Medicina, chimica, teologia. Robert Boyle e le origini della filosofia sperimentale

The third part analyses Boyle’s religious concerns, starting from the early writings, showing how he reacted against the spread of Epicurean views in the mid-seventeenth century, and how his distaste with the contemporary attempts to interpret religious truth in strictly rationalistic terms influenced his later epistemological views. Lastly, the study presents an attempt to discuss Boyle’s epistemology in the light of the surviving fragments of his unpublished work entitled “The Uses and Bounds of Experience in Natural Philosophy”: the final chapter of the thesis is devoted to explain the genesis of that work, its content and rationale and its place in the context of Boyle’s later writings. It also comprises an appendix made up by transcriptions of the manuscript documents belonging to that work.