Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 06 – 30
The recurrence of examples involving bread, wine, and beer in writers as different as Bacon and Adam Smith is not accidental. In early-modern Europe, these products represented the most basic and universally recognized outcomes of human skill: grain-processing (bread, beer) and fermentation (wine, beer). For Bacon, the arts of Ceres and Bacchus served as classical shorthand for the oldest mechanical inventions—baking, brewing, and winemaking—emphasizing how slowly and accidentally such practices developed in the absence of a systematic method. Smith, by contrast, invoked the butcher, brewer, and baker to illustrate the ordinary economic relations of daily life and the dependence of society on mutually beneficial exchange. Although Bacon employed these examples to illustrate technological invention and Smith to illustrate economic exchange, both selected them for the same reason: they represented ordinary activities whose practical importance was immediately evident to every reader. These examples therefore remind the modern reader that philosophical illustrations should first be interpreted within the ordinary material culture of their own time before symbolic, theological, or allegorical meanings are inferred.
Hossein Jorjani 