Robert Boyle (1627-1691) believed that a reductionist conception of the mechanical philosophy threatened the heuristic power and autonomy of chemistry as an experimental science. While some historical and philosophical scholars have examined his nuanced position, understanding the chemical philosophy he developed through his own experimental work is incredibly difficult even for experts in the field. In The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle, Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino energetically explains Boyle's ideas in a whole new light and proposes that Boyle regarded chemical qualities as non-reducible dispositional and relational properties that emerge from, and supervene upon, the mechanistic structure of chymical atoms. Banchetti-Robino demonstrates that these ideas are implicit in Boyle's writing, making his philosophical contributions crucial to the fields of both philosophy and chemistry. The arguments presented are further strengthened by a detailed mereological analysis of Boylean chymical atoms as chemically elementary entities, which establishes the theory of wholes and parts that is most consistent with an emergentist conception of chemical properties. More generally, this book examines the way in which Boyle sought to accommodate his complex chemical philosophy within the framework of the 17th century mechanistic theory of matter. Banchetti-Robino conceptualizes Boyle's experimental work as a scientific research programme, in the Lakatosian sense, to better explain the positive and negative heuristic function of the mechanistic theory of matter within his chemical philosophy. The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle actively engages with the contemporary and lively debates over the nature of Boyle's ideas about structural chemistry, fundamental mechanistic particles and properties, the explanatory power of subordinate causes, the complex relation between fundamental particles, natural kinds, and unified chemical wholes. The book is a rich historical account that begins with the dominant paradigms of 16th and 17th Century chemical philosophy and takes readers all the way through to the 21st Century.

Hardbound. This volume of Research in Philosophy and Technology is guest edited by Marina Banchetti-Robino in association with Don E. Marietta Jr. and Lester Embree. In her introduction to the 10 major theme papers that deal with Philosophies of the Environment and Technology, Banchetti-Robino gives an account of the origin of this original collection, of the importance of the theme, and of the interrelated arguments advanced relative to the theme. This set of papers by a number of well-known figures in philosophical studies both on the environment and on technology - namely J. Baird Callicott, Don Ihde, Larry Hickman, Don E. Marietta Jr., Lester Embree, Frederick Ferre, and Holmes Rolston III - together with a few younger scholars - Tim Casey, Marina Banchetti-Robino and Robert Frodeman - opens new pathways in both environmental philosophy and the philosophy of technology.

"Here stands the first of a series of important collective statements on the proverbial problem of reason that once fled those spaces in which the person of color reached for a meeting. What other resources are left for those of us who rely on ideas in a world that offers few options short of violence or, worse, apathy but to transcend the struggle for recognition into the sphere of building new intellectual homes? One must read this courageous celebration of thinking and of asserting the value of intelligence."Lewis R. Gordon, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University and Ongoing Visiting Professor at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica