| |
| | Robert Boyle (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) |
 | | Boyle, a champion of both the corpuscularian doctrine and the Baconian method of natural history, preferred to report the results of his experiments, including negative results, and frequently lamented the fact that we lacked "histories" (collections of experimental results and accurate observations) in various fields of scientific endeavour. |
 | | Boyle was a corpuscularian, a term he employed to paper over the differences between believers in a vacuum, and believers in a plenum, given that both of them agreed that the explanation of natural occurrences should be solely in terms of particles of matter, their motion and interaction. |
 | | Boyle did, however, leave a plan of the intended work, and in the manuscript remains — seven volumes of correspondence, forty-six volumes of miscellaneous papers and eighteen volumes of notebooks — there are still a number of unpublished fragments and some longer selections which he intended for this work. |
| plato.stanford.edu /entries/boyle (11428 words) |
|