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THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY Robert Boyle Grouped His CHAPTER EIGHT THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY Robert Boyle grouped his seventeenth century corpuscularian pre- decessors and contemporaries as the ‘mechanical philosophers’.1 He intended the term as neutral between atomists and non-atomist defend- ers of a common vision—that the physical world is machine-like and composed of a discernable material substratum the bits of which, in combination, give rise to familiar macro-sized entities and phenom- ena. While their differences regarding the nature of matter were great, two issues drew together early modern corpuscularians of all sorts, Gassendi among them. First, they were concerned to provide a suitable ontology for the mechanical philosophy. Among other things, this entailed making the mechanist picture work all the way down to the subvisible level, and building that picture up from that level. One reason this is necessary is to guarantee the scalar invari- ance of physical laws—that such laws work across the spectrum of magnitudes. Second, they were for the most part concerned to meet empiricist constraints and interests of the new science. This entailed, 1 Robert Boyle, The Excellency and Grounds of the Corpuscular or Mechanical Philosophy (1674); q.v. Peter Anstey, The Philosophy of Robert Boyle (London; New York: Routledge, 2000) and Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000). This term has had lasting historiographical currency (even if Boyle was not intending a historical account), thanks to Boas’ (1952) influential study; q.v. Marie Boas [Hall], “The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy”, Osiris 10 (1952), 412–541. More recent studies include Alan Gabbey, “The Mechanical Philosophy and its Problems: Mechanical Explanations, Impenetrability, and Perpetual Motion”, in Change and Progress in Modern Science, ed. Joseph C. Pitt (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985); Martin Tamny, “Atomism and the Mechanical Philosophy”, in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie and M.J.S. Hodge (London; New York: Routledge, 1990); and Daniel Garber, “Descartes, Mechanics, and the Mechanical Philosophy”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002), 185–204. A canonical list of mechanical philosophers would likely include Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle himself, as well as Isaac Beeckman, Nicholas Lemery, Christiaan Huygens, and Newton (the last viewed by some as a transitional figure, though his commit- ments to corpuscularian explanation are clear). Other figures, including Galileo (only a quasi-corpuscularian) and Hobbes, are more contentiously counted among the mechanical philosophers. 206 part iii—chapter eight among other things, saying what empirical evidence might be adduced for corpuscularian claims. As regards the first issue, let us begin by assessing what is meant by ‘mechanism’ or the ‘mechanical philosophy’—and how atomism as an ontological thesis might relate to it. Early modern philosophers and scientists who espoused the mechanical philosophy promoted a group of theses—some scientific claims per se and some claims about the way science should be pursued—but all based on the view that material objects behave in the ways of artificial machines such as clocks (to take a popular seventeenth century image). In principle, their behavior is regular, measurable, repeatable, predictable, and produced by the behavior of their component parts. As Martin Tamny (1990) has noted, the mechanical philosophy had at least these two facets: a mechanist methodology, according to which our best physical hypotheses tell us about ‘real properties’ of bodies underlying manifest phenomena—and which suggests that such hypotheses are supported by our best evidence, empirical or other- wise; and a corpuscularian ontology, according to which all macro- sized objects consist of micro-sized parts bearing those real properties. What ties the two theses together is the suggestion that, given the corpuscularian ontology, our best physical hypotheses will locate the quantifiable, real properties of bodies in corpuscles and so allow us to reinterpret the behavior of all macro-physical objects in terms of the actions, interactions,2 and states of their constituent corpuscles.3 2 That corpuscular interaction plays such a central role in this view, and a num- ber of mechanical philosophers are committed to a ‘no action at a distance’ the- sis, might seem to suggest that a corpuscular ontology is just what mechanists need to establish the latter point. Indeed, one interpretative tradition has it that the notion of action-at-a-distance confuses body and mind—that any such action represents an ‘animistic physics’ (Mary Hesse, “Gilbert and the Historians”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 11 (1960), 1–10; 130–142) which was eliminated over time in favor of a purely material means of action. However, there are independent his- torical reasons for favoring the ‘no action at a distance’ thesis, among them a long tradition of rejecting the void, and commitment to the species theory of image transmission; q.v. Pyle (1995), 359–369, 616–617. Moreover, a corpuscular ontol- ogy alone does not proscribe action at a distance. Some mechanical philosophers— Gassendi, Boyle, and Newton among them—invested spirit-like features in matter, all the while maintaining that such features could arise (and be conceptually sus- tainable) without appeal to spiritual substance per se; q.v. chapters 9 and 10. Among the historical precedents for such a view, we find the Stoic pneuma tradition. For the connection to Newton, q.v. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, “Stoic and Epicurean Doctrines in Newton’s System of the World”, in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 221–238. 3 This interpretation has it that there are methodological and ontological theses.
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