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Understanding science through its history: a response to Newman

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (1):150-153 (2011)

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How not to integrate the history and philosophy of science: a reply to Chalmers.William R. Newman - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (2):203-213.details 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 (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 12 citations
Boyle and the origins of modern chemistry: Newman tried in the fire.Alan F. Chalmers - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (1):1-10.details William Newman construes the Scientific Revolution as a change in matter theory, from a hylomorphic, Aristotelian to a corpuscular, mechanical one. He sees Robert Boyle as making a major contribution to that change by way of his corpuscular chemistry. In this article it is argued that it is seriously misleading to identify what was scientific about the Scientific Revolution in terms of a change in theories of the ultimate structure of matter. Boyle showed, especially in his pneumatics, how empirically accessible, (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 14 citations
Robert Boyle and the heuristic value of mechanism.Peter R. Anstey - 2002 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 33 (1):157-170.details 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 Boyle's 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 (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 20 citations
The lack of excellency of Boyle's mechanical philosophy.Alan Chalmers - 1993 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 24 (4):541-564.details Download Export citation Bookmark 29 citations

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