Another Look at Robert Boyle's Acceptance of the Mechanical Philosophy: Its Limits and its Chemical and Social Contexts

Abstract

THE Mechanical philosophy, the doctrine that all phenomena in the physical world can be explained in terms of matter and motion, was the philosophical basis of the new science that emerged during the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Its source can be traced to the revival of ancient atomism during the Renaissance. It caught the attention of those philosophers who were not satisfied with, or were opposed to, the peripatetic physical theory, especially in the manner practised by the scholastic followers of Aristotle since the late medieval period. It had undergone significant modification and development in the hands of such philosophers as Rene Descartes (15961650) and Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), and mainly through their influence the mechanical philosophy came to be accepted by many natural philosophers in the latter halfofthe century.2 The pattern of this acceptance and the nature of exceptions to it has not yet been fully understood, however. In this paper, I shall try to throw some light on this problem by examining the limits and contexts of the acceptance of the mechanical philosophy by Robert Boyle (1627-1691), perhaps its most efficient and successful proponent in the seventeenth century.