Contingency, irony, and sociability: Robert Boyle’s experimental style

Abstract

This article examines the effect of the new natural philosophy on language, and ranges across Robert Boyle’s scientific, theological, and ethical writing to identify irony, in particular, as an important, neglected feature of his style. Boyle’s voluntarism required that language acknowledge its own contingency, its uncertain relation to a reality itself contingent. His irony is language forged under just such pressure: it attests to the provisional and performative status of his discourse; it exposes naturalised systems of value as constructed and liable to deconstruction; and by realising the “urbanity” crucial to Ciceronian irony, it foregrounds the reliance of his language and science on civil conversation. However, this article also suggests that Boyle, like his contemporaries, recognised irony’s dangers, and that in his responses to the “scoffing” of atheistic wits he reflects on troubling implications of his own thought and rhetoric.