Leviathan and the Air-Pump

Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life

Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780691024325
  9780691083933
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400838493
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

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.

· INDEX ·

This is a single index of subjects and persons. Emphasis is on subjects, and persons are usually indexed as subheadings rather than as main entries. Where persons’ names are found as main entries, these entries are not comprehensive. When used as subheadings, Huygens is always Christiaan Huygens, and More is Henry More. Works by Boyle and Hobbes appear as main entries, and are distinguished by (B) or (H) after their titles.

Conventions used are: f for figure, and n for note. Italicized page numbers denote the main treatment of indexed topic.

Académie Royale des Sciences, Paris, 228f, 229, 269–71, 273, 275f

Accademia del Cimento, Florence, 230, 276–78

access: to air-pumps, 38–39

to experimental space, 113–14, 336

denied to Hobbes, 230, 320–31, 333

Acts. See Clarendon Code; Licensing Act; Treason Act; Triennial Act; Uniformity Act

adequacy, treatment of, 13–14

adhesion. See cohesion

aer purus, and Hobbes, 118, 120, 123, 179–80

aether, 337

Boyle, 45–46, 119–20, 181–84, 217n

Hobbes, 87–88, 117–20, 181

Huygens, 199–200, 243–44, 246, 269–72

Newton, 199–200

Noël, 157

Power, 331. See also air

air: Boyle, 179–85, 263–64

Brouncker, 263

density of, 53

Descartes, 358–59

elasticity of, see spring of

Hobbes, 115–18, 120, 123

Hooke, 120, 264

Huygens, 120

Wallis, 120

—pressure of: Boyle, 40, 44, 48, 50–55, 189–93, 198, 210, 217, 221

Hobbes, 192

More, 211–12, 221

—spring of, 44–45, 188, 263

Boyle, 40, 50–55, 121, 124–25, 141,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction to the 2011 Edition
• Notes on Sources and Conventions
• Acknowledgments
• · I · Understanding Experiment
• · II · Seeing and Believing: The Experimental Production of Pneumatic Facts
• · III · Seeing Double: Hobbes’s Politics of Plenism before 1660
• · IV · The Trouble with Experiment: Hobbes versus Boyle
• · V · Boyle’s Adversaries: Experiment Defended
• · VI · Replication and Its Troubles: Air-Pumps in the 1660s
• · VII · Natural Philosophy and the Restoration: Interests in Dispute
• · VIII · The Polity of Science: Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index