Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Virtue, providence and political neutralism: Boyle and Interregnum politics
- 3 Science writing and writing science: Boyle and rhetorical theory
- 4 Learning from experience: Boyle's construction of an experimental philosophy
- 5 Carneades and the chemists: a study of The Sceptical Chymist and its impact on seventeenth-century chemistry
- 6 Boyle's alchemical pursuits
- 7 Boyle's debt to corpuscular alchemy
- 8 Boyle and cosmical qualities
- 9 The theological context of Boyle's Things above Reason
- 10 ‘Parcere nominibus’: Boyle, Hooke and the rhetorical interpretation of Descartes
- 11 Teleological reasoning in Boyle's Disquisition about Final Causes
- 12 Locke and Boyle on miracles and God's existence
- Bibliography of writings on Boyle published since 1940
- Index
8 - Boyle and cosmical qualities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Virtue, providence and political neutralism: Boyle and Interregnum politics
- 3 Science writing and writing science: Boyle and rhetorical theory
- 4 Learning from experience: Boyle's construction of an experimental philosophy
- 5 Carneades and the chemists: a study of The Sceptical Chymist and its impact on seventeenth-century chemistry
- 6 Boyle's alchemical pursuits
- 7 Boyle's debt to corpuscular alchemy
- 8 Boyle and cosmical qualities
- 9 The theological context of Boyle's Things above Reason
- 10 ‘Parcere nominibus’: Boyle, Hooke and the rhetorical interpretation of Descartes
- 11 Teleological reasoning in Boyle's Disquisition about Final Causes
- 12 Locke and Boyle on miracles and God's existence
- Bibliography of writings on Boyle published since 1940
- Index
Summary
Boyle published his Tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things in 1671 (although its imprimatur is dated 3 November 1669), as a kind of sequel to the Origin of Forms and Qualities of 1666, but unlike the latter work these tracts have attracted very little scholarly attention. If they have been noticed at all they have been given a seemingly unproblematic mechanistic interpretation. Boyle defines ‘systematical or cosmical’ qualities as those qualities of a body which do not derive from the sizes, shapes and motions of its constituent particles, but
depend upon some unheeded relations and impressions which those bodies owe to the determinate fabrick of the grand system or world they are part of.
‘A system [of the world] so constituted as ours is’, Boyle wrote, ‘whose fabrick is such that there may be divers unheeded agents, which, by unperceived means, may have great operations upon the body we consider’, can give rise to special attributes of that body. It is by no means immediately clear what Boyle has in mind here, but, relying upon standard assumptions about the nature of the mechanical philosophy and about Boyle's status as a leading mechanist, it might seem reasonable to suppose that Boyle is merely extending the discussion in the Origin of Forms and Qualities about the power of a key to open a lock.
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- Robert Boyle Reconsidered , pp. 119 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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