Seventeenth-century Philosophy Research Articles

Considerações acerca de certa presença spinozista na obra de Laurent Bove e Mark Fisher

This article intends to approach two contemporary contributions, by the theorists Mark Fisher and Laurent Bove, who, each in his own way, claim the actuality and effectiveness of certain concepts and notions of the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedictus Spinoza (1632 – 1677). In Laurent Bove, the foundation and dissemination of a political clinic, at the same time, singular and social, unfolds under the relation between conatus and freedom, always corresponding to the affective and intellectual rules of the autonomous project of the multitude, as formulated by Spinoza. Mark Fisher, in turn, from the Spinozian concept of entity, produces a speculative articulation between Gothic materialism and cyber-Spinozism that aims to create a collective body, immanent and antagonistic to the tyranny of financial capitalism. Furthermore, based on Spinoza’s theory of affects, he develops an ethical analysis of his time that also intends to be a convocation to political action. Finally, the paper aims to clarify what the two authors have in common, namely, their belief in the positivity of political action, and how this characteristic reaffirms the relevance of maintaining an ever attentive and vibrant dialogue with Spinoza’s philosophy.

Considerações acerca de certa presença spinozista na obra de Laurent Bove e Mark Fisher

This article intends to approach two contemporary contributions, by the theorists Mark Fisher and Laurent Bove, who, each in his own way, claim the actuality and effectiveness of certain concepts and notions of the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedictus Spinoza (1632 – 1677). In Laurent Bove, the foundation and dissemination of a political clinic, at the same time, singular and social, unfolds under the relation between conatus and freedom, always corresponding to the affective and intellectual rules of the autonomous project of the multitude, as formulated by Spinoza. Mark Fisher, in turn, from the Spinozian concept of entity, produces a speculative articulation between Gothic materialism and cyber-Spinozism that aims to create a collective body, immanent and antagonistic to the tyranny of financial capitalism. Furthermore, based on Spinoza’s theory of affects, he develops an ethical analysis of his time that also intends to be a convocation to political action. Finally, the paper aims to clarify what the two authors have in common, namely, their belief in the positivity of political action, and how this characteristic reaffirms the relevance of maintaining an ever attentive and vibrant dialogue with Spinoza’s philosophy.

Walter Charleton, wellbeing, and the Cartesian passions

ABSTRACT Walter Charleton is an often-overlooked figure in the history of seventeenth-century philosophy, frequently thought of as a mere conduit for the ideas of others, rather than a significant thinker in his own right. As a self-described “eclectic,” Charleton saw himself as avoiding dogmatism by selecting the best ideas from his sources and fitting them together into a new, coherent system. Here I argue his method allowed him to innovate on his sources, and led to attempts at overcoming the limitations of the systems he drew on. My focus is Charleton’s Natural History of the Passions (1674) and what it takes from René Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (1650). There are two benefits to this analysis. First, it will help contextualise Charleton’s work and defend him against the accusation of lacking originality. Second, it will further our understanding of a hitherto understudied facet of Descartes’s influence in early modern England.

Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

La localisation viscérale des passions selon Pinel, Esquirol et leurs prédécesseurs, et le concept contemporain d’intéroception

Seventeenth-century philosophers used the terms “passions” or “passions of the soul” to refer to what we call emotions. The debate as to whether their origin was cerebral or peripheral, i.e. epigastric, was at that time led by two famous protagonists, René Descartes and Marin Cureau de la Chambre. These concepts were still subject to controversy at the beginning of the 19th century, by which time the debates were no longer philosophers, but rather alienists. Philippe Pinel and his student Jean-Étienne Esquirol remained staunch epigastralgists, as was Pierre-Antoine Prost. Their writings indicate that they were unaware of the work of certain physiologists who were their contemporaries, such as Pierre Brisseau and François Pourfour du Petit, and who were uncovering a new physiology, that of the autonomic nervous system. Over the next century, the theories concerning emotions benefited from constant advances in physiology and pathophysiology but continued to confront the problem of their central or peripheral origin. The 21st century finally combined the two theories within a concept of interoception or the physiological sense of the perception of the body's state. This article covers three centuries of evolution in the concepts and knowledge of the physiology of what brings colour to life, our emotions.

Causation and Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy ed. by Dominik Perler and Sebastian Bender

Reviewed by: Causation and Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy ed. by Dominik Perler and Sebastian Bender Nick Westberg and Jean-Luc Solère Dominik Perler and Sebastian Bender, editors. Causation and Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy. Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. vi + 361. Cloth, $112.00. This volume is a welcome addition to early modern scholarship, providing a source of reflection on the connection between cognition theory and causation theory. The collection's great merit is exploiting this cognition-causation connection to provide a new avenue for historical research that is at the same time philosophically significant. Several of the essays advance our understanding of key figures by using this connection to settle longstanding interpretive disputes. (Besides those detailed in the present paragraph, the excellent pieces by Julia Jorati on Leibniz, Sebastian Bender on Berkeley, and Martine Pécharman on Hobbes also fall under this heading.) For instance, in "Descartes on the Causal Structure of Cognition," Alison Simmons rejects both the concurrentist and the occasionalist readings and argues that Descartes, in fact, does not endorse any view about the metaphysics of causation. Instead, he is more interested in showing the success of mechanism. Mechanistic physics can account for all the bodily interactions that lead up to perception. Thus, philosophers may dispense with the Aristotelian assimilation thesis and its underlying physics. In "Knowing Mind through Knowing Body," Daniel Garber provides an answer to the "Pancreas Problem" in Spinoza scholarship. Awareness is distinguished from mere perception, which may be not conscious. Moreover, awareness results from the body's interaction with an external body, whereas (unconscious) perception does not require such interaction and can be purely internal. This helps explain Spinoza's criticism of Descartes's cogito argument. By extension from the definition of awareness, self-consciousness—that is, the idea of the idea of one's body—depends upon interaction with external bodies. So, one cannot separate self-consciousness from causal relations with the external world. Peter Kail likewise uses the cognition-causation connection to engage a longstanding debate, defending the view that David Hume is not a radical skeptic. He argues that Hume's criticism of causation only precludes one sense in which the mind is a cause of inferences, that is, the sense in which it deductively infers. Hume instead treats reason as a reliable mechanism that leads us to nondeductive inferences. Other essays use the cognition-causation connection not to wade into perennial scholarly disputes, but rather to open up historical inquiry to lesser-known philosophers. These figures are often taken to be minor on account of their quirky positions. But this collection reveals that an unorthodox position in one domain (causation or cognition) is often the result of a unique thesis defended in the other. For instance, in "Nothing Is Simply One Thing," Julia [End Page 688] Borcherding shows that Anne Conway advances her non-unitary theory of mind because she significantly alters Descartes's account of change. Likewise, in "Cartesian Causation and Cognition," Tad Schmaltz argues that Géraud de Cordemoy embraces occasionalism about the mind's perceptions because he reasons that Cartesian metaphysics renders causation between finite substances impossible. Again, Dominik Perler, in "Suárez on Cognition and Causation," illuminates Suárez's unorthodox view of the intellect as a coordinated efficient cause of ideas. He shows that Suárez's view is a last-ditch attempt within Aristotelianism to replace a failed assimilation thesis. The pieces by Sarah Hutton on Cudworth, David Cunning on Cavendish, and Han Thomas Adriaenssen on John Sergeant and Antoine Le Grand fall in the same group of essays that explore lesser-known figures. The excellent contributions of Martin Lin on Spinoza's causal axiom, Stephan Schmid on Malebranche, and James Van Cleve on Reid form a third group. Not only are they analytically thorough, but they also bring illuminating contemporary analysis to bear on this collection's theme. The collection is not without its issues. For one thing, the pieces do not fit together as a cohesive whole. This is due to the broad scope of figures (eighteen philosophers, spanning divergent perspectives from about 1600 to about 1750) and the differing interpretive methods. The...

Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro

Reviewed by: Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro Rudolphus Teeuwen Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro. Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2021. xix + 307 pp. "Fundamentalisms" in the title of this book is the plural of a word we more often encounter in the singular, but it is the contention of Morson and Schapiro that there are two types of fundamentalism (in different varieties) and that they are at loggerheads. One kind of fundamentalism asserts truth with absolute certainty; the other denies it with just as much certainty. This means that there are two forms of folly that drown out chances for wisdom, and this brings real dangers to a democracy such as the United States. The authors want to chart a way of getting from folly to wisdom and the success of this undertaking depends in large part on readers' willingness to live and think outside of the three criteria that define fundamentalism, whether of the positive or negative kind. These criteria are "Certainty," the "Perspicuity of Truth," and adherence to a "Foundational Text or Revelation." The three criteria have a theological ring to them: the inerrant foundational text offering absolute certainty of the truth revealed in it—this suggests the positive fundamentalism of forms of Christianity or Islam (by no means the only form religions can take). But there is a secular variety of this positive fundamentalism as well: if works by Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, or Kim Il Sung are read, as they demand to be, as inerrant foundational texts, forms of truth and certainty emerge that have baleful consequences for human lives. And Freud, in his claim of scientific inerrancy, knows absolutely but implausibly that there is no such thing as chance in the workings of the human mind. Apart from such positive fundamentalisms, there is the negative kind. Negative fundamentalists too believe that knowledge, to be worthwhile, must be based on something equivalent in certainty to physics or mathematics. But they also believe that such certainty, even in physics or mathematics, is ultimately unattainable and that therefore the entire project of truth must be relativized by an awareness of a purely cultural construction of knowledge. Relativists are absolutists by another name: with truth conceived of as an all or nothing proposition, they choose "nothing" where positive fundamentalists choose "all." Morson and Schapiro try to shepherd us toward a non-absolute sense of relativity: a skepticism that admits doubt, a taking on board that our convictions are shaped to an extent by cultural prejudices and happenstance and we will never know to what extent exactly. This is Morson and Schapiro as analyzers of the pass we have come to in democratic societies in general, and the United States in particular. Fundamentalists are on speaking terms only with fellow-fundamentalists of the same stripe and only sharpen the way they think and express themselves, so minds end up wide shut, and the closing of the American mind becomes irrevocable. [End Page 761] Well, nearly irrevocable. This book becomes imaginative in the remedy it suggests. Stephen Toulmin, in his 1990 book Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, sees modernity, in its embrace of the rationalism of seventeenth-century philosophers as Descartes and Leibniz, as having discarded the earlier humanism of writers of the sixteenth century—Erasmus, Montaigne, and Shakespeare among them. It is this humanist tradition we need to return to in matters of ethics, public policy, and the practicalities of living our lives. This means that we should not rely on deductive reasoning but on practical case-based reasoning. In this way we can turn from folly to wisdom. In chapters on politics, economics, religion, and literature, Morson and Schapiro work out how such a switch can be made and what it would mean for ethical and practical decision-making in democratic societies divided by fundamentalisms. If case-based reasoning is the way forward, it is realist novels we should turn to. It is in the realist novel that casuistry is preserved while philosophy led us astray toward the logic of rationalism. Ethics in the realist novel is a matter...

Английские философы-рационалисты о феномене чудесного

The review deals with the analysis of the monograph devoted to the influence of Christian understanding of the phenomenon of miracle on the views of English seventeenth-century philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The reviewer’s attention is focused on the way the author of the monograph describes the spiritual atmosphere in which the world view of these thinkers developed, as well as on the historiographical interpretations of their theories.

Moral improvement through mathematics: Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole’s Nouveaux éléments de géométrie

This paper examines the ethical and religious dimensions of mathematical practice in the early modern era by offering an interpretation of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole’s Nouveaux elements de geometrie (1667). According to these important figures of seventeenth-century French philosophy and theology, mathematics could achieve extra-mathematical or non-mathematical goals; that is, mathematics could foster practices of moral self-improvement, deepen the mathematician’s piety and cultivate epistemic virtues. The Nouveaux elements de geometrie, which I contend offers the most robust account of the virtues cultivated by mathematics in the period, was envisaged by its authors to cultivate moral, Christian and epistemic virtues that could serve in the fulfilment of moral and Christian obligations. In this paper, I set out the goals of mathematical inquiry for the Port-Royalists and describe the specific virtues they believed a revised edition of the Elements of Euclid could foster. I show that Arnauld and Nicole believed that an acquaintance with mathematics could render a student of Euclid more just, truth-loving, attentive and humble, and better able to discern truth from falsity.

Living Philosophy: Self-revelation and Damaris Masham’s Philosophical Autobiography

ABSTRACT The seventeenth-century philosopher Damaris Masham (1658/59–1708) had an intimate and emotional relationship with her friend and companion John Locke (1632–1704), and corresponded with him over many years. Her extensive surviving letters to Locke have been largely overlooked by scholarship on her philosophy. Setting Masham’s letters in the context of philosophical and historical scholarship on autobiography, as well as Berel Lang’s work on philosophical genre, I argue that her letters to Locke should be read as a form of philosophical autobiography. By doing so, unrecognized aspects of Masham’s philosophical position on selfhood and sociability are made visible. Furthermore, I show how the personal and the philosophical are inextricable in the letters and argue that lived emotional experience is of philosophical value. This point is of particular import in the project of retrieval of women philosophers throughout history, but should also be taken into account in the context of a modern philosophical milieu that often privileges “arguing that” as the only legitimate mode of philosophical practice.

Kyoto and the heavens: setting Japan’s center of time

Why did scholars in mid-nineteenth century Japan assume that the prime meridian should run through Kyoto – positioning the city not only as the center of Japan but also of the entire world? Tracing the close connections between longitude determination, astronomical time measurement, and calendar compilation, this article argues that the making of Kyoto-centered place was rooted in the use of astronomical time as a tool for analyzing celestial and geographical space. This article first shows that the existence of a prime meridian on Japanese maps was the result of astronomical timekeeping practices used by an early nineteenth-century surveyor, Inō Tadataka. It then traces the decision to draw the prime meridian specifically through Kyoto to various centuries-old calendrical conventions, the astronomical work of Shibukawa Shunkai, and the metaphysics of seventeenth-century philosopher Yamazaki Ansai. The article emphasizes the role that practices of measurement, calculation, and observation played in the shaping of a map, the appearance of which eventually manifested the idea of the place it purportedly represents.

John Locke: the Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso by Victoro Nuovo

Reviewed by: John Locke: the Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso by Victoro Nuovo Benjamin Storey NUOVO, Victor. John Locke: the Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2017. 263 pp. Cloth, $74.00 In his latest book, Victor Nuovo, editor of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke, argues that Locke should be understood as a "Christian virtuoso." Nuovo uses that term to designate a group of seventeenth-century philosophers who practiced an empirical science based on naturalistic principles derived from pagan thinkers, while also earnestly professing Christianity. The virtuosi were concerned for Christianity's fate in their time and sought to reconcile their competing scientific and religious commitments. Nuovo's distinctive, well-documented reading of Locke deserves the attention of all who wish to understand Locke's thought in its original context. [End Page 801] Nuovo describes Christian virtuosity as arising in response to a seventeenth-century "crisis of atheism," a crisis created by the newfound prominence of "Democritean naturalism and its Epicurean successor." He places Locke in a tradition of Christian virtuosi whose "prototype" was Francis Bacon and whose "archetype" was Locke's friend and mentor, Robert Boyle. Boyle coined the term in an unfinished work, The Christian Virtuoso, which Nuovo argues Locke read in manuscript in 1681. Like Locke and Boyle, many of the virtuosi were members of the Royal Society and sought to advance naturalistic inquiry rooted in Democritean atomism, while showing that science to be compatible with Christianity. Doing so was a tricky business, and Nuovo describes the virtuosi as haunted by the shadow of atheism, which they "could not escape, for it was their very own." Nuovo traces the impetus for Locke's magnum opus, the Essay concerning Human Understanding, to a meeting of virtuosi on a winter night in 1671. The friends were brooding over the question of how to preserve "the principles of morality and revealed religion" in the face of the crisis of atheism in which they were embroiled. Nuovo conjectures that their conversation may have been rendered particularly acute by the publication of Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise in 1670, for Spinoza "reduced the whole of reality to a single substance, which he called God but equated with nature," and described revelation as "as an all-too human invention devised for reasons of political expedience." In his Essay, Locke responded to the problem this overweening naturalism presented by reconceiving the structure of human knowledge itself, and thereby creating a new logic to rival that of Aristotle. Nuovo argues that Locke's investigations led him to conclude that "Morality is the proper Science, and Business of Mankind in General" and to "deny the possibility of a science of nature." The self-aware "philosopher of nature," Locke held, should regard himself as "pilgrim," whose basic concerns are religious and moral, and whose scientific inquiries reflect only "a modest curiosity" about this passing world, along with a charitable interest in the advantages human beings might derive from understanding nature's causal mechanisms. Although Locke elevated morality to the status of mankind's proper science and business, he never produced a systematic treatment of ethics. Nuovo argues, however, that he did in fact possess such a moral theory, which he developed by following in the tradition of "the great hedonist moralists, in particular Epicurus." Reconstructing this moral theory mostly from the Essay and Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education, Nuovo describes it as "a scheme of pagan ethics" with "Christian and biblical interjections" inserted here and there. Nuovo concludes his account of Locke's work with a reading of The Reasonableness of Christianity and the Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, which he argues should "count as major works of Biblical theology." Locke's project in these works was to enlarge "the scope of reason" to include "authenticating and interpreting revelation." In the [End Page 802] Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke found in the gospels "a moral truth suited for all sorts and conditions of men, surpassing in its cogency and efficacy all the discoveries of philosophy." In the Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, Locke argued for the coherence of Paul's teaching beneath his "exuberance and abundant expression." In both...

Spinoza and Menasseh ben Israel: Facts and Fictions.

An examination of what has been claimed about the relationship between the seventeenth-century philosopher Bento (Benedictus) Spinoza and Menasseh ben Israel, a rabbi of the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community. The article shows that, despite claims by scholars that Menasseh was Spinoza's teacher and intellectual mentor, in fact there is no evidence for the former claim, and much evidence that the two men were, intellectually, diametrically opposed on certain important substantive questions.

George Eliot and Spinoza: Toward a Theory of the Affects

Abstract This article argues that in The Lifted Veil George Eliot conducts a fictional experiment to test the limits of seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza's metaphysics. Eliot's Gothic novella, a significant generic departure from the realist fiction that established her fame, can arguably be read as a response to Spinoza's theory of the imagination, with its nursery of illusions and fears. Despite Eliot's years of studying and translating Spinoza's two major works, and the influence his philosophy exerted over both herself and George Henry Lewes, there has been a curious tendency to overlook this fundamental intellectual relationship. In The Lifted Veil Eliot does not merely give fictional form to Spinoza's ideas; rather, she contests and reshapes his affective philosophy, setting his intensely optical, phenomenal notion of the subject's enslavement to the vividness of imagination in an incendiary allegory of mid-century Victorian visual culture. The various epistemological crises of the mid-century moment find expression in Eliot's horrifying first-person account of delimited, inescapable sensory experience. What ensues is a destabilizing of the bluntly rational terms upon which Spinoza grounded his vision of the affective imagination, through which Eliot explores her own specular phenomenology of loss in a period when the very act of seeing was radically evolving.

Review of The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy by Dan Kaufman (ed.)

A review of Dan Kaufman's (ed.) recent book The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).

Of Human Bondage ve Özgür İrade Sorunsalı

Of Human Bondage (1915) by Somerset Maugham might be considered to be the story of a boy’s rite of passage, of a troubled love affair or to have a touch of Maugham’s own growth from boyhood to adulthood. However, the novel exceeds these simplistic approaches, touching upon the most intriguing questions of the human condition: the triggering principles of human actions and the question of free will. In this questioning, Maugham’s main philosophical inspiration is Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and he borrows the title of his book from Spinoza’s magnum opus, Ethics (1677) in which “Of Human Bondage” is the title of an episode. In his Ethics, Spinoza defines the concept of bondage as man’s inability to have full control over his actions and thoughts and he suggests that even though a human being has the knowledge of good and evil, certain faculties of human nature might lead to false knowledge or imperfection in his/her actions. The novel’s protagonist, Philip, who struggles with this bondage that surrounds him like an alien power that comes from within, as Maugham describes it, becomes the object of this discussion of human freedom or imprisonment carried out by Spinoza and other seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. Thus, the aim of this paper is to discuss the issue of the ‘inescapable’ bondage of man and the possibility of free will as embodied in Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.

Descartes and the notion of animal spirits: a brief historico-philosophical remark on Sonya Marie Scott's 'Crises, confidence, and animal spirits: exploring subjectivity in the dualism of Descartes and Keynes'

In ‘Crises, confidence, and animals spirits: exploring subjectivity in the dualism of Descartes and Keynes,’ Sonya Marie Scott sets out to deepen our understanding of Keynes’ use of animal spirits in his influential work in economics, by exploring one of the sources from which he appears to have acquired the notion—in the work of Seventeenth-Century philosopher René Descartes. The examination to follow will focus almost exclusively on Descartes’s view, where I hope to bring to light, for future discussion, both historical and philosophical troubles lurking in the account of Descartes as found in Scott’s article. I shall focus on two issues: first, I shall say a few critical words about the analogy offered by Scott, the analogy between Descartes’s and Keynes’ respective ‘dualisms;’ secondly, I shall look briefly at Scott’s reading of Descartes on animal spirits. As a quick bit of preliminary stage-setting, let me preface my remarks with a brief account of Descartes’s dualism and his account of the human being.

Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century French Philosophy: The Charronian Legacy 1601–1662, written by José R. Maia Neto

Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century French Philosophy: The Charronian Legacy 1601–1662, written by José R. Maia Neto

Framing the Mind–Body Problem in Contemporary Neuroscientific and Sunni Islamic Theological Discourse

Famously posed by seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, the mind–body problem remains unresolved in western philosophy and science, with both disciplines unable to move convincingly beyond the dualistic model. The persistence of dualism calls for a reframing of the problem through interdisciplinary modes of inquiry that include non-western points of view. One such perspective is Islamic theology of the soul, which, while approaching the problem from a distinct point of view, also adopts a position commensurate with (substance) dualism. Using this point of convergence as a conceptual starting point, we argue that bringing into dialogue contemporary neuroscientific, philosophy of mind, and Sunni Islamic theological discourses may provide a fruitful way of reframing the age-old mind–body problem. This paper provides an overview of how these three discourses have approached the issue of the mind–body (-soul) problem. Juxtaposing these three discourses, we hope, may ignite further scholarly dialogue and investigation.

R. Boyle vs. H. More on Acquiring Knowledge. Religious Concerns of the Seventeenth-Century Philosophy in England

R. Boyle i H. More na temat poznania. Religijne znaczenie siedemnastowiecznej filozofii angielskiej Druga poła siedemnastego stulecia była świadkiem zasadniczych sporów na temat istoty i źródeł wiedzy. W swych interpretacjach, historycy filozofii podkreślają znaczenie intelektualnego tła owego okresu, na jakim dyskusje te się rozgrywały i wskazują na różnorakie motywy, które powodowały, że poszczególni filozofowie przyjmowali takie czy inne stanowisko w odniesieniu do teorii poznania czy metafizyki. W niniejszym artykule usiłuję podkreślić znaczenie, jakie dla ówczesnego rozwoju myśli filozoficznej miał kontekst religijny. Różnica poglądów na temat pewnych kwestii teologicznych jest punktem wyjścia także dla dyskusji pomiędzy Robertem Boylem i Henrym Morem na temat statusu oraz możliwego wykorzystania wiedzy dostępnej dzięki metodzie eksperymentalnej. Najważniejszą z takich kwestii było zagadnienie Bożej wszechmocy, którą Boyle interptetował w ramach teologii woluntarystycznej, More zaś intelektualistycznej. W konsekwencji Boyle uważał, że dostępna człowiekowi wiedza może być co najwyżej prawdopodobna, zaś wyniki eksperymentów nie pozwalają na formułowanie tez o charakterze absolutnym. Z kolei More utrzymywał, że ludzka wiedza może być odbiciem absolutnej wiedzy Boga, a wyniki eksperymentów mogą stanowić uzasadnienie tez metafizycznych, przede wszystkim dotyczących istnienia Stwórcy.