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Leviathan and the Air-Pump : Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life / Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextSeries: Princeton Classics ; 109Publisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2011]Copyright date: ©2011Description: 1 online resource (448 p.) : 22 b/w illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691150208
  • 9781400838493
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 533.5
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS -- INTRODUCTION TO THE 2011 EDITION -- NOTES ON SOURCES AND CONVENTIONS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- I. Understanding Experiment -- II. Seeing and Believing: The Experimental Production of Pneumatic Facts -- III. Seeing Double: Hobbes's Politics of Plenism before 1660 -- IV. The Trouble with Experiment: Hobbes versus Boyle -- V. Boyle's Adversaries: Experiment Defended -- VI. Replication and Its Troubles: Air-Pumps in the i66os -- VII. Natural Philosophy and the Restoration: Interests in Dispute -- VIII. The Polity of Science: Conclusions -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX
Summary: Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS -- INTRODUCTION TO THE 2011 EDITION -- NOTES ON SOURCES AND CONVENTIONS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- I. Understanding Experiment -- II. Seeing and Believing: The Experimental Production of Pneumatic Facts -- III. Seeing Double: Hobbes's Politics of Plenism before 1660 -- IV. The Trouble with Experiment: Hobbes versus Boyle -- V. Boyle's Adversaries: Experiment Defended -- VI. Replication and Its Troubles: Air-Pumps in the i66os -- VII. Natural Philosophy and the Restoration: Interests in Dispute -- VIII. The Polity of Science: Conclusions -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

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Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Jul 2021)