Abstract
After a brief biography of Jaap van Brakel we set out his appropriation and use of the distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image of the world. In a certain sense van Brakel gives priority to the manifest image as the ultimate source of meaning in chemical discourses. He does not take sides in the debate about nominal and real essences, twin earths and so, but presents a compromise. As an active practitioner of the chemical arts he emphasises the indispensability of models as a main tool for chemical thinking. We then turn to van Brakel’s interest in forging an intercultural point of view in which philosophy of chemistry plays an important part.
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Notes
According to an older entry to the “Commentators Biographies” of the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, van Brakel’s research interests at that time included: (1) giving form to philosophy of technology by integrating (and "fusing") methodological, epistemological, and ontological aspects on the one hand with social, political, and moral aspects on the other; (2) philosophical aspects of "sustainable" technological development; (3) foundations of cognitive science; (4) natural kinds; (5) colour; (6) emotion; (7) ethnocentricity and intercultural communication; (8) foundations of the concept of chance. Interestingly enough, philosophy of chemistry is not on that list.
Like Jaap van Brakel, both authors have their first academic education in chemical engineering. Indeed, there are other philosophers with an engineering background: Descartes (military engineering) and Wittgenstein (aeronautics), for example.
On the Philosophy of Chemistry, (van Brakel and Vermeeren 1981) is still a very useful bibliographic commentary, though van Brakel does not refer to it in his textbook.
In one of van Brakel’s very last introductory lectures on philosophy of science at Leuven (May 4th, 2010), K. R. has experienced this substantial critique of the science-centered views of Sellars, among other topics.
In a recent article about microessentialism, Paul Needham states the following: “But an early critique of the application of this line of thought [the importance of manifest descriptions] to chemical substances (van Brakel 1986) has not been similarly acknowledged, and later efforts in the same general direction … seem to have made little impression on philosophers writing on natural kinds”. (Needham 2011)
In his Philosophy of Chemistry, Jaap van Brakel does not particularly refer to chemical elements and the periodic table of the elements which might surprise some of the readers.
Additionally (this is not van Brakel’s claim), this fact offers a brilliant argument for the importance of philosophical activities.
In his presentation to the celebration session of the ISPC symposium in Oxford, one of us (K.R.) shortly referred to the first contact problem, using a scene from the Paramount Star Trek movie The First Contact: “Live long and prosper”, said the first volcan on Earth to the constructor of the warp engine at first contact in that scene. Although these words are translated in the movie, the human does not understand the alien (!). However, both, partly reluctantly, shake hands.
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Ruthenberg, K., Harré, R. Philosophy of chemistry as intercultural philosophy: Jaap van Brakel. Found Chem 14, 193–203 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-012-9161-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-012-9161-1