Banchetti-Robino, Marina Paola (Author)
Robert Boyle (1627-1691) believed that a reductionist conception of the mechanical philosophy threatened the heuristic power and autonomy of chemistry as an experimental science. While some historical and philosophical scholars have examined his nuanced position, understanding the chemical philosophy he developed through his own experimental work is incredibly difficult even for experts in the field. In The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle, Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino energetically explains Boyle's ideas in a whole new light and proposes that Boyle regarded chemical qualities as non-reducible dispositional and relational properties that emerge from, and supervene upon, the mechanistic structure of chymical atoms. Banchetti-Robino demonstrates that these ideas are implicit in Boyle's writing, making his philosophical contributions crucial to the fields of both philosophy and chemistry. The arguments presented are further strengthened by a detailed mereological analysis of Boylean chymical atoms as chemically elementary entities, which establishes the theory of wholes and parts that is most consistent with an emergentist conception of chemical properties. More generally, this book examines the way in which Boyle sought to accommodate his complex chemical philosophy within the framework of the 17th century mechanistic theory of matter. Banchetti-Robino conceptualizes Boyle's experimental work as a scientific research programme, in the Lakatosian sense, to better explain the positive and negative heuristic function of the mechanistic theory of matter within his chemical philosophy. The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle actively engages with the contemporary and lively debates over the nature of Boyle's ideas about structural chemistry, fundamental mechanistic particles and properties, the explanatory power of subordinate causes, the complex relation between fundamental particles, natural kinds, and unified chemical wholes. The book is a rich historical account that begins with the dominant paradigms of 16th and 17th Century chemical philosophy and takes readers all the way through to the 21st Century.
...MoreReview Victor Boantza (2023) Review of "The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: Mechanicism, Chymical Atoms, and Emergence". Metascience: An International Review Journal for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (pp. 355-357).
Review Ashley J. Inglehart (2021) Review of "The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: Mechanicism, Chymical Atoms, and Emergence". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 831-832).
Review Antonio Clericuzio (2021) Review of "The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: Mechanicism, Chymical Atoms, and Emergence". Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (pp. 450-451).
Chapter
Cook, Margaret G.;
(2001)
Divine Artifice and Natural Mechanism: Robert Boyle's Mechanical Philosophy of Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB000101139/)
Book
Ott, Walter R.;
(2009)
Causation and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB001033000/)
Article
Pyle, Andrew;
(2002)
Boyle on Science and the Mechanical Philosophy: A Reply to Chalmers
(/isis/citation/CBB000201214/)
Article
Chalmers, Alan;
(2002)
Experiment versus mechanical philosophy in the work of Robert Boyle: A reply to Anstey and Pyle
(/isis/citation/CBB000201215/)
Chapter
Osler, Margaret J.;
(2001)
Whose Ends? Teleology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB000101140/)
Article
Anstey, Peter R.;
(2002)
Robert Boyle and the Heuristic Value of Mechanism
(/isis/citation/CBB000201213/)
Book
Boantza, Victor D.;
(2013)
Matter and Method in the Long Chemical Revolution: Laws of Another Order
(/isis/citation/CBB001420404/)
Article
Carlin, Laurence;
(2012)
Boyle's Teleological Mechanism and the Myth of Immanent Teleology
(/isis/citation/CBB001230570/)
Chapter
Antonio Clericuzio;
(2016)
Mechanism and Chemical Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England: Boyle’s Investigation of Ferments and Fermentation
(/isis/citation/CBB153077081/)
Article
Banchetti-Robino, Marina Paola;
(2012)
The Ontological Function of First-Order and Second-Order Corpuscles in the Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: The Redintegration of Potassium Nitrate
(/isis/citation/CBB001210754/)
Book
Clericuzio, Antonio;
(2000)
Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000100183/)
Book
Sargent, Rose-Mary;
(1995)
The Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment
(/isis/citation/CBB000820069/)
Article
Anstey, Peter R.;
(2014)
Philosophy of Experiment in Early Modern England: The Case of Bacon, Boyle and Hooke
(/isis/citation/CBB001420209/)
Book
Hunter, Michael Cyril William;
(2015)
Boyle Studies: Aspects of the Life and Thought of Robert Boyle (1627-91)
(/isis/citation/CBB001551955/)
Article
Levitin, Dmitri;
(2014)
The Experimentalist as Humanist: Robert Boyle on the History of Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB001321003/)
Book
David S. Sytsma;
(2017)
Richard Baxter and the Mechanical Philosophers
(/isis/citation/CBB825569082/)
Chapter
Daston, Lorraine;
(2010)
The Empire of Observation, 1600--1800
(/isis/citation/CBB001221449/)
Book
Svetozar Y. Minkov;
Bernhardt L. Trout;
(2018)
Mastery of Nature: Promises and Prospects
(/isis/citation/CBB548935384/)
Article
Roos, Anna Marie Eleanor;
(2015)
The Saline Chymistry of Color in Seventeenth-Century English Natural History
(/isis/citation/CBB001553528/)
Article
Louis Caruana;
(2018)
Mechanistic Trends in Chemistry
(/isis/citation/CBB703605057/)
Be the first to comment!