Coffeehouses and Print Shops

Abstract

Experimental philosophy came to prominence on a wave of coffee. In the mid-1650s, a group of aspiring Oxford scholars met regularly at a new kind of place. Something like an alcohol-free tavern, it was presided over by an apothecary named Arthur Tillyard. There, spurred by liberal doses of thick, black liquid, they debated the new ideas transforming natural philosophy and the mathematical sciences. Peter Staehl, Robert Boyle’s (1627–1691) German chymist, mounted experimental displays at the same location. This club of scholars moved to London in 1660 and reemerged as what would soon be called the Royal Society. At about the same time, the novel setting in which these rendezvous had originally occurred – the coffeehouse – also moved to London and began an extraordinary surge in popularity there. Together, the coffeehouse and the Royal Society would become perhaps the two most distinctive social spaces of Restoration England. The implications of their advent would stretch beyond England itself. What began in Oxford and London would grow to affect the fortunes of the sciences throughout Western Europe. Experiment was not the only controversial investigatory practice fostered by the rise of the coffeehouse. In 1659, political philosopher James Harrington (1611–1677) – whose Oceana (1656) had founded republicanism on a natural philosophy of circulating particles – organized regular debates at Miles’ Coffeehouse, in Westminster. Here soldiers, political figures, and ordinary citizens participated in exhilarating exchanges that ranged broadly over the history and philosophy of government. The Rota, as Harrington called this forum, both generated new knowledge and, far more importantly, exemplified a new way of proposing, debating, and resolving claims in general.

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