Robert Boyle, Christian Virtuoso

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Experimental Practice ◽  
Robert Boyle

Boyle gave the vocation of a Christian virtuoso its name and exemplified its character in his life. Following Bacon, he affirmed the priority of natural philosophy, and, like Bacon, he prescribed that it be practiced through experimental methods and that it found its explanations either directly upon perceived causes or upon causal hypotheses inferred from experimental practice or trials of nature, chief among them the mechanical or ‘atomicall’ philosophy. In his book The Christian Virtuoso, he prescribed that the study of nature was complemented and completed by the study of Holy Scripture, and he imagined a form of intellectual life in which the scope of natural reason was enlarged by revelation, which in turn was confirmed through trials or experiments of faith.

Francis Bacon and the Origins of Christian Virtuosity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Mind

Although the vocation of Christian virtuoso was invented and named by Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon provided the archtype. A Christian virtuoso is an experimental natural philosopher who professes Christianity, who endeavors to unite empiricism and supernatural belief in an intellectual life. In his program for the renewal of the learning Bacon prescribed that the empirical study of nature be the basis of all the sciences, including not only the study of physical things, but of human society, and literature. He insisted that natural causes only be used to explain natural events and proposed not to mix theology with natural philosophy. This became a rule of the Royal Society of London, of which Boyle was a principal founder. Bacon’s rule also had a theological use, to preserve the purity and the divine authority of revelation. In the mind of the Christian virtuoso, nature and divine revelation were separate but complementary sources of truth.

An apprenticeship in scientific communication: the early correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (1656-63)

1999 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Avramov
Keyword(s):  
Communication Skills ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Communication ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Prolonged Stay ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Scientific Academies

This paper examines how Henry Oldenburg became a man of scientific communication during the years 1656-1663. His interest in the new natural philosophy started in the mid-1650s when, while visiting England, he became acquainted with men like Robert Boyle and Samuel Hartlib. Embarking on a trip over Europe as tutor to Richard Jones, Boyle's nephew, he also began to practice merchandising in knowledge. His communication skills quickly developed, for he learned a great deal from his personal contacts with men of science and from his correspondence with Hartlib, Boyle, and others. His prolonged stay in Paris in the late 1650s was very important for there he acquired an experience of the intellectual life of the private scientific academies, and gained for himself a host of new correspondents. The paper concludes by looking at Oldenburg in his role as mediator in the Spinoza-Boyle debate of 1663. By that time, at the beginning of his career as Secretary of the Royal Society, he was already a well-rounded ‘philosophicall merchant’.

Empiricisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Allen
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
William James ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Chinese Tradition ◽  
Experimental Practice ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
History Of

Empiricisms reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European philosophy and comparatively. It traces the history of empirical philosophy from its birth in Greek medicine to its emergence as a philosophy of modern science. A richly detailed account in Part I of history’s empiricisms establishes a context in Part II for reconsidering the work of the so-called radical empiricists—William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each treated in a dedicated chapter. What is “radical” about their work is to return empiricism from epistemology to the ontology and natural philosophy where it began. Empiricisms also sets empirical philosophy in conversation with Chinese tradition, considering technological, scientific, medical, and alchemical sources, as well as selected Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist classics. The work shows how philosophical reflection on experience and a profound experimental practice coexist in traditional China with no interaction or even awareness of each other. Empiricism is more multi-textured than philosophers tend to assume when we explain it to ourselves and to students. One purpose of Empiricisms is to recover the neglected context. A complementary purpose is to elucidate the value of experience and arrive at some idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism.

Animism, Aristotelianism, and the Legacy of William Gilbert’s De Magnete

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-188
Author(s):  
Jeff Kochan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Physical Experiments ◽  
Modern Natural

Abstract William Gilbert’s 1600 book, De magnete, greatly influenced early modern natural philosophy. The book describes an impressive array of physical experiments, but it also advances a metaphysical view at odds with the soon to emerge mechanical philosophy. That view was animism. I distinguish two kinds of animism – Aristotelian and Platonic – and argue that Gilbert was an Aristotelian animist. Taking Robert Boyle as an example, I then show that early modern arguments against animism were often effective only against Platonic animism. In fact, unacknowledged traces of Aristotelian animism can be found in Boyle’s mechanical account of nature. This was Gilbert’s legacy.

Literary Knowledge

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-43
Author(s):  
Tita Chico
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Fundamental Component ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Tool

Natural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the individual who produces them.

What did Charles II call the Fellows of the Royal Society?

1977 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-16 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Accademia Del Cimento

I have shown elsewhere that in 1660 and 1661 both Robert Southwell (1635-1702, later Sir Robert and P.R.S.), and Sir John Finch (1626-1682) tried to establish a correspondence between the virtuosi in England and in Florence, more especially between Prince Leopold de’ Medici and Robert Boyle, by far the most widely known English man of science at that time. For some mysterious reason the desired correspondence did not take place; Boyle did not write, but did send through Oldenburg two copies of the Latin edition of his New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall , one for the Prince and one for Vincenzo Viviani. This was in October 1661. Indeed, the only knowledge that the Royal Society obtained about the Florentine Accademia del Cimento came through Oldenburg’s French correspondents. They learned nothing substantial except that the experiments made by the Accademia were to be published all together in a book. Finally, in 1667, they were; but for several years the appearance of this work had been expected and in fact eagerly awaited throughout the learned world. As far as the experiments are concerned it could have been published as early as 1662, and the long delay can largely, though not entirely, be blamed on the Secretary who wrote it, Count Lorenzo Magalotti (1637-1712), who was a perfectionist, and a fussy one, not about natural philosophy, but about language.

Robert Boyle and Subversive Religion in the Early Restoration

1974 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 275-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Free Inquiry ◽  
Ancient Greek Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Competing Ideas ◽  
Early Restoration

Boyle's natural philosophy as it evolved in the 1660s was the product in part of some competing philosophies and theologies. Since he defined his own thought in terms of these others, one of the best ways of understanding it and its origins would seem to be to study it in relation to this context of competing ideas—especially as this has never before been done for Boyle. This was no mere battle over philosophical and religious ideas; beneath the surface lay extreme ideological differences; the nature of society and government was at stake just as it was in Boyle's dialogue with the sects in the late 1640s and the 1650s. Indeed some of his opponents in the 1660s still represent positions against which he argued before the Restoration, and these are the ones I wish to consider here.In 1665 or 1666 Boyle wroteA Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. By “the vulgarly received notion of nature” he means the conception deriving from ancient Greek philosophy, both Platonic and Aristotelian, that there is a governing agency in nature apart from God which cannot be reduced to the mechanical principles of matter and motion. This agency is called variously plastic nature, the astral spirits or the soul of the world, and as Boyle says is conceived by “the schools” as “a being that…does always that which is best.” Boyle's intention is to show that his own idea of nature is preferable to this Peripatetic and Platonic one because his goes further than its rival towards a proper understanding of the relations between Creator and creation.

Self-Scrutiny and the Study of Nature: Robert Hooke's Diary as Natural History

1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lotte Mulligan
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
After Hours ◽  
College Now ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

Robert Hooke's intellectual life was steadfastly dedicated to the pursuit of natural philosophy and the formulation of an appropriate method for studying nature, His daily life, however, was seemingly fragmented—an energetic rush in and around the city of London, with him acting now as curator (and later secretary) of the Royal Society, now as Cutlerian Lecturer in the History of Nature and Art, now as Geometry Professor at Gresham College, now as architect and surveyor of postfire London, and forever as a member of a number of intersecting social, intellectual, and professional circles that made up London's coffeehouse culture. Such a range of activities was perhaps wider than that of many of his contemporaries, though other diarists, most notably Samuel Pepys, recorded similarly crammed lives. Yet despite the apparently unsystematic nature of his daily round he was, also like Pepys, a methodical man who hated to waste time, and for long periods he kept a diary that helped him account for how he spent it.I argue here that his diary keeping was an integral part of his scientific vision reflecting the epistemological and methodological practices that guided him as a student of nature. The diary should be read, I propose, not as an “after-hours” incidental activity removed from his professional and intellectual life; both its form and its content suggest that he chose to record a self that was as subject to scientific scrutiny as the rest of nature and that he thought that such a record could be applied to producing, in the end, a fully objective “history” with himself as the datum.

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