Leviathan and the air-pump : Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life / Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer ; with a new introduction by the authors.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shapin, Steven.

Contributor:

Princeton University Press., Publisher.

Schaffer, Simon.

Series:

Princeton Classics ; 109

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Air-pumps--History.

Air-pumps.

Physics--Experiments--History.

Physics.

Science--England--History.

Science.

Hobbes, Thomas, 1588-1679. Leviathan.

Hobbes, Thomas.

Boyle, Robert, 1627-1691.

Boyle, Robert.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (777 p.)

Edition:

Princeton classics paperback ed.

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2011, c1985.

Language Note:

English

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.

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

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

"Paperback reissue, with a new introduction, 2011."--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613256027

9781283256025

1283256029

9781400838493

1400838495

OCLC:

753480176