Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (review)

308 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 97:2 APRIL ~989 this matter was scattered was but finite." Newton is not referring here to the universe itself as spatially finite but only to the possibility of all matter being restricted to a finite portion of the (infinite) universe. I am afraid that Funkenstein's appreciation of the subtleties of Newtonian physics does not match his appreciation of the subtleties of medieval theology, which means that in physics, at least, his study of the "transition from medieval to early modern modes of reasoning" (ix) must be judged unconvincing. ROBERT PALTER Trinity College,HarOCord Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Hobbes,Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 44o. $6o.oo. Although the title of this book suggests a purely historical study, the authors conceive it much differently. In their own words, "Our subject is experiment. We want to understand the nature and status of experimental practices and their intellectual products" (3)" Their intention is to give a historical answer to this. Their topic is the controversy that took place in the 166os and the early a67os between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle over Boyle's experiments with the airpump , a device that allegedly extracted air from a glass globe thereby causing a purported vacuum. Boyle and Hobbes disagreed about what exactly happened during the experiment and what value experiments had for science. In short, Hobbes argued that Boyle could not have gotten the results he claimed to get because of philosophical problems with Boyle's procedure. On Boyle's view scientific knowledge was to be discovered through experiment. Hobbes in contrast thought that experiment alone could never provide as much certainty as deduction from necessary first principles could. One way to see the dispute between Boyle and Hobbes is as a dispute between those for whom science and knowledge are experimental and probabilistic as against those for whom science and knowledge are demonstrative and yielding necessary truths. For Boyle matters of fact come to be foundational, and these come to be established when they are experienced by and attested to by the scientific community. It was part of the ideology of the experimentalists that the scientific community was open to everyone when in fact it was not. Only members of the Royal Society or their guests could observe the workings of Boyle's air-pump. His intellectual distinction notwithstanding , Hobbes was never invited to the Royal Society in any capacity, to his great irritation. The problem, the authors suggest, is that Hobbes had a bad attitude. He was dogmatic and disputatious when the scientific community wanted open-minded and congenial colleagues. To describe the issue in terms that do not refer to personality, Boyle, in effect, was a positivist; opponents like Hobbes were metaphysicians. On a priori and metaphysical grounds, Hobbes denied that Boyle could have produced a vacuum with his device, BOOK REVIEWS 309 while Boyle refused to commit himself on this issue. One reason Hobbes did not consider observation to be decisive is that many people had observed spirits, that is, "insubstantial beings," a claim that Hobbes knew had to be wrong. Boyle believed that there were reliable sightings of spirits and endorsed the work of Cambridge theologians to assemble "reliable spirit testimonies to use against Hobbists" (2o9). For Boyle and his allies, it was important to devise ways of increasing the range of sensations since matters of fact are wholly within the domain of the senses. Scientific instruments serve this purpose; they allow humans to experience things that they otherwise could not. Instruments, Boyle said, are "artificial Organs." Because Hobbes was on the losing side of this debate, historians of science and philosophy have almost unanimously judged Hobbes's arguments embarrassingly poor, perhaps often without even reading them, or ignored them completely. Shapin and Schaffer take on the task of narrating the actual debate and showing that Hobbes's arguments are not patently bad. Indeed, they conclude by saying that Hobbes was correct in arguing that knowledge, "as much as the state, is the product of human action." According to the authors, the dispute between Hobbes and Boyle was...