The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest write by Robert Boyle. This book was released on . The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
The Aspiring Adept
The Aspiring Adept - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Aspiring Adept write by Lawrence Principe. This book was released on 2018-06-05. The Aspiring Adept available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The Aspiring Adept presents a provocative new view of Robert Boyle (1627-1691), one of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution, by revealing for the first time his avid and lifelong pursuit of alchemy. Boyle has traditionally been considered, along with Newton, a founder of modern science because of his mechanical philosophy and his experimentation with the air-pump and other early scientific apparatus. However, Lawrence Principe shows that his alchemical quest--hidden first by Boyle's own codes and secrecy, and later suppressed or ignored--positions him more accurately in the intellectual and cultural crossroads of the seventeenth century. Principe radically reinterprets Boyle's most famous work, The Sceptical Chymist, to show that it criticizes not alchemists, as has been thought, but "unphilosophical" pharmacists and textbook writers. He then shows Boyle's unambiguous enthusiasm for alchemy in his "lost" Dialogue on the Transmutation and Melioration of Metals, now reconstructed from scattered fragments and presented here in full for the first time. Intriguingly, Boyle believed that the goal of his quest, the Philosopher's Stone, could not only transmute base metals into gold, but could also attract angels. Alchemy could thus act both as a source of knowledge and as a defense against the growing tide of atheism that tormented him. In seeking to integrate the seemingly contradictory facets of Boyle's work, Principe also illuminates how alchemy and other "unscientific" pursuits had a far greater impact on early modern science than has previously been thought.
The Aspiring Adept
The Aspiring Adept - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Aspiring Adept write by Lawrence M. Principe. This book was released on 1998. The Aspiring Adept available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Alchemy Tried in the Fire
Alchemy Tried in the Fire - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Alchemy Tried in the Fire write by William R. Newman. This book was released on 2005-06. Alchemy Tried in the Fire available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. William Newman and Lawrence Principe reveal the hitherto hidden laboratory experiments of a famous alchemist and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry derive from alchemy.
Leviathan and the Air-Pump
Leviathan and the Air-Pump - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Leviathan and the Air-Pump write by Steven Shapin. This book was released on 2011-08-15. Leviathan and the Air-Pump available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
