Boyle, Malpighi, and the Problem of Plastic Powers

Abstract

In this paper, I examine Boyle’s views on generation and his appeal to plastic powers as an explanatory agent following a brief overview of the secondary literature. Further, I also look at the relationship between Boyle and the Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi, who was one of the most prolific medical writers in the second half of the seventeenth century. This paper looks at their correspondence, which included not only ideas about experiments and the mechanical philosophy, but mineral samples as well. I argue that Malpighi appropriated Boyle’s notion of plastic powers in his own writings as part of a mechanical account of generation. Thus, Boyle’s description of a plastic power was perceived as being mechanical by one of his own contemporaries similarly committed to the mechanical philosophy. In both Boyle and Malpighi, moreover, we see a shared philosophy regarding mechanical explanation. For each of them, mechanical explanations involve physical agents acting on matter. Their shared view implies an important shift in which the power of an explanatory agent like a plastic power is in its mechanical mode of operation.