The Birth of the Past (original) (raw)

Intellectual History Review, 2013

Abstract

too numerous to detail here, including powerful remarks about Boyle and Locke’s reliance on the ontology bound up with the idea of the ‘chain of being’ and about their understanding of how far human reason could be perfected given its obvious limits. Yet Regimens of the Mind throws up difficulties – to be anticipated given Corneanu’s radical reading of well-known sources – that will only be resolved with more research. Although she shows that Boyle and Locke relied on older cultura animi sources, mediated by Francis Bacon, for their conception of philosophy’s power to shape the mind, we do not get a clear sense of how they re-shaped them to meet the needs of new models of inquiry. Nor is it clear how they responded to new ideas about the workings of mind that must surely have influenced their thinking – the neurological works of Descartes and Willis, for example. The most fundamental problem, however, concerns the two arguments referred to in the first paragraph. While Corneanu’s case is persuasive, it by no means invalidates the argument that Boyle (in particular) saw method as a means of effacing the prejudices of individual inquirers. There will need to be a wider inquiry that seeks to understand how the early Royal Society reconciled (if it did at all) the apparently competing and hard-to-reconcile claims made for its epistemological programmes with respect to the workings of the philosophical community and the minds of individuals. That Regimens of the Mind suggests such stimulating lines of inquiry is a testament to the industry and inquiry of its author in furnishing us with a persuasive and new argument about the nature of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. It is a fine work that will hopefully provoke responses from inquirers just as attentive and industrious as Sorana Corneanu.

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