The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle

The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle PDF Author: Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino
Publisher:
ISBN: 0197502504
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle examines the relationship between Robert Boyle's experimental work in chemistry and his commitment to mechanical philosophy.

The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle

The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle PDF Author: Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino
Publisher:
ISBN: 0197502504
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle examines the relationship between Robert Boyle's experimental work in chemistry and his commitment to mechanical philosophy.

The Diffident Naturalist

The Diffident Naturalist PDF Author: Rose-Mary Sargent
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226734978
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
Featuring a figure of early modern science, this text explores Robert Boyle's philosophy of experiment, a central aspect of his life and work. Philosophical, legal, experimental and religious traditions that played a part in shaping Boyle's experimental thought and practice are examined.

Robert Boyle: A Free Enquiry Into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature

Robert Boyle: A Free Enquiry Into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature PDF Author: Robert Boyle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521567961
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
An important treatise by one of the leading mechanical philosophers of the seventeenth century.

The Scientist's Atom and the Philosopher's Stone

The Scientist's Atom and the Philosopher's Stone PDF Author: Alan Chalmers
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048123623
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on the results of his own scholarly research as well as that of others the author offers, for the first time, a comprehensive and documented history of theories of the atom from Democritus to the twentieth century. This is not history for its own sake. By critically reflecting on the various versions of atomic theories of the past the author is able to grapple with the question of what sets scientific knowledge apart from other kinds of knowledge, philosophical knowledge in particular. He thereby engages historically with issues concerning the nature and status of scientific knowledge that were dealt with in a more abstract way in his What Is This Thing Called Science?, a book that has been a standard text in philosophy of science for three decades and which is available in nineteen languages. Speculations about the fundamental structure of matter from Democritus to the seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers and beyond are construed as categorically distinct from atomic theories amenable to experimental investigation and support and as contributing little to the latter from a historical point of view. The thesis will provoke historians and philosophers of science alike and will require a revision of a range of standard views in the history of science and philosophy. The book is key reading for students and scholars in History and Philosophy of Science and will be instructive for and provide a challenge to philosophers, historians and scientists more generally.

Leviathan and the Air-Pump

Leviathan and the Air-Pump PDF Author: Steven Shapin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400838495
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Get Book Here

Book Description
Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.

The Very Idea of Modern Science

The Very Idea of Modern Science PDF Author: Joseph Agassi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400753519
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a study of the scientific revolution as a movement of amateur science. It describes the ideology of the amateur scientific societies as the philosophy of the Enlightenment Movement and their social structure and the way they made modern science such a magnificent institution. It also shows what was missing in the scientific organization of science and why it gave way to professional science in stages. In particular the book studies the contributions of Sir Francis Bacon and of the Hon. Robert Boyle to the rise of modern science. The philosophy of induction is notoriously problematic, yet its great asset is that it expressed the view of the Enlightenment Movement about science. This explains the ambivalence that we still exhibit towards Sir Francis Bacon whose radicalism and vision of pure and applied science still a major aspect of the fabric of society. Finally, the book discusses Boyle’s philosophy, his agreement with and dissent from Bacon and the way he single-handedly trained a crowd of poorly educated English aristocrats and rendered them into an army of able amateur researchers.

Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle PDF Author: Reijer Hooykaas
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive study of the thought of Robert Boyle in the context of his time. Boyle was a pioneer of experimental physics and founder of modern chemistry. Hooykaas provides a historical study of the relations between science and Christian faith in Boyle focusing on his views of religion, revelation, reason and experience. Boyle's conception of science is compared with those of Descartes, Gassendi, Newton, Bacon and Pascal. It is a close textual study of the collected works of Boyle using the edition of 1772. It corrects criticism that Hooykaas abused history of science to engage in Christian apologetics. It is intended for historians of science, philosophers of science, students of religion and science relations, Boyle scholars, and historians of chemistry. Contents: Foreword; Introduction; Chapter I: Boyle's Life and Times; Chapter II: Science; Chapter III: Religion and the Study of Nature; Chapter IV: Special Revelation; Index of Names. Co-published with The Pascal Center for Advanced Studies in Faith and Science.

Experimental Philosophy and the Birth of Empirical Science

Experimental Philosophy and the Birth of Empirical Science PDF Author: Michael Ben-Chaim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351937758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
How did empirical research become the cornerstone of modern science? Scholars have traditionally associated empirical research with the search for knowledge, but have failed to provide adequate solutions to this basic historical problem. This book offers a different approach that focuses on human understanding - rather than knowledge - and its cultural expression in the creation and social transaction of causal explanations. Ancient Greek philosophers professed that genuine understanding of a particular subject was gained only when its nature, or essence, was defined. This ancient mode of explanation furnished the core teachings of late medieval natural philosophers, and was reaffirmed by early modern philosophers such as Bacon and Descartes. Yet during the second half of the 17th century, radical transformation gave rise to innovative research practices that were designed to explain how empirical properties of the physical world were correlated. The study unfolded in this book centres on the works of Robert Boyle, John Locke, and Isaac Newton - the most notable exponents of the 'experimental philosophy' in the late 17th century - to explore how this transformation led to the emergence of a recognizably modern culture of empirical research. Relating empirical with explanatory practices, this book offers a novel solution to one of the major problems in the history of western science and philosophy. It thereby provides a new perspective on the Scientific Revolution and the origins of modern empiricism. At the same time, this book demonstrates how historical and sociological tools can be combined to study science as an evolving institution of human understanding.

The Sceptical Chymist

The Sceptical Chymist PDF Author: Robert Boyle
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3752370815
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reproduction of the original: The Sceptical Chymist by Robert Boyle

The Aspiring Adept

The Aspiring Adept PDF Author: Lawrence Principe
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691186286
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Aspiring Adept presents a provocative new view of Robert Boyle (1627-1691), one of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution, by revealing for the first time his avid and lifelong pursuit of alchemy. Boyle has traditionally been considered, along with Newton, a founder of modern science because of his mechanical philosophy and his experimentation with the air-pump and other early scientific apparatus. However, Lawrence Principe shows that his alchemical quest--hidden first by Boyle's own codes and secrecy, and later suppressed or ignored--positions him more accurately in the intellectual and cultural crossroads of the seventeenth century. Principe radically reinterprets Boyle's most famous work, The Sceptical Chymist, to show that it criticizes not alchemists, as has been thought, but "unphilosophical" pharmacists and textbook writers. He then shows Boyle's unambiguous enthusiasm for alchemy in his "lost" Dialogue on the Transmutation and Melioration of Metals, now reconstructed from scattered fragments and presented here in full for the first time. Intriguingly, Boyle believed that the goal of his quest, the Philosopher's Stone, could not only transmute base metals into gold, but could also attract angels. Alchemy could thus act both as a source of knowledge and as a defense against the growing tide of atheism that tormented him. In seeking to integrate the seemingly contradictory facets of Boyle's work, Principe also illuminates how alchemy and other "unscientific" pursuits had a far greater impact on early modern science than has previously been thought.