Soru

In the 1660s, Robert Boyle’s pneumatic experiments with the newly devised air-pump were heralded by the Royal Society as the foundational paradigm for empirical natural philosophy. By creating an artificial, evacuated chamber—a 'vacuum'—Boyle argued that investigators could witness nature’s fundamental mechanisms shorn of ambient interference. However, philosopher Thomas Hobbes mounted a fierce methodological critique. Hobbes contended that Boyle’s instrument was inherently leaky and physically incapable of producing an absolute void; rather, the pump merely rarified trapped air or admitted invisible, subtler fluids through apparatus seals. More fundamentally, Hobbes rejected the epistemological premise of experimentalism: that valid universal knowledge about nature could be manufactured within the confines of an elite private laboratory using artificial devices that distorted natural phenomena. To Hobbes, true philosophy required deductive causal reasoning from universally observable first principles, not consensus-building among gentlemen witnessing an idiosyncratic and mechanically compromised spectacle. While standard historiography long portrayed Hobbes’s objections as the stubborn resistance of a scholastic dogmatist, recent scholarship suggests Hobbes exposed a core vulnerability in early experimentalism: the inescapable necessity of social conventions and institutional trust in validating what counted as an empirical 'matter of fact.'

Based on the passage, which of the following statements regarding the controversy between Boyle and Hobbes are supported by the text? (Select all that apply.)