The Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment (review)

616 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:4 OCTOBER 1996 intellect. However, Osier argues that certain subtleties in the medieval dialectic between the absolute and ordained powers of God serve to ground Descartes solidly in the intellectualist tradition. Osler's argument is persuasive, although her claim that the voluntarist reading is a product of twentieth-century Anglo- American philosophers of the analytic tradition ignores the fact that some nonanalytic twentieth-century interpreters as well as some seventeenth-century interpreters read Descartes as a voluntarist , and had reasons other than those she cites for doing so.~ The second issue Osier raises and dispels is the nature of the eternality of the eternal truths. This issue stems from Descartes's insistence on the created yet eternal nature of essences and certain truths. Osier explains that Descart_es used the word "eternal" equivocally, and that Gassendi's criticisms of Descartes's position treated his use as univocal. When Descartes applied the term to God, it meant 'timelessness'; when he applied it to some created being, e.g., a triangle, it meant 'sempiternar or 'infinite duration'. Osier notes that the roots of this distinction can be found in Boethius's De Trinitate, and that it had a major impact on medieval philosophy and theology.s These are only some of the important issues that Osier discusses within the powerful theological framework she sets out in the opening chapters. Osler's Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy is more than a history of the mechanical philosophy: it is an authoritative work that is a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the intellectual context of the seventeenth century. PATRICIA EASTON Claremont Graduate School Rose-Mary Sargent. The Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment. Science and Its Conceptual Foundations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. xi + 355. Cloth, $65.oo. Paper, $26.oo. In one of the first monographic treatments of the thought of Robert Boyle emerging from the new wave of scholarship based on Boyle's manuscripts as well as his published works, Rose-Mary Sargent sets out to examine Boyle's theory and practice of the experimental philosophy, arguing that Boyle's approach to method in natural philosophy should be called "experimentalism" rather than "empiricism." According to Sargent, Francis Bacon was the source of Boyle's emphasis on an experimental approach to knowledge, and Ren~ Descartes's rationalism formed the basis of Boyle's hypothetical method, by which he reasoned from sense experience to unobservables. ' For such twentieth-century interpreters, see for example, Genevi6ve Rodis-Lewis, "Pol6miques sur la cr*ation des possibles et sur l'impossible dans l'&ole cart~sienne," Studia Cartesiana2 (Amsterdam: Quadratures, 1980: 1o5-23; and Jean-Luc Marion, Sur l'omologygrisede Descartes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1981), 220. For the seventeenth-century interpreters, see, for example, Robert Desgabets, Supplkment ~ la philosophiede M. Descartes,Opuscule 6 in Oeuvresphilosophiques ingditesde DoraRobertDesgabets(Amsterdam: Quadratures, 1983), esp. 249. sOsler refers the reader to Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and theEarly Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 115-x7. BOOK REVIEWS 617 Other important influences on Boyle's thought came from the English legal tradition, clinical medicine, and alchemy. Sargent's account of Boyle's method is flawed by her idiosyncratic use of the term "empiricism," which she defines narrowly as the claim "that all knowledge is to be grounded in sense perception and that science is to be restricted to the knowledge of observable phenomena. As a consequence, the idea that we can ever determine the truth of theories that explain regularities by referring to unobservable entities and processes is rejected" (4a). Sargent denies that Boyle was an empiricist in this sense because he believed that by experimentation he could attain knowledge of the unobservable processes that cause the observable phenomena in nature. The more usual definition of "empiricism" is that it is "a theory that experience rather than reason is the source of knowledge, and in this sense it is opposed to rationalism. ''~ In this sense, empiricism denies the possibility of a priori knowledge of the world. Experimentalism is an empirical method of discovering and testing statements about the world. The...