Peter R. Anstey

The Philosophy of Robert Boyle

Introduction Part I The theory of qualities 1. Distinctions among the qualities 2. Distinguishing criteria for the primary qualities 3. The perception of the sensible qualities 4. The ontological status of the sensible qualities Part II Matter in motion 5. Natural and violent states and motions 6. The nature of place 7. Laws and concurrence 8. Mind/Body interaction Appendices 1. Transcript of Boyle Papers, vol. 10, fols. 29-31 2. Transcript of Boyle Papers, vol. 10, fols. 38-40

The origins of early modern experimental philosophy

This paper argues that early modern experimental philosophy emerged as the dominant member of a pair of methods in natural philosophy, the speculative versus the experimental, and that this pairing derives from an overarching distinction between speculative and operative philosophy that can be ultimately traced back to Aristotle. The paper examines the traditional classification of natural philosophy as a speculative discipline from the Stagirite to the seventeenth century; medieval and early modern attempts to articulate a scientia experimentalis; and the tensions in the classification of natural magic and mechanics that led to the introduction of an operative part of natural philosophy in the writings of Francis Bacon and John Johnston. The paper concludes with a summary of the salient discontinuities between the experimental/speculative distinction of the mid-seventeenth century and its predecessors and a statement of the developments that led to the ascendance of experimental philosophy from the 1660s.

Robert Boyle and the heuristic value of mechanism

Abstract This paper argues that, contrary to the claims of Alan Chalmers, Boyle understood his experimental work to be intimately related to his mechanical philosophy. Its central claim is that the mechanical philosophy has a heuristic structure that motivates and gives direction to Boyles experimental programme. Boyle was able to delimit the scope of possible explanations of any phenomenon by positing both that all qualities are ultimately reducible to a select group of mechanical qualities and that all explanations of natural phenomena are to be in terms of the operations of machines and are to appeal only to qualities that are already familiar. This is illustrated by his investigations into the Torricellian experiment. Boyles explanation of the elevation of the mercurial cylinder by appeal to the spring of the air was an intermediate mechanical explanation. Boyle was convinced that the spring of the air was ultimately reducible to the mechanical qualities. This in turn had implications for his research into the cause of respiration. In a move that was both parsimonious and consistent with the broad requirements of the mechanical philosophy, Boyle was able to solve the problem of the cause of the inflow of air into the lungs by appeal to his research in pneumatics. This application of a mechanical explanation in pneumatics to physiology is just what one would expect if the mechanical philosophy was as universal as Boyle claimed it to be. Therefore, far from Boyles experiments having a life of their own, they were clearly directed by and understood in terms of the mechanical philosophy.

Boyle on seminal principles

Abstract This paper presents a comprehensive study of Robert Boyle’s writings on seminal principles or seeds. It examines the role of seeds in Boyle’s account of creation, the generation of plants and animals, spontaneous generation, the generation of minerals and disease. By an examination of all of Boyle’s major extant discussions of seeds it is argued that there were discernible changes in Boyle’s views over time. As the years progressed Boyle became more sceptical about the role of seminal principles in the generation of minerals and he came to reject the spontaneous generation of insects and animals from putrefying matter. It is also argued that Boyle’s notion of a generative or ‘plastick’ principle creates a tension within his mechanical philosophy. He appeals to a plastick power in order to explain those phenomena of generation that are beyond the explanatory resources of the corpuscular hypothesis. However, when pressed to explain the nature of this power he either hints, somewhat paradoxically, that it too can be explained mechanically or admits his nescience.

Francis Bacon and the Classification of Natural History

This paper analyses the place of natural history within Bacons divisions of the sciences in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and the later De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623). It is shown that at various points in Bacons divisions, natural history converges or overlaps with natural philosophy, and that, for Bacon, natural history and natural philosophy are not discrete disciplines. Furthermore, it is argued that Bacons distinction between operative and speculative natural philosophy and the place of natural history within this distinction, are discontinuous with the later distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy that emerged in the methodology of the Fellows of the early Royal Society.

Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe: Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy

choices of words or lack of explanation. However (and it is a big however), all of these issues, and many more which Hunter addresses only briefly, are best left as they are, given the purpose of the book, which is not to engage new debates, but to introduce readers to an image of Boyle which accurately reflects the careful scholarship of the past two or three decades. Among Hunter’s many triumphs with this volume, he has restored Boyle’s alchemy, and, more importantly (as the subtitle suggests), his Christianity, to their places in Boyle’s life after the dominance for too many years of a positivist narrative, which ignored who Boyle actually was. Is more work needed? Of course, and this is why Michael Hunter needed to bring the account of Boyle’s life up to date, so that others could examine the questions very properly raised by his book. This invitation to further research is another of the strong points of the book. Appended to the main text are two features which I believe should be mandatory in all future biographies: an extensive bibliographical essay giving the reader direction for further research (257–90), and a timeline of the subject’s ‘whereabouts’ correlating where he was and what he was doing at the time (291–8). In addition to these features, Hunter’s bibliography and footnotes make this volume a tool worth placing in the luggage for research trips. It is both an engaging read and an indispensible reference. Biographies cannot be definitive. Those that pretend to be are not any good: they are deceptive. A biography must be an invitation, particularly when dealing with a key figure in intellectual history, to engage the life and thought of an individual and her or his context. The narrative needs to be clear, and debatable issues need to be left open to debate. Hunter has struck the proper balance here. Future generations of researchers on Boyle will become accustomed to writing, ‘see Hunter ...’.

The Creation of the English Hippocrates

This article examines the process by which the London physician Thomas Sydenham (1624–89) rose to fame as the English Hippocrates in the late seventeenth century. It provides a survey of the evidence for the establishment of Sydenham’s reputation from his own writings, his professional relations, and the writings of his supporters and detractors. These sources reveal that in the first decades of his career Sydenham had few supporters and faced much opposition. However, by the end of the seventeenth century, Sydenham was the object of extraordinary outbursts of adulation and had become renowned for his decrying of hypotheses and speculative theory, his promotion of natural histories of disease, and the purported similarities between his medical method and that of Hippocrates. It is argued that Sydenham’s positive reputation owed little to his achievements in medicine: it was almost entirely the result of his promotion by the philosopher John Locke and a small group of sympathetic physicians. It was they who created the English Hippocrates.

The World Makers: Scientists of the Restoration and the Search for the Origins of the Earth

tion that there were men before Adam: that, following La Peyrère, the Book of Genesis only described the origins of the Jews, not humankind in its entirety. Of course, once you have done away with Adam and Eve as the parents of all sin, it’s very hard to find a suitably divine role for God the Son: Jesus becomes hard to distinguish from many other Old Testament prophets, and Christianity begins to stand on unstable ground. Lodwick’s utopia sees him boldly negotiating the implications of such views, and doing so nearly two decades before free-thinkers like Blount and Toland would get into their contrarian stride. Like many of the more discursive works printed in this volume, A Country Not Named is an index of Lodwick’s vitality within the religious and political currents of the later seventeenth century. In reuniting Lodwick the linguist, Lodwick the heretic, Lodwick the autodidact, Lodwick the bibliophile, and Lodwick the man, Henderson and Poole have done a signal service to a neglected figure in British and European intellectual history. They have also helped to defamiliarise our picture of the early Royal Society, something that should serve to direct those studying it along fruitful new paths.

Experimental pedagogy and the eclipse of Robert Boyle in England

One of the most important developments in early modern natural philosophy was the emergence of a distinctive movement of experimental philosophy in the mid-seventeenth century. Robert Boyle was in the vanguard of this development as a theoretician and practitioner, indeed as the exemplar of an experimental philosopher: little wonder that he was popularly known on the Continent as “The English Philosopher.” However, by the fourth decade of the eighteenth century Boyle’s standing as a natural philosopher, as well as the actual content of his natural philosophy, had very much moved from the centre to the periphery. As Michael Hunter has noted, this shift is nicely illustrated in the fact that while a bust of Boyle took pride of place in Queen Caroline’s grotto called the Hermitage in Richmond gardens erected in 1731–3, there is no image of him in the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe erected in 1734–5. Boyle’s image is also conspicuously absent from the gallery of English greats assembled in the Wren Library of Trinity College Cambridge in the 1750s. This paper is an attempt to provide at least a partial answer as to why Boyle was eclipsed in the eighteenth century. No doubt a full explanation would be multi-causal and is beyond the scope of this article. It would address such issues as the internal politics of the Royal Society in the final decades of Newton’s presidency as well as the status of chemistry at this time. What I should like to propose, however, is a broad explanatory hypothesis pertaining to natural philosophical methodology that helps to account for Boyle’s shift from the centre to the periphery. In the body of the paper I shall provide hitherto unexamined evidence of changes in Boyle’s posthumous reputation, evidence which supports this broader thesis. This evidence comes, not from strictly natural philosophical works, but from the publications of pedagogues, namely, published lectures aimed at promoting developments within natural philosophy both to university students and to the educated English public at large in the first three decades of the eighteenth century. These are the lectures of John Keill (1671–1721), Francis Hauksbee the Elder (c.1660–1713) and John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–1744). So why were the contribution and reputation of Boyle eclipsed in the period up to the death of Isaac Newton? One obvious explanation is the extraordinary success and impact of Newton’s celestial dynamics and optics. It is only too easy to claim that Newton’s achievement took all before it. This explanation on its own, however, is rather too simplistic, overlooking as it does the variety and complexity of natural philosophy and its methodological contours during this

John Locke and Helmontian Medicine

This paper examines the sources and nature of Locke’s medical thought. It is argued from a sampling of entries in Locke’s medical notebooks and his correspondence, that Locke was a chymical physician. His medical thought contains two interlocking strands: he was an adherent of mercurialist transmutational alchemy and Helmontian iatrochemistry. The major, though not the only, influence on these aspects of Locke’s thought was Robert Boyle.