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
11 - Teleological reasoning in Boyle's Disquisition about Final Causes
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
Ex rerum Causis Supremum noscere Causam
Introduction
Robert Boyle's Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things is the most detailed treatment of final causality to appear in the seventeenth century. Remarkably, given the importance of the doctrine of final causes for understanding the dramatic shift in philosophies of nature during this period, this work has received scant attention from historians and philosophers of science. To date there has been only one sustained scholarly examination of this treatise. In an article published a decade ago, James Lennox argues that Boyle's primary aim in this work was to provide a defence of teleological inference in experimental science. In Lennox's view, the Disquisition should be viewed as an early exercise in the analysis of teleological explanation in natural science, a project that has proven popular in recent years.
I believe that Lennox's interpretation presents a distorted picture of Boyle's thinking, and that a much more satisfactory account of his aims in this treatise is possible. To this end, I undertake a fresh examination of this work, paying particular attention to (i) the adversarial context in which it was written, (ii) the kinds of questions Boyle sought to answer, (iii) the technical distinctions deployed in his arguments and (iv) the reasoning undergirding his conclusions.
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- Information
- Robert Boyle Reconsidered , pp. 177 - 192Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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