Reviews

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Boyle's Sceptical Chymist has emphasised the alchemical context of Boyle's work. In this paper we will draw attention to its specifically sceptical context. Based on Cicero's works on Academic scepticism, the Academica and De Natura Deorum, we give some grounds for Boyle's choice of the literary style of the work and, in particular, for his choice of Carneades as its main character. Based on Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism, we show the sceptical nature of the arguments presented by Carneades against the alchemists. Finally, we set Boyle's Sceptical Chymist in the context of Seventeenth-Century skepticism (Gassendi, Mersenne, Descartes, and Glanvill) in order to shed light on the relation exhibited by Boyle's work between scepticism and the new science, in particular the corpuscular theory.