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)

Many physicians, anatomists and natural philosophers engaged in attempts to map the seat of the soul during the so-called Scientific Revolution of the European seventeenth century. The history of these efforts needs to be told in light of the puzzlement bred by today's strides in the neurological sciences. The accounts discussed here, most centrally by Nicolaus Steno, Claude Perrault and Thomas Willis, betray the acknowledgement that a gap remained between observable form, on the one hand, and motor and sensory functions, (...) on the other. Observation yielded information about form, but did not guarantee a constant correlation with presumed function, while the mechanisms of sense and movement did not fit in with accounts of action and cognition whose purpose was to place the connection between active body and willful, conscious soul onto a descriptive rather than metaphysical plane. Teleology was now no longer a helpful tool in the disciplines of anatomy and physiology; the consequences of this are still with us. (shrink)

Special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Studies (4.1., Spring 2005) Guest Editor: Lucian Petrescu. -/- .

This paper explores Cavendish’s argument for what she calls “animate matter.” Her commitment to the ubiquity of animate matter, styled “Cavendish’s animism,” is presented as the conclusion of an inference to the best explanation of nature’s order. The reconstruction of Cavendish’s argument begins with an examination of the relationship between God’s creation of our world and the order produced through nature’s wise governance of her parts. Cavendish’s materialism and anti-atomism are presented as ingredients in her final account of God’s ordering (...) of the world by making it a self-moving whole. On the present account of Cavendish’s metaphysics, this self-moving whole then freely produces the regular motions that constitute its ordering of itself, as a distinct ordering beyond God’s initial act of creating our world. The depth of Cavendish’s commitment to the animistic elements of her materialism—or in other words, the extent to which her system is genuinely animistic—is then considered. (shrink)

Summary Robert Boyle is remembered largely for his integration of experiment and the ?mechanical philosophy?. Although Boyle is occasionally elusive as to what he means precisely by the ?mechanical philosophy?, it is clear that a major portion of it concerned his corpuscular theory of matter. Historians of science have traditionally viewed Boyle's corpuscular philosophy as the grafting of a physical theory onto a previously incoherent body of alchemy and iatrochemistry. As this essay shows, however, Boyle owed a heavy debt to (...) a longstanding alchemical theory that postulated the corpuscular make-up of metals and various reagents. I have elsewhere argued in a general way for Boyle's debt to alchemical corpuscular theory, but in the present essay I show one of his precise sources?namely the Wittenberg medical professor Daniel Sennert (1572?1637). In his youth Boyle wrote a treatise on corpuscularianism, Of the Atomicall Philosophy, that borrowed heavily from Sennert without acknowledgement. Later works, such as The Sceptical Chymist, elaborate on these borrowings. This discovery shows that we cannot view Boyle's corpuscular philosophy as an imposition of physics on chemistry: instead, it appears that it originally grew out of chemistry itself. The discovery also throws an interesting light on Boyle's attitude toward sources. (shrink)