Inaug.--Diss.--Strassburg i. E. / Literatur: p. [79]-80.

A number of historians of science have claimed that the early Boyle Sermons provided a platform for the promotion of a moderate-Anglican social and political ideology underpinned by Newtonian natural philosophy. However, by examining in detail the texts of Richard Bentley, John Harris and Samuel Clarke, this thesis argues that their Sermons should not be characterised as 'Newtonian'. These texts were highly complex literary productions constructed with the intention of achieving victory over the enemies of Christianity. An examination of their rhetorical strategies focuses attention on the use to which various cognitive materials - including natural philosophy - were put. Thus the presence of Newtonian concepts in the texts is explained by the aims and overall scholarly programmes of the Lecturers. It will also be argued that the term 'Boyle Lectureship' is problematic and that the main elements of the Lectureship - Robert Boyle's bequest, the Trustees, the Lecturers, and the Sermons - cannot be conflated into a single historical unit. Therefore, throughout this study, emphasis is placed on the contingent and singular behaviour of individuals located within an ecclesiastical and scholarly community, where career promotion and the notion of scholarly credit were important. The brief in Boyle's last will and testament stipulated that the Lecturers must defend Christianity using the scholarly tools to hand. In this thesis it will be shown that the personnel of the Lectureship conformed to Boyle's brief and that they utilised all available methods and materials in the pursuance of their legal and institutional responsibilities. This approach removes the analysis of the Lectureship from an overarching sociological perspective; instead the Sermons are interpreted as exemplary texts in the rhetorical prosecution of the enemies of Christianity. This study, therefore, acknowledges the complex nature of theological texts in early modern England.

The purpose of this study is to examine how English natural philosophers of the seventeenth century—in particular, Robert Boyle (1627-1691) considered and assessed the personal traits of skill and experience and the significance of these characteristics to the practice of seventeenth-century science. Boyle's writings reveal that skill and experience impacted various aspects of his seventeenth-century experimental natural philosophy, including the credibility assessment of tradesmen and eyewitnesses to natural phenomena, the contingencies involved in the making of experiments, and Boyle's statements about the requisite skills of experimental philosophy in contrast to other traditions. Subtopics explored include the popularization of science and Boyle's expectations concerning the future improvement of natural philosophy.

In this thesis I will offer an extended discussion and critique of an important social constructivist book, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), focusing on its reception and its standing in science and technology studies in the fifteen years since its publication. This work claims to be an "origins" story for the modern form of life that we now call the scientific community, and this claim has not itself been contested strongly by other scholars. Central to Shapin and Schaffer's argument for the socially constructed nature of scientific knowledge, is the contrast they find between the community orientation of Robert Boyle and the anti-community stance of Thomas Hobbes. In the course of this thesis, I question the validity not only of this contrast, but of the origins story itself. I suggest that while experimental, communally-practiced science and modernity did emerge together around the end of the seventeenth-century, the qualities of science that Shapin and Schaffer suggest are distinctive of modern science might more accurately be represented as distinctive of modern science. In other words, I suggest that the story of Leviathan and the Air-Pump is not so much an origins story for science as it is emblematic of the early influence of widespread European modernist culture on scientific practices. Leviathan and the Air-Pump is an important case to study in order to unravel the strands of science and modernity because it occupies simultaneously both the early and late margins of the modern period: first, by taking the contested but emergent modernism represented by Robert Boyle as its subject and, second, as a work of scholarship that sits on the far margins of the modern period. My method is to treat Shapin and Schaffer's work as a central primary source for understanding how contemporary science and technology studies scholarship deals with early modern science. A side product of this analysis is to suggest strongly that Shapin and Schaffer's account of the social construction of scientific knowledge is itself socially constructed: that is, it is highly selective in its presentation and interpretation of historical evidence. I also consider what the implications may be for separating modernity from science, and for thinking about how science might be practiced in the age that will follow -- perhaps is already following -- the modern period. / Master of Science