ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Contested Views on "Factitious Airs" in the Edinburgh Enlightenment

• In Event: Debating Science in the Enlightenment

English Abstract

The term "factitious air" gained currency in the late seventeenth century through the work of Robert Boyle and Henry Cavendish. It denoted artificially produced gases and was variously associated with (what are now known as) hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide. In the eighteenth century, the study of factitious airs took on broader implications, as physical, chemical, and physiological experimentation on gases intersected metaphysical and ontological theories around the nature of air, of the animal body, and of the human spirit (e.g. theories of phlogiston and pneumatology). Gases thus became a contested territory where physical and metaphysical debates converged and collided. The proposed paper examines the significance of the University of Edinburgh in the context of this contested discourse around gases in the eighteenth century. It focuses on a network of thinkers and experimenters including William Cullen (1710–1790), David Hume (1711–1776), Joseph Black (1728–1799), James Lind (1736–1812), James Watt (1736–1819), and Daniel Rutherford (1749–1819), all of whom were associated with the University of Edinburgh. Drawing on the collective work and mutual influences of these physicians, chemists, engineers, and philosophers, the paper will isolate points of contention between their different understandings of the nature, function, and potential of gases (e.g. mechanical, physiological, therapeutic, metaphysical), and discuss the significance of those contested views on gases for the broader eighteenth-century intellectual developments emanating from the University of Edinburgh, the Edinburgh-based scholarly community, and the wider Scottish Enlightenment.

Author

• Alessia Pannese