{"id":2985,"date":"2012-12-10T10:12:19","date_gmt":"2012-12-09T22:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/?p=2985"},"modified":"2012-12-10T10:15:39","modified_gmt":"2012-12-09T22:15:39","slug":"robert-saint-clair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/robert-saint-clair\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Saint Clair"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Anstey writes…<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is not uncommon for very minor contributors to early modern thought to go unnoticed, but every now and then they turn out to be worth investigating. One such person is Robert Saint Clair. A Google search will not turn up much on Saint Clair, and yet he was a servant of Robert Boyle and a signatory to and named in Boyle\u2019s will. He promised twice to supply the philosopher John Locke with some of Boyle\u2019s mysterious \u2018red earth\u2019 after his master\u2019s death, and a letter from Saint Clair to Robert Hooke was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society<\/em> (vol. 20, 1698, pp. 378\u201381).<\/p>\n

What makes Saint Clair interesting for our purposes is his book entitled The Abyssinian Philosophy Confuted<\/em> which appeared in 1697. For in that book, which contains his own translation of Bernardino Ramazzini\u2019s treatise on the waters of Modena, Saint Clair attacks Thomas Burnet\u2019s highly speculative theory of the formation of the earth. I quote from the epistle to the reader:<\/p>\n

I shall not care for the displeasure of these men of Ephesus<\/em> [Burnet and others], whose trade it is to make Shrines to this their Diana<\/em> of Hypothetical Philosophy, I mean who in their Closets make Systems of the World, prescribe Laws of Nature, without ever consulting her by Observation and Experience, who (to use the Noble Lord Verulams<\/em> words) like the Spider … spin a curious Cob-web out of their Brains … (sig. a4)<\/p>\n

The rhetoric of experimental philosophy could hardly be more obvious. Burnet and the other \u2018world-makers\u2019 are criticized for being adherents of \u2018Hypothetical Philosophy\u2019, for making \u2018Systems of the World\u2019, and for not consulting nature by \u2018Observation and Experience\u2019. He also praises Ramazzini\u2019s work for being \u2018the most admirable piece of Natural History\u2019 (sig. a2). Saint Clair rounds off this passage with a reference to Bacon\u2019s famous aphorism (about which we have commented before<\/strong><\/a>) from the New Organon<\/em> comparing the spider, the ant and the bee to current day natural philosophers (I. 95).<\/p>\n

What can we glean from Saint Clair\u2019s critique here? First, it provides yet another piece evidence of the ubiquity of the ESD in late seventeenth-century England: the terms of reference by which Saint Clair evaluated Burnet were clearly those of experimental versus speculative philosophy.<\/p>\n

Second, it is worth noting the term \u2018Hypothetical Philosophy\u2019. This expression was clearly \u2018in the air\u2019 in the late 1690s in England. For instance, it is found in John Sergeant\u2019s Solid Philosophy Asserted<\/em><\/a> which was also published in 1697. Indeed, it <\/em>is the very term that Newton used in a draft of his letter of 28 March 1713 to Roger Cotes to describe Leibniz and Descartes years later. Clearly the term was in use as a pejorative before Newton\u2019s attack on Leibniz.<\/p>\n

Saint Clair has been almost invisible to early modern scholarship on English natural philosophy and yet his case is a nice example of the value of inquiring into the plethora of minor figures surrounding those canonical thinkers who still capture most of our attention. I would be grateful for suggestions as to names of others whom I might explore.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, Saint Clair obviously thought that John Locke might be interested in his book, for we know from Locke\u2019s Journal that he sent him a copy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Anstey writes… It is not uncommon for very minor contributors to early modern thought to go unnoticed, but every now and then they turn out to be worth investigating. One such person is Robert Saint Clair. A Google search […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[368,226,16380,366,224,16381],"class_list":["post-2985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","tag-boyle","tag-experimental-philosophy","tag-hypothetical-philosophy","tag-locke","tag-newton","tag-ramazzini"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}