Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life by Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer (review)
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life by Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer (review)
复制标题
利维坦和气泵：霍布斯、波义耳和实验生活史蒂文·夏平、西蒙·谢弗（评论）
作者：
O. Hannaway
《利维坦与气泵》考察了17世纪两位主要思想家之间关于实验方法的价值和适当性的冲突：托马斯·霍布斯，政治论文《利维坦》的作者，自然哲学系统实验的激烈批评者；罗伯特·波义耳，机械哲学家，新发明的气泵的所有者。在他们的争论中，利害攸关的问题包括从气泵的物理完整性到它可能产生的知识的智力完整性。博伊尔和霍布斯都在寻找一种建立知识的方法，这种方法不会沦为人身攻击和政治分裂。波义耳提出这个实验作为治疗方法。他认为，事实应该由像气泵这样的机器来制造，这样绅士们就可以见证这些实验，并产生大家都同意的知识。相比之下，霍布斯则寻求自然法则，并将实验视为人为的、不可靠的、专属行会的产物。《利维坦和空气泵》中采用的新方法对科学史研究产生了巨大的影响。Shapin和Schaffer发现了一个科学革命的时刻，并展示了关键的科学给出——事实、解释、实验、真理——是如何成为新的政治秩序的基础。Shapin和Schaffer在他们的人种学方法上也很有创新。他们试图了解一个遥远而陌生的群体的工作习惯、仪式和社会结构，他们认为政治与科学家的所作所为紧密相关，而不是他们的言论。Steven Shapin和Simon Schaffer用霍布斯和波义耳之间的对抗来理解早期科学实验史上的危局。他们描述了主人公对自然知识的不同看法，并将霍布斯-波义耳之争置于当代关于知识分子在公共生活中的角色以及英国复辟时期社会秩序和认同问题的辩论中。在新的引言中，作者描述了这本书首次出版时人们是如何理解科学及其社会背景的，以及从那时起科学史的研究发生了怎样的变化。
"Leviathan and the Air-Pump" examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise "Leviathan" and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He 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, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in "Leviathan and the Air-Pump" have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens - facts, interpretations, experiment, truth - were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. 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. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.