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Dr. Andreas Blank, Humboldt University, Berlin;
Ted McGuire and Margaret Osler have argued that in the case of Robert Boyle (1627-1691) an empiricist methodology can be understood as the outcome of a voluntarist theology. By contrast, William Newman and Lawrence Principe claim that Boyle’s conception of matter was derived from corpuscularian versions of alchemy. However, although both interpretations capture significant aspects of Boyle’s thought, the role of atomism in the formation of Boyle’s corpuscularianism suggests that his theory of knowledge should be read against the background of a more pluralistic and rationalistic methodology. This becomes particularly clear in his early manuscripts on atomism and animal generation written between 1649 and 1659. The present paper has two aims: (1) to point out some parallels between the atomistic accounts of animal generation found in works by British atomists such as Kenelm Digby and Nathaniel Highmore and Boyle’s account of “seminal principles”; and (2) to emphasize the non-empiricist components of the methodologies at work behind these atomistic theories of animal generation, such as the use of an Epicurean-Stoic theory of “common notions” and a broadly rationalistic view of the evaluation of good hypotheses.
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