Anti-Paracelsianism from Conrad Gessner to Robert Boyle

Daphnis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 104-139
Author(s):  
Charles D. Gunnoe ◽  
Dane T. Daniel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Cumulative Impact ◽  
Robert Boyle

This article surveys the current knowledge of the anti-Paracelsian movement from a confessional perspective. It outlines the rise of the critique of Paracelsus by academic physicians such as Conrad Gessner, Thomas Erastus’s vociferous demonization, and an ambivalent Catholic reaction. Andreas Libavius and other chymical theorists remained critical of Paracelsus’s natural philosophy while engaging aspects of his alchemy. The cumulative impact reveals a widespread anti-Paracelsian discourse, which escalated in the seventeenth century due to the growing popularity of Paracelsian spiritualism.

scholarly journals The pharmakon of ‘If’: working with Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-514
Author(s):  
MICHAEL WINTROUB
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Social ◽  
Heuristic Strategy ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Strategy I

AbstractWhilst the ‘local culture’ of experimental natural philosophy in seventeenth-century England drew on ‘resources’ supplied by the gentlemanly identity of men like Robert Boyle, this culture found much of its distinctiveness in a series of exclusions having to do with faith, gender and class. My concern in this essay is less with these exclusions, and the distinctions they enabled, than with their surreptitious returns. Following from this, as a heuristic strategy, I will try to understand how Boyle and Co. used and reacted to, repressed and cathected, that which they sought to exclude. By charting the movements of exile and return across the contested frontiers of class, gender and faith, truth and lies, authenticity and performance, we can, I believe, fruitfully complicate our understandings of both the social history of truth, and the social history of our ‘post-truth’ predicament.

Science and Apologetics in the Early Boyle Lectures

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Dahm
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Do So

With the endowment of a lectureship for the defense of the Christion faith, the distinguished English natural philosopher, Robert Boyle, gave the Anglican church a unique opportunity to counter the atheistic currents of thought which were posing a challenge to the faithful in the late seventeenth century. Of the Boyle lectures preached between 1692 and 1713, the most important and popular ones incorporated the new natural philosophy of the age—including some of the recently published ideas of Newton—in an apologetic which was remarkable for its flexibility and its concern with contemporary theological issues. Within the institutional framework which Boyle's generosity had provided, certain of the Anglican clergy devoted themselves anew to the age-old exercise of utilizing the discoveries of science in the service of their faith. It was particularly appropriate that they do so since many of the challenges were based implicitly or explicitly on a materialistic and mechanistic science.

The Reception of Descartes in the Seventeenth-Century Scottish Universities: Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy (1650–1680)

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 179-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Gellera
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy

In 1685, during the heyday of Scottish Cartesianism (1670–90), regent Robert Lidderdale from Edinburgh University declared Cartesianism the best philosophy in support of the Reformed faith. It is commonplace that Descartes was ostracised by the Reformed, and his role in pre-Enlightenment Scottish philosophy is not yet fully acknowledged. This paper offers an introduction to Scottish Cartesianism, and argues that the philosophers of the Scottish universities warmed up to Cartesianism because they saw it as a newer, better version of their own traditional Reformed scholasticism, chiefly in metaphysics and natural philosophy.

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.

The Curious Eye

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Moment

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

Theological Foundations for Modern Science?

Dialogue ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Theology And Science ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
Recent Collection ◽  
Scientific Imagination

It is often said that philosophy in the seventeenth century returned from a Christian otherworldliness to a pagan engagement, theoretically and practically, with material nature. This process is often described as one of secularization, and the splitting off of science from natural philosophy and metaphysics is a traditional figure in accounts of the emergence of the modern. At the same time, the historiographical assumption that early modern science had religious and philosophical foundations has informed such classics as E. A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1932), Gerd Buchdahl's Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (1969), and Amos Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination (1986). A recent collection testifies to continuing interest in the theme of a positive relationship between theology and science.

Henry More and William Petty: Revisiting an Early Modern Polemic

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihnea Dobre
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Epistolary Exchange

Abstract This paper explores an overlooked aspect of the brief but intense correspondence between William Petty and Henry More, making use of the Hartlib Papers Online. Traditionally, the brief epistolary exchange between More and Petty has been seen in the light of an opposition between Cartesian rationalism and Baconian empiricism. A look at the original manuscripts, however, shows that the opposition was not originally framed in those terms at all. This article draws attention to the actors’ original categories, and places this exchange in the evolving landscape of seventeenth-century natural philosophy.

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