Customer Reviews

Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life

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The authors begin their review of the 17th-century Hobbes-Boyle controversy by declaring their intent to take a strongly pro-Hobbes stance, so it is not surprising that they end by concluding that "Hobbes was right". (About what, is not clear.)

Their stated reason for adapting this biased perspective is that the opposite view (that Hobbes was wrong) has been so thoroughly documented that not much new could be added. Only by adopting a "charitable" view of Hobbes, and a critical view of his opponents, could they make a significant new contribution. In other words, they wanted to make a splash, not a ripple.

Their bias is expressed by selective omission of information unfavorable to Hobbes. For example, in Hobbes's "Dialogus Physicus", his fallacious solution of the cube-duplication problem has been deleted, without mentioning that it was fallacious. Also, the reader is not informed that a "Torricelli apparatus" and a "mercury barometer" are functionally identical; the height of the mercury column varies with weather conditions. This variability was a problem for Hobbes, but not for Boyle. But it is not mentioned, except in connection with a suggestion that the experimentalists may have fudged their data.

Also, the authors should have noted that Hobbes's a-priori rationalist philosophy is not a viable alternative to experimentalism, because it is based on an elementary logical fallacy: you cannot make up definitions and postulates arbitrarily AND claim that deductions from them give certainty about the real world.

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