History of Chemistry

Kant conceives of chemical dissolutions as involving the infinite division and subsequent blending of solvent and solute. In the resulting continuous solution, every subvolume contains a uniform proportion of each reactant. Erich Adickes argues that this account stands in tension with other aspects of Kant’s Critical philosophy and his views on infinity. I argue that although careful analysis of Kant’s conception of dissolution addresses Adickes’ objections, the infinite division inherent to the process is beyond our human cognition, for Kant. Nevertheless, (...) such infinite division may be considered as an idea of reason to make comprehensible chemical reactions, revealing reason to play a pivotal role in the foundations of chemistry. (shrink)

I critically examine Stewart’s suggestion that we should weigh the various predictions Mendeleev made differently. I argue that in his effort to justify discounting the weight of some of Mendeleev’s failures, Stewart invokes a principle that will, in turn, reduce the weight of some of the successful predictions Mendeleev made. So Stewart’s strategy will not necessarily lead to a net gain in Mendeleev’s favor.

I draw attention to one of the most important sources of Kuhn’s ideas in Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Contrary to the popular trend of focusing on external factors in explaining Kuhn’s views, factors related to his social milieu or personal experiences, I focus on the influence of the books and articles he was reading and thinking about in the history of science, specifically, sources in the history of chemistry. I argue that there is good reason to think that the history (...) of chemistry had a profound influence on Kuhn’s thinking, and what is remarkable is that this has eluded our attention for so long. I also argue that his interest in the history of chemistry was due to the influence of James B. Conant and Leonard Nash. (shrink)

When scientists put forward hypotheses, they sometimes involve new kinds of entities, which we can call 'hypothetical entities.' Hypothetical entities are pervasive in the sciences, and some examples include caloric and, up until very recently, the Higgs boson. Some hypothetical entities are discovered, as was the case with the Higgs boson, while scientists conclude that others, like caloric, do not exist. Hypothetical entities pose a number of important challenges for the philosophy of science, and my goal is to develop and (...) defend what I will call the suppositionalist view of hypothetical entities. In chapter 1, I examine the extant views of hypothetical entities, which I draw from the scientific realism debate. I argue that these views are all committed to the claim that terms for hypothetical entities putatively refer to empirical entities. In chapter 2, I develop the suppositionalist view of hypothetical entities. On this view, terms for hypothetical entities refer to what are called 'objects of supposition.' Examples of such objects from other domains include fictional characters like Superman and mathematical objects like the natural numbers. I draw from analogies with fiction and mathematics in order to develop the suppositionalist view in the scientific domain. In chapter 3, I give a history of a hypothetical entity that I will later use as a test case for views of hypothetical entities. In the late-eighteenth century, Antoine Lavoisier hypothesized that muriatic acid is composed of oxygen and a hypothetical entity called the 'muriatic radical.' In the early-nineteenth century, Humphry Davy's work on muriatic acid showed that it is actually composed of hydrogen and chlorine, and so muriatic acid is hydrochloric acid. Finally, in chapter 4, I use the history of the muriatic radical in order to argue against the extant views, and for the suppositionalist view. I argue that the former are committed to giving a history of the muriatic radical that is either whiggish or incomplete. The latter, however, can give us a non-whiggish history that is more complete, and hence it is preferable to the extant views. (shrink)

Kant’s preoccupation with architectonics is a characteristic and noteworthy aspect of his thought. Various features of Kant’s argumentation and philosophical system are founded on the precise definitions of the various subdomains of human knowledge and the derivative borders among them. One science conspicuously absent from Kant’s routine discussions of the organization of knowledge is chemistry. Whereas sciences such as physics, psychology, and anthropology are all explicitly located in the architectonic, chemistry finds no such place. In this paper, I examine neglected (...) passages from Kant’s corpus as well as texts regarding chemistry that Kant himself read in order to unveil his views on the definition of chemistry and its relations with the other sciences. These considerations reveal chemistry to be the science that studies the changes of matter into new kinds. Yet Kant idiosyncratically believes that such a change requires an infinite division of matter, effected by chemical forces. Although this understanding of chemical change dovetails with Kant’s dynamical, continualist theory of matter, it implies that chemistry cannot be reduced to physics. Thus, although chemistry stands alongside empirical physics as an applied natural science in Kant’s architectonic, it remains a distinct, independent science. (shrink)

Published texts, unpublished documents and, to a lesser extent, artefacts are the stuff from which historians of science fashion their interpretations of the past. From these residues we attempt to reconstruct the lost fabric of personalities, activities and institutions that constituted the practice of science, and to comprehend the flow of thought that was its substance. Like the sensory data of the empirical sciences, these raw materials are not pure chunks of reality. They must be interpreted in the light of (...) contemporary discourse and practice of which they were part. Over time, and in the hands of different commentators they acquire new significance, sometimes of mythic proportions; moreover, they are inevitably viewed in the light of present suppositions and fashions, both scientific and historiographical. (shrink)

After Lavoisier's execution, the leading French chemists were Antoine-François Fourcroy , Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau and Claude-Louis Berthollet . At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Berthollet introduced a new conception of chemical change that challenged the theory of elective affinities which had dominated chemistry for nearly a hundred years. Berthollet's new affinities raised controversy among chemists and had to coexist with the firmly established theory of elective affinities. Apart from the public debate in research articles, Berthollet's affinities also had (...) to compete with the influence of Fourcroy and his school in the textbook market. This paper seeks to assess the extent to which French textbooks published at the beginning of the nineteenth century were committed to Berthollet's innovation, and how they contributed to its marginalization. (shrink)

Although not universally accepted at the time, the atomic hypothesis during the 19th century provided a definite ordering scheme for certain relatively sophisticated chemical phenomena. As such, it was conceptually responsible for the formulation and precise articulation of important seminal ideas in chemical studies. In this paper we will explore this claim with regard to the views of the British chemist Alexander W. Williamson.

As we have seen, it was clearly Guyton's intention, in 1808, to supply details of his improved platinum pyrometer, and he did submit a drawing of the instrument at the meeting of the Class in December 1810. It would seem that on that occasion he did not supply those details which are to be found in the fourth, unpublished, part of the ‘Essay’. The existence of a text fit to be sent to the printer, and the execution of a drawing (...) relating to the improved version of his platinum pyrometer, might be taken as evidence that Guyton intended to publish. His paper of 1810 did not appear until 1814, however, so that publication of the fourth part of the ‘Essay’ could scarcely have occurred until 1815 or later. Guyton probably hoped to be able to read it to the Class of Physical and Mathematical Sciences before publishing it in the Annales de Chimie, but his death on 2 January 1816 robbed him of the opportunity. (shrink)

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the English chemist John Dalton developed his atomic theory, a set of theoretical commitments describing the nature of atoms and the rules guiding their interactions and combinations. In this paper, I examine a set of conceptual and illustrative tools used by Dalton in developing his theory as well as in presenting it to the public in printed form as well as in his many public lectures. These tools—the concept of ‘atmosphere’, the pile (...) of shot analogy, and Dalton's system of chemical notation—served not just to guide Dalton's own thinking and to make his theories clear to his various audiences, but also to bind these theories together into a coherent system, presented in its definitive form in the three volumes of A New System of Chemical Philosophy . Despite these links, Dalton's contemporaries tended to pick and choose which of his theories to accept; his system of notation failed to be adopted in part because it embodied the whole of his system indivisibly. (shrink)

James Hutton defended the doctrine of phlogiston in two lengthy dissertations 1792 and 1794. Empirical, biographical and disciplinary contexts jointly explain his position. Observationally, Hutton based his argument on facts about heat, light and the storage of energy, explicitly contrasting them to concerns about weight relationships. Hutton's intellectual development shows how he found these particular problems centrally relevant, and focusing on phlogiston indicates how his better known geology fits into more fundamental thinking about the natural economy. The resonance of Hutton's (...) views with many contemporaries highlights the significance of his views, and suggests how we might reconsider the role of phlogiston in late-eighteenth-century chemistry. (shrink)

For some fifteen years in his chemistry lectures in Edinburgh, Joseph Black taught that phlogiston possesses absolute levity. It was not an aberration on Black's part: he justified the notion on experimental grounds. Moreover, the existence of a nongravitating substance capable of entering the composition of bodies raised intriguing possibilities for uniting physical and chemical phenomena. The doctrine became something of a tradition in Edinburgh, but was subject to growing criticism, particulary with the growth of pneumatic chemistry. By the early (...) 1780s, Black found the hypothesis was no longer tenable and quietly dropped it, leaving a void in the explanation of weight relations in combustion which his students were quick to fill with Lavoisier's oxygen theory. (shrink)

In the spring of 1780 there appeared a short work by J. H. de Magellan, published in London but written in French, which contained the first table of specific heats to appear in print. Magellan attributed the table to Richard Kirwan, but in none of his published works does Kirwan refer to it, so that the circumstances of its compilation are obscure. Kirwan's correspondence, however, provides evidence both of his association with Magellan and of his long concern with theories of (...) heat. In a series of letters concerned principally with his forthcoming publication, written to James Watt at the beginning of 1780, Magellan attacked Joseph Black for his failure to publish his own work on heat. (shrink)

The influential French chemist Marcelin Berthelot spoke against the use of Dalton's atomic theory and Avogadro's hypothesis in the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper argues that Berthelot conceded that atomism might be acceptable as a system of conventions, but he feared the power of such conventions in constructing a realistic picture of atoms which was not warranted empirically. Equally, Berthelot's anti-atomism was a last-ditch effort to assert the place of chemistry within the tradition of natural history and (...) to deny the possible reduction of chemical science to the laws of nineteenth-century physics. (shrink)

Though causality seems to have a natural place in chemical thought, the analysis of the underlying causal concepts requires attention to two different research styles. In Part One I attempt a classification and critical analysis of several philosophical accounts of causal concepts which appear to be very diverse. I summarize this diversity which ranges from causality as displayed in regular concomitances of types of events to causality as the activity of agents. Part Two is concerned with the analysis of contrasting (...) chemical discourses, comparing the classical atomist style of Boyle, and Lavoisier and von Liebig with the later energeticist style of van’t Hoff and Hinshelwood. In detail different clusters of causal concepts can be abstracted from these discursive styles, yet they all approximate the Realist format for causal discourse. By way of summary I make an attempt to map the vernacular distinctions of Part Two onto the philosophical territory of Part One. The argument is rounded off with a brief analysis of a chemical publication of 2008. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the question to what extent and in which sense we can conceive of Johannes Baptista Van Helmont’s (1579-1644) style of experimenting as “modern”. Connected to this question, I shall reflect upon what Van Helmont’s precise contribution to experimental practice was. I will argue - after analysing some of Van Helmont's experiments such as his tree-experiment, ice-experiment, and thermoscope experiment - that Van Helmont had a strong preference to locate experimental designs in places wherein variables (...) can be more easily controlled (and in the limit, in relatively closed physical systems such as paradigmatically the vessel, globe or sphere (vas, globus, sphera)). After having reviewed some alternative candidates, I shall argue that Van Helmont’s usage of relatively isolated physical systems and a moderate degree of quantification, whereby mathematical procedures mainly refer to guaranteeing that quantities are conserved by roughly determining them, are the characteristics that best captures his contributions to “modern” experimentation. (shrink)