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

Citation

Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (2017). Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton University Press.

Chapter Summary

First published in 1985, the book examines the 1660s dispute between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle over Boyle's air-pump experiments. Its argument, in the publisher's words, is that the dispute was about how reliable knowledge should be made, and that solutions to the problem of knowledge were also solutions to the problem of social order in Restoration England. The text has eight chapters, a bibliography and an index; later editions add an introduction to the 2011 edition, and the book also includes Schaffer's translation of Hobbes's Dialogus physicus de natura aeris.

Chapter 1: Understanding Experiment

The opening chapter states the problem: why experiments are thought to produce reliable knowledge, and why that belief should not be taken for granted. The authors propose to look at the debate as outsiders, as a way of seeing how experimental fact came to be accepted.

Chapter 2: Seeing and Believing: The Experimental Production of Pneumatic Facts

Describes Boyle's programme and the air-pump itself. The chapter distinguishes three "technologies" through which Boyle made matters of fact: a material technology (the pump), a literary technology (reports that let readers witness at a distance), and a social technology (the conventions for how experimentalists should deal with each other).

Chapter 3: Seeing Double: Hobbes's Politics of Plenism before 1660

Turns to Hobbes and to his philosophy of nature, including his denial of the vacuum, and relates it to his political thought. The chapter sets out why, for Hobbes, a conclusion about empty space was bound up with questions of order, authority and the proper form of knowledge.

Chapter 4: The Trouble with Experiment: Hobbes versus Boyle

The direct confrontation. The chapter examines Hobbes's objections to Boyle's experiments and to the experimental programme, and the two men's different ideas of what counts as philosophy.

Chapter 5: Boyle's Adversaries: Experiment Defended

Looks at how Boyle responded to his critics, including Hobbes and other opponents, and what he treated as essential and what as negotiable in his experimental practice.

Chapter 6: Replication and Its Troubles: Air-Pumps in the 1660s

Considers the attempts to build and operate further air-pumps in the 1660s, the difficulty of replicating experiments, and how replication related to the establishment of facts.

Chapter 7: Natural Philosophy and the Restoration: Interests in Dispute

Places the controversy in the political and religious setting of Restoration England and asks what interests were at stake in the choice between competing ways of doing natural philosophy.

Chapter 8: The Polity of Science: Conclusions

Draws the argument together: the way a community produces knowledge and the way it organises political life are linked, and this link helps to explain why experimental practice became established.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2: Experiment and matters of fact

• Matter of fact: an experimentally produced piece of knowledge, treated by Boyle as separate from theories about its cause.
• Material, literary and social technologies: the three means by which Boyle made experimental facts credible.
• Virtual witnessing: writing that lets readers who did not see an experiment take part in it as witnesses.

Chapters 3–5: Hobbes versus Boyle

• Plenism and the vacuum: Hobbes's view that space is full, against Boyle's willingness to speak of a vacuum.
• Philosophy as demonstration of causes: Hobbes's standard for knowledge, against which the experimental programme fell short.

Chapters 6–8: Replication and social order

• Replication: the difficulty of reproducing air-pump results and its role in establishing facts.
• Polity of science: the claim that the conventions of experimental knowledge-making and the conventions of political order are connected.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A single, sharply defined case. The whole book is built on one controversy, which lets the authors give a detailed account of the instrument, the arguments of both parties and the surrounding social setting.
• Symmetry between the parties. The authors deliberately treat Hobbes's objections as serious and avoid assuming that Boyle was right from the start; this is the book's central methodological lesson.
• Structure that builds the argument. The chapters move from the problem, through Boyle's practice and Hobbes's philosophy, to their clash, its aftermath and its political setting.
• Primary-source material. The inclusion of Schaffer's translation of Hobbes's Dialogus physicus gives readers a text from the dispute itself.

Limitations

• Demanding reading. The book assumes interest in both seventeenth-century natural philosophy and political thought, and it is written as a research monograph rather than as an introduction.
• Narrow case, broad claim. The wider argument about knowledge and social order is made from a single episode, and readers should consider how far it generalises.
• Dated edition context. The book dates from 1985; the introduction added in the 2011 edition places it in later discussion, but the scholarship it responds to is that of its time.

Where It Fits in the Course

Among the history of science and technology books, this is the close case study in the history of experimental practice. Steven Shapin's The Scientific Revolution is a short interpretive account of seventeenth-century natural philosophy by one of the same authors and is the natural lead-in to this monograph. David Lindberg's The Beginnings of Western Science, Bowler and Morus's Making Modern Science, McClellan and Dorn's Science and Technology in World History and Patricia Fara's Science: A Four Thousand Year History are broad surveys; they provide the chronological frame that the case study then challenges and enriches.

How to Use This Book

It is meant for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in history of science, science and technology studies and intellectual history, and for readers of Hobbes or Boyle.

A practical reading plan:

• Start with Chapter 1 for the method and the problem, and with the 2011 introduction if the edition includes it.
• Core: Chapters 2–4, which set out Boyle's technologies, Hobbes's philosophy and their confrontation.
• Then Chapters 5–6 for the development of the dispute and replication, and Chapters 7–8 for the political reading and the conclusion.
• Alongside: read parts of Boyle's experimental reports and of Hobbes's Leviathan so the arguments in Chapters 2 to 4 can be checked against the sources, and read Shapin's short book first if the period is unfamiliar.