Alan Chalmers uses Robert Boyle’s mechanical philosophy as an example of the irrelevance of ‘philosophy’ to ‘science’ and criticizes my 2006 book Atoms and alchemy for overemphasizing Boyle’s successes. The present paper responds as follows: first, it argues that Chalmers employs an overly simplistic methodology insensitive to the distinction between historical and philosophical claims; second, it shows that the central theses of Atoms and alchemy are untouched by Chalmers’s criticisms; and third, it uses Boyle’s analysis of subordinate causes and his (...) debate with Henry More in the 1670s to demonstrate the inadequacy of Chalmers’s construal of the mechanical philosophy.Keywords: Robert Boyle; Alan Chalmers; Geber; Paul of Taranto; Daniel Sennert; Alchemy; Chymistry; Mechanical philosophy; Reduction to the pristine state. (shrink)

Although Boyle has been regarded as a champion of the seventeenth century Cartesian mechanical philosophy, I defend the position that Boyle’s views conciliate between a strictly mechanistic conception of fundamental matter and a non-reductionist conception of chemical qualities. In particular, I argue that this conciliation is evident in Boyle’s ontological distinction between fundamental corpuscles endowed with mechanistic properties and higher-level corpuscular concretions endowed with chemical properties. Some of these points have already been acknowledged by contemporary scholars, and I actively engage (...) with their ideas in this paper. However I attempt to contribute to the debate over Boyle’s mechanical philosophy by arguing that Boyle’s writings suggest an emergentist, albeit still mechanistic, notion of chemical properties. I contrast Boyle’s views against those of strict reductionist mechanical philosophers, focusing on the famous debate with Spinoza over the redintegration of niter, and argue that Boyle’s complex chemical ontology provides a more satisfactory understanding of chemical phenomena than is provided by a strictly reductionist and Cartesian mechanical philosophy. (shrink)

I argue in the paper that classical chemistry is a science predominantly concerned with material substances, both useful materials and pure chemical substances restricted to scientific laboratory studies. The central epistemological and methodological status of material substances corresponds with the material productivity of classical chemistry and its way of producing experimental traces. I further argue that chemist’s ‘pure substances’ have a history, conceptually and materially, and I follow their conceptual history from the Paracelsian concept of purity to the modern concept (...) of pure stoichiometric compounds. The history of the concept of ‘pure substances’ shows that modern chemists’ concept of purity abstracted from usefulness rather than being opposed to it. Thus modern chemists’ interest in pure chemical substances does not presuppose a concept of pure science. (shrink)

The paper is a response to William Newman’s rebuttal of a critique of his account of the origins of modern chemistry by Alan Chalmers. A way in which the nature of science can be illuminated by history of science is identified and an account of how this can be achieved in the context of a study of the work of Boyle defended in the face of Newman’s criticism. Texts from the writings of Boyle that are cited by Newman as posing (...) problems for Chalmers’ thesis are interpreted as in fact supporting it. (shrink)

An oft-cited truism about the emergence of a new, ‘mechanistic’ approach to natural philosophy in the seventeenth century is that it was inspired by analogy to the workings of clockwork. In Authori...

ArgumentThis article argues that during the seventeenth century chemistry achieved intellectual and institutional recognition, starting its transition from a practical art – subordinated to medicine – into an independent discipline. This process was by no means a smooth one, as it took place amidst polemics and conflicts lasting more than a century. It began when Andreas Libavius endeavored to turn chemistry into a teaching discipline, imposing method and order. Chemistry underwent harsh criticism from Descartes and the Cartesians, who reduced natural (...) phenomena to the mechanical affections of matter, leaving little room for chemistry as an independent discipline. Boyle rejected the chemical principles and promoted the fusion of chemistry with corpuscularianism. He did not reduce chemical phenomena to the mechanical affections of matter, but strived to promote chemistry as part of natural philosophy. Lemery gave strong impulse to the recognition of chemistry as a discipline in its own right by fostering a compromise of chemistry and mechanism. Lemery adopted the chemical principles, but did not see them as the ultimate ingredients of bodies. In order to promote chemistry, he distanced it from alchemy and pursued the reform of chemical terminology. (shrink)

Recently, Frauchiger and Renner proposed a Gedankenexperiment, which was claimed to be able to prove that quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself. Here we show that the conclusions of Frauchiger and Renner actually came from their incorrect description of some quantum states. With the correct description there will be no inconsistent results, no matter which quantum interpretation theory is used. Especially, the Copenhagen interpretation can satisfy all the three assumptions,, and of Frauchiger and Renner simultaneously, thus it (...) has no problem consistently describing the use of itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In an unpublished anatomical treatise written around 1670, the English anatomist and fellow of the Royal Society of London Edmund King proposed that the human body was ultimately an assemblage of tubes and contained liquids. Without literally seeing every of its constituents to be tubular, how did King come to posit a tubular body? This article tackles the question by examining King’s inquiry about the pulse against his framing of the circulatory system into a universally tubular model. Asking how (...) King registered this model despite the limited visibility of vascularity in practice, I discuss the place of analogy in his anatomical observation. I argue that analogy constituted an essential strategy for extending what King had perceived to account for the hardly perceptible nuances of the human body. I concentrate on two of his analogies, in which the artery was compared to the cord and the ureter. These two analogies revealed remarkable epistemic potency in representing and reasoning the pulse as the inherent motion of the living artery. They suggest that in seventeenth-century observation accounts, analogy was not simply a rhetoric suspicious of violating the principle of scientific empiricism; rather, they opened up ways of seeing and imagining nature. (shrink)