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
7 - Boyle's debt to corpuscular alchemy
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
In the preface to his Origin of Forms and Qualities, Robert Boyle spells out his attitude toward contemporary chemists in the following terms: ‘ … though I have a very good opinion of chymistry itself, as it is a practical art; yet, as it is by chymists pretended to contain a system of theorical principles of philosophy, I fear it will afford but a very little satisfaction to a severe inquirer …’. In this fashion Boyle distances himself from the theoretical principles underlying Paracelsian iatrochemistry and alchemy, while at the same time allowing for his appropriation of the alchemists' techniques in the laboratory. Despite Allen Debus's fundamental article of 1967, in which he showed that Boyle's Sceptical Chymist owed a major conceptual debt to Jan Baptist van Helmont, Boyle's dismissal of alchemical theory as an influence on his own work still remains largely unchallenged.
In this chapter I will argue for a radically different position. It is my view that Boyle knew and absorbed the material theory of alchemy to such a degree that it forms a seamless part of his own work. I do not refer here primarily to Boyle's attitude toward the transmutation of metals, which is obviously derived from alchemy.
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- Robert Boyle Reconsidered , pp. 107 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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