Abstract

In this dissertation I examine Robert Boyle's conception of physical causation and argue that Boyle holds a causal realist view that grounds what I call a moderate mechanism. I begin with a brief survey of the causal theories of three competing philosophical movements during Boyle's time, Aristotelianism, Renaissance naturalism, and mechanism. I then consider the question of the role of divine power in causal relations among created things. Views of God's role in physical causation include occasionalism, concurrentism, and deism. I argue that Boyle's view is a kind of weak deism, in which God, having brought the world in existence and sustaining it ever since, does not directly act to fully or partially bring about the effects in common causal relations. I reject Professor McGuire's interpretation of Boyle as a proto-Humean, arguing that it amounts to an occasionalist construal of Boyle. In my view, physical causes with powers are central to Boyle's view of natural philosophy, and thus he does not hold a "regularity view" of causation in which the identification of law-like regularities is sufficient for scientific explanation. This leads to an examination of Boyle's notion of a law of nature, and an analysis of the passage that is the locus classicus of numerous, differing interpretations of Boyle's conception of natural laws. I offer a new interpretation of the passage and of his conception of natural laws. Finally, I argue against recent interpretations of Boyle that emphasize his interest in alchemy and attempt to show that he abandoned mechanist principles such as the rejection of occult qualities and active principles in scientific explanations. I argue that Boyle does not endorse the postulation of various unanalyzable occult qualities in things in order to explain natural changes. I offer an account of Boyle's analysis of powers in which they are neither intrinsic to the entities that possess them nor two-place relations obtaining between suitable agents and patents, but rather three-place relations obtaining between agent, patient and enabling conditions