Work
The Sceptical Chymist
Overview
The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes is the title of a book by Robert Boyle, published in London in 1661. In the form of a dialogue, the Sceptical Chymist presented Boyle's hypothesis that matter consisted of corpuscles and clusters of corpuscles in motion and that every phenomenon was the result of collisions of particles in motion. Boyle also objected to the definitions of elemental bodies propounded by Aristotle and by Paracelsus, instead defining elements as "perfectly unmingled bodies" (see below). For these reasons Robert Boyle has sometimes been called the founder of modern chemistry.
The main setting for the book is a private garden, where five characters are having a conversation about the constituents of mixed bodies. Four of the characters are named, while the fifth one is the unnamed narrator. Due to the popularity of the book, Aristotle’s doctrine of the four elements and Paracelsus’ theory of the three principles gradually passed into disuse.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Philosophers who discussed The Sceptical Chymist
Related ideas
- Carneades
- Paracelsus
- Internet Archive
- London
- Thomas Kuhn
- Aristotle
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- Jan Baptist van Helmont
- Philosophy of science
- Kingdom of England
- Corpuscularianism
- Oxford University Press
- Robert Boyle
- Chemistry
- Carbon
- Kinetic theory of gases
- Themistius
Place in the tradition
Part of Atomism.