which analyzes the nature of human beings in relation to God. The Theology of the Body presents an interpretation of the fundamental significance of the body, and in particular of sexual differentiation and complementarity, one which aims to challenge common contemporary philosophical views. Nevertheless, the pope's personalistic phenomenology is "echoing what he learned from St. John of the Cross" and is "in harmony with St. Thomas Aquinas". Francis Bacon Francis Bacon was an early empiricist who focused on problems of knowledge. In his Great Instauration, he argued that the current state of knowledge is immature and not advancing. His purpose was for the human mind to have authority over nature through understanding and knowledge. Bacon argued against Aristotle's final and formal cause, stating that "the final cause rather corrupts than advances the sciences." He thought that focusing on formal causality is an impediment to knowledge, because power is gained by focusing on matter that is observable and experienced, not just a figment of the mind. His emphasis on power over nature contributed to the rise of an understanding of nature as mechanism and the claim that true knowledge of nature is that expressed by mechanical laws. Pope John Paul II saw Bacon's conception of knowledge and its proper object as the beginning of the split between person and body, which is his goal to reconcile. René Descartes René Descartes furthered a mathematical approach to philosophy and epistemology through skepticism and rationalism, emphasizing the practical value of power over nature. In his Discourse on Method, Descartes said, “we can find a practical [philosophy], by which knowing the nature and behavior of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies which surround us…we can employ these entities for all the purposes for which they are suited, and so make ourselves the masters and possessors of nature”. In addition to the importance of power over nature, Descartes (like Bacon) insisted upon dismissing final cause, stating that “the entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing’s ‘end,’ I judge to be utterly useless”. Descartes’ practical philosophy also proposed a dualism between the mind and the physical body, based on the belief that they are two distinct substances. The body is matter that is spatially extended, whereas the mind is the substance that thinks and contains the rational soul. Pope John Paul II responded to this dualism in his