This comprehensive volume marks a new standard in scholarship in the emerging field of the philosophy of chemistry. Philosophers, chemists, and historians of science ask some fundamental questions about the relationship between philosophy and chemistry.

This volume connects chemistry and philosophy in order to face questions raised by chemistry in our present world. The idea is first to develop a kind of philosophy of chemistry which is deeply rooted in the exploration of chemical activities. We thus work in close contact with chemists (technicians, engineers, researchers, and teachers). Following this line of reasoning, the first part of the book encourages current chemists to describe their workaday practices while insisting on the importance of attending to methodological, metrological, philosophical, and epistemological questions related to their activities. It deals with sustainable chemistry, chemical metrology, nanochemistry, and biochemistry, among other crucial topics. In doing so, those chemists invite historians and philosophers to provide ideas for future developments. In a nutshell, this part is a call for forthcoming collaborations focused on instruments and methods, that is on ways of doing chemistry. The second part of the book illustrates the multifarious ways to study chemistry and even proposes new approaches to doing so. Each approach is interesting and incomplete but the emergent whole is richer than any of its components. Analytical work needs socio-historical expertise as well as many other approaches in order to keep on investigating chemistry to greater and greater depth. This heterogeneity provides a wide set of methodological perspectives not only about current chemical practices but also about the ways to explore them philosophically. Each approach is a resource to study chemistry and to reflect upon what doing philosophy of science can mean. In the last part of the volume, philosophers and chemists propose new concepts or reshape older ones in order to think about chemistry. The act of conceptualization itself is queried as well as the relationships between concepts and chemical activities. Prefaced by Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Roald Hoffmann, and by the President of the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry, Rom Harré, this volume is a plea for the emergence of a collective cleverness and aims to foster inventiveness.

This volume follows the successful book, which has helped to introduce and spread the Philosophy of Chemistry to a wider audience of philosophers, historians, science educators as well as chemists, physicists and biologists. The introduction summarizes the way in which the field has developed in the ten years since the previous volume was conceived and introduces several new authors who did not contribute to the first edition. The editors are well placed to assemble this book, as they are the editor in chief and deputy editors of the leading academic journal in the field, Foundations of Chemistry. The philosophy of chemistry remains a somewhat neglected field, unlike the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of biology. Why there has been little philosophical attention to the central discipline of chemistry among the three natural sciences is a theme that is explored by several of the contributors. This volume will do a great deal to redress this imbalance. Among the themes covered is the question of reduction of chemistry to physics, the reduction of biology to chemistry, whether true chemical laws exist and causality in chemistry. In addition more general questions of the nature of organic chemistry, biochemistry and chemical synthesis are examined by specialist in these areas.

This book addresses themes in the newly emerging discipline of philosophy of chemistry, in particular issues in connection with discussions in general philosophy of science on natural kinds, reduction and ceteris paribus laws. The philosophical issue addressed in all chapters is the relation between, on the one hand, the manifest image (the daily practice or common-sense-life-form) and on the other the scientific image, both of which claim to be the final arbiter of "everything."With respect to chemistry, the question raised is this: Where does this branch of science fit in, with the manifest or scientific image? Most philosophers and chemists probably would reply unhesitatingly, the scientific image. The aim of this book is to raise doubts about that self-evidence. It is argued that chemistry is primarily the science of manifest substances, whereas "micro" or "submicro" scientific talk--though important, useful, and insightful--does not change what matters, namely the properties of manifest substances.These manifest substances, their properties and uses cannot be reduced to talk of molecules or solutions of the Schrödinger equation. If "submicroscopic" quantum mechanics were to be wrong, it would not affect all (or any) "microlevel" chemical knowledge of molecules. If molecular chemistry were to be wrong, it wouldn't disqualify knowledge of, say, water--not at the "macrolevel" (e.g. its viscosity at 50 C), nor at the pre- or protoscientific manifest level (e.g. ice is frozen water).

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1827 edition. Excerpt: ... NEW SYSTEM OF CHEMICAL PHILOSOPHY. CHAP. V. SECTION 13. METALLIC OXIDES. .A.LL the metals are disposed to combine with oxygen, but the combination is effected more easily with some than with others; the compound is usually called an oxide, but in some instances it is also called an acid. The same metal combines with one, two, or perhaps more atoms of oxygen, forming compounds which may be distinguished according to Dr. Thomson, by the terms protoxide, deutoxide, tritoxide, &c. Such however is the repulsion of oxygen to oxygen that we rarely find three atoms of it retained by a single atom of any kind; and there are not many instances of metals capa VOL. II. ble of holding two atoms of oxygen. Various modifications of the proportions of metals and oxygen arise from the combinations of the oxides themselves one with another and with oxygen, so as to lead some to imagine thata'n atom of metal in some instances combines with 3, 4, or more of oxygen. This is altogether improbable: It is much more simple to suppose that one atom of oxygen connects two or more atoms of protoxide, 1 of protoxide unites to 1 or more of deutoxide, &c. These intermediate oxides are in few if any instances found to combine with acids like the other two oxides. There is no reason that I am acquainted with for disbelieving that oxygen combined with a metal is still repulsive of oxygen, and that by the same law as particles of an. elastic fluid; that is, the repulsion is inversely as the distance of the centres of the atoms. Hence it may be demonstrated that it requires twice the strength of affinity to form a deutoxide as a protoxide, three times the strength to form a tritoxide as a protoxide, &c. On this account; it is, in all probability, that deutoxides are not...

This book represents a collection of papers from one of the founders of the new Philosophy of Chemistry. It is only the second single-author collection of papers on the Philosophy of Chemistry.The author is the editor-in-chief of Foundations of Chemistry, the leading journal in the field. He has recently gained worldwide success with his book on the periodic table of the elements titled The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance. This volume provides an in-depth examination of his more philosophical and historical work in this area and further afield.

In A Tale of Seven Elements, Eric Scerri presents the fascinating history of those seven elements discovered to be mysteriously "missing" from the periodic table in 1913.