Leviathan and the Air Pump: Thirty Years On

The historian of science David Wootton reviews the controversial
dispute between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes, followed by a reply
from Boyle's biographer Michael Hunter Robert Boyle's air-pump
experiments in 1659 provoked a lively debate over the possibility
of a vacuum. The air-pump, a complicated and expensive device,
became an emblem of the new experimental science that was promoted
by the Royal Society. However, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes
challenged both the validity of Boyle’s experiment and the
philosophical foundations of this new approach to science. In their
controversial book Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) Steven Shapin
and Simon Schaffer took up Hobbes’s case, arguing that experimental
findings depend for their validity on the scientific culture in
which they are made. David Wootton (Anniversary Professor of
History, University of York) reviews this controversy and present a
new view of the dispute between Boyle and Hobbes. His lecture is
followed by a reply from Robert Boyle's biographer Michael Hunter
(Emeritus Professor of History, Birkbeck). The discussion is
chaired by Ritchie Robertson (Taylor Professor of the German,
University of Oxford).