The significance of Robert Boyle (1627-91) as the most influential English scientist in the generation before Newton is now generally acknowledged, but the complexity and eclecticism of his ideas has also become increasingly apparent. This volume presents an important group of studies of Boyle by Michael Hunter, the leading expert on Boyle’s life and thought. It forms a sequel to two previous books: Hunter’s Robert Boyle: Scrupulosity and Science (2000) and The Boyle Papers: Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle (2007). Like them, it conveniently brings together material otherwise widely scattered in essay volumes and academic journals, while nearly a third of the book’s content is hitherto unpublished. The collection opens with a substantial introduction that places the studies that follow in the context of existing studies of Boyle; appended to it is an annotated edition of Boyle’s telling list of desiderata for science. The next three essays comprise a group of essentially biographical studies, exploring various aspects of Boyle’s life and intellectual evolution, after which three others provide further evidence of the ’convoluted’ Boyle divulged in Robert Boyle: Scrupulosity and Science. Finally, we have two chapters, one hitherto published only in French and the other not at all, which throw important light on topics that preoccupied Boyle in the last few years of his life - the supernatural and the exotic. Together, these essays add greater depth to our understanding of Boyle, both as an individual and as a natural philosopher.

The philosophy of Robert Boyle (1627-1691) is a hot topic in early modern philosophy. Boyle was at the centre of the scientific community of 17th-century England, and an accurate view of the Enlightenment scientific revolution is impossible without recognition of the contributions that he made. Work on Boyle's philosophy is also shedding light on contemporary issues in the philosophy of science - it can help us understand the nature of scientific explanation and the role that the mechanical model of explanation plays in present-day science. Boyle's mechanical philosophy ushered in a new explanatory model for science and even though his corpuscular hypothesis failed, its failure does not entail the failure of the explanatory model of which it was an instance. Boyle on Fire demonstrates these points by examining Boyle's work concerning a method of experiment common in the seventeenth century called Fire Analysis. In the Sceptical Chymist (1661), Boyle attacks elemental theories of chemical explanation primarily by raising objections against Aristotelian and Paracelsian interpretations of fire analysis. The book reconstructs Boyle's corpuscular account of fire analysis and then compares it to these objections. This process reveals those characteristics of mechanical explanations that make them epistemologically superior to elemental theories of chemical explanation, and it is these characteristics that survive the death of the corpuscular hypothesis and have become an enduring feature of the scientific enterprise.

Arguing that the early Royal Society moved science toward racialization by giving skin color a new prominence as an object of experiment and observation, Cristina Malcolmson provides the first book-length examination of studies of skin color in the Society. She also brings new light to the relationship between early modern literature, science, and the establishment of scientific racism in the nineteenth century. Malcolmson demonstrates how unstable the idea of race remained in England at the end of the seventeenth century, and yet how extensively the intertwined institutions of government, colonialism, the slave trade, and science were collaborating to usher it into public view. Malcolmson places the genre of the voyage to the moon in the context of early modern discourses about human difference, and argues that Cavendish’s Blazing World and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels satirize the Society’s emphasis on skin color.

The eighteen studies included here reflect three particular aspects of Leonard Boyle's remarkable impact on teaching and scholarship. His abiding interest in the early history and architecture of the basilica of San Clemente in Rome forms the focus of Part I; his profound contribution to the theory and practice of palaeography is reflected in Part II; and his creative work on clerical education, pastoral care, and the Dominican Order, inspires Part III. In all these areas, Fr Boyle combined remarkable attention to detail with the humane ability to bring clarity to complex issues. This book commemorates his inspiration, but also reflects his favourite maxim, derived from the twelfth-century teacher-theologian, Hugh of St-Victor, to 'Learn everything', for 'afterwards you will find that nothing is superfluous.' The fourth section is devoted to Fr Leonard as friend, scholar, and Prefect of the Vatican Library, and it ends, fittingly, with what may be regarded as his own scholarly valediction, 'St Thomas Aquinas and the Third Millennium'.

This book is a study of the scientific revolution as a movement of amateur science. It describes the ideology of the amateur scientific societies as the philosophy of the Enlightenment Movement and their social structure and the way they made modern science such a magnificent institution. It also shows what was missing in the scientific organization of science and why it gave way to professional science in stages. In particular the book studies the contributions of Sir Francis Bacon and of the Hon. Robert Boyle to the rise of modern science. The philosophy of induction is notoriously problematic, yet its great asset is that it expressed the view of the Enlightenment Movement about science. This explains the ambivalence that we still exhibit towards Sir Francis Bacon whose radicalism and vision of pure and applied science still a major aspect of the fabric of society. Finally, the book discusses Boyle’s philosophy, his agreement with and dissent from Bacon and the way he single-handedly trained a crowd of poorly educated English aristocrats and rendered them into an army of able amateur researchers.

The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle examines the relationship between Robert Boyle's experimental work in chemistry and his commitment to mechanical philosophy.

Robert Boyle’s role as the most influential English scientist in the generation before Newton is now acknowledged, and the complexity of his ideas has become increasingly apparent. This volume forms a sequel to Michael Hunter’s two previous books: Robert Boyle: Scrupulosity and Science (2000) and The Boyle Papers: Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle (2007). Like them, it brings together material otherwise widely scattered in essay volumes and academic journals, while over a third of the book’s content is hitherto unpublished.