Abstract
Philosophers of science have shown over the past several years a growing interest in chemistry. Chemistry has always held an important place in French philosophy of science. By confronting our respective experiences as philosopher and chemist, we bring out the specificity of the French tradition. The insight provided thereby will allow us to examine afresh some philosophical problems raised by contemporary science: changing conceptions of matter, laboratory practice as opposed to mathematical representation as well as the impact of computer modeling and atomic microscopy on our knowledge of the behavior of matter.
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Notes
- 1.
Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (1839–1842), 2 vols., Paris: Hermann 1998. Abridged translation H. Martineau, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009.
- 2.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les institutions chimiques (1747), Paris: Champion 2010, I, ch. 1, p. 10, our translation. Cf. Bruno Bernardi, “Pourquoi la chimie? Le cas Rousseau”, in: Revue Dix-huitième siècle 42, 2010, pp. 433-443.
- 3.
Following Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, who wrote: “Aggregation is merely the union of several parts of a similar body without decomposition, and which are called in consequence integrated parts […]. Affinity, in contrast, makes up a new body”, our translation. This passage from the Encyclopédie is quoted in Bernardi, La fabrique des concepts, Paris: Champion 2006, p. 158.
- 4.
Rousseau: “The life of both bodies is the self common to the whole, the reciprocal sensibility and internal correspondence of all the parts. Where this communication ceases, where the formal unity disappears, and the contiguous parts belong to one another only by juxtaposition, the man is dead, or the State is dissolved”, Discours sur l’économie politique, in: Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, Paris: Gallimard 1964, p. 245. English translation, Constitution Society. Cf. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Eds.), The Collected Works of Rousseau, vol. 3, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 1993. See also Luc Vincenti, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: l’individu et la République, Paris: Kimé 2001, ch. 5, p. 146.
- 5.
Bernardi, “Pourquoi la chimie?”.
- 6.
François Pépin, “Diderot philosophe de la chimie: des Lumières à la science contemporaine”, in: Jean-Pierre Llored (Ed.), La chimie, cette inconnue? Paris: Hermann, in press, our translation.
- 7.
Guillaume-François Rouelle (1703–1770) is one of the major French chemists of the 18th century. Many renown members of the French intellectual community, including Lavoisier, attended his lectures on chemistry, which he held in his laboratory. He was associate member of the French Academy of Science. Diderot followed his courses for three years.
- 8.
Denis Diderot, Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement (1770), in: Oeuvres philosophiques. Paris: Garnier 1964, p. 395, our translation. See Jean Starobinski, Action and Reaction. New York: Zone Books 2003, ch. 2. and Pépin “Diderot: la chimie comme modèle d’une philosophie expérimentale”, in: Revue du Dix-huitième siècle 42, 2010, pp. 445-472.
- 9.
Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, translation M. Friedman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004, p. 7. See Mai Lequan, La chimie selon Kant. Paris: Presses universitaires de France 2000.
- 10.
Pierre Duhem, Le mixte et la combinaison chimique. Paris: Fayard 1985. English translation P. Needham, Mixture and Chemical Combination. Dordrecht: Kluwer 2002. Cf. Robert Deltete and Anastasios Brenner, “Essay Review of Pierre Duhem’s Mixture”, in: Foundations of Chemistry 6, 2004, pp. 203-232.
- 11.
Duhem, La théorie physique, son objet et sa structure (1906), Paris: Vrin 1981. English translation P.P. Wiener, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991.
- 12.
Ibid., pp. 25, 127, 214.
- 13.
Ibid., p. VI.
- 14.
Hans Hahn, Rudolph Carnap and Otto Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle”, in: Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology. Dordrecht: Reidel 1973, pp. 299-318.
- 15.
Neurath provides a presentation of the project in “Unified Science and its Encyclopedia”, in: Philosophical Papers. Dordrecht: Reidel 1983. Cf. Friedrich Stadler, The Vienna Circle: Studies in the Origins, Development and Influence of Logical Empiricism. Springer: Vienna 2001.
- 16.
Neurath, “Sociology in the Framework of Physicalism”, in: Philosophical Papers, p. 80.
- 17.
Émile Meyerson, Identité et réalité. Paris: Vrin 1951. English trans. K. Loewenberg, Identity and Reality. London: G. Allan &; Unwin 1930.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 88.
- 19.
For example H. Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2010, p. 221.
- 20.
Meyerson, Du cheminement de la pensée (1931), 3 vols., Paris: Alcan, p. 613, our translation.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 138. Cf. p. 246.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 790, our translation.
- 23.
Gaston Bachelard, L’activité rationaliste de la physique contemporaine. Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1951.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 86, our translation. Cf. Meyerson, Identity and Reality, ch. 9.
- 25.
Bachelard, L’activité rationaliste, p. 87.
- 26.
W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press 1980, p. 45. For an attempt to combine instruments of analytic philosophy of science and historical epistemology, see Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press 2002.
- 27.
“A synthon is defined as a structural unit within a molecule which is related to a possible synthetic operation, the term was coined in 1967 by E. J. Corey”, in Wikipedia.
- 28.
“The basic assumption of all molecule-based hypotheses is that similar molecules have similar activities. This principle is also called Structure-Activity Relationship (SAR). The underlying problem is therefore how to define a small difference on a molecular level, since each kind of activity, e.g. reaction ability, biotransformation ability, solubility, target activity, and so on, might depend on another difference”, in Wikipedia.
- 29.
Valency electrons are those which are associated with the highest energy orbital and which are directly involved in chemical reactivity. For more details see the Frontier-Orbital Theory.
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Brenner, A., Henn, F. (2013). Chemistry and French Philosophy of Science. A Comparison of Historical and Contemporary Views. In: Andersen, H., Dieks, D., Gonzalez, W., Uebel, T., Wheeler, G. (eds) New Challenges to Philosophy of Science. The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5845-2_31
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