Leviathan And The Air Pump Summary

Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer

Leviathan and the Air Pump is a book by Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer, that was published in 1985. This book talks about the debate between Thomas Hobbes author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of the systematic experimentation in natural philosophy and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and the owner of the newly invented air pump. The debate was over Boyle’s air pump experiment and existence of a vacuum in the 1660’s. Shapin and Schaffer were able to refute firmly any sort of traditionalist notions that "hard sciences" like physical chemistry were not affected by social currents. Shapin and Schaffer's work informed us on how Boyle's development of

the experimental enterprise was consciously designed to give its interpreters political and religious lawfulness and supremacy in the Restoration. Shapin and Schaffer's work is to this degree an important reminder that Boyle and Hobbes' debate about scientific knowledge was also a larger debate about solutions to maintaining social order.
In this book, Boyle insisted that his experiments with the air-pump was general, accessible to all, and open to replication. Hobbes also argued for an absolute government and one with no dualism that was natural in the vacuum. The debates between Hobbes and Boyle reflect social and scientific issues, the issues relating governance, knowledge,religion, experiment, and philosophy. Boyle argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes looked for natural law and viewed experiments as unreliable and artificial products of an exclusive guild. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer used the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. The authors of this book described how science and its social context were understood when this book was published first, and how the study of the history of science has changed since that time.