Abstract
The focus of this contribution lies on eighteenth-century chemistry up to Lavoisier’s anti-phlogistic chemical system. Some main features of chemistry in this period will be examined by discussing classificatory practices and the understanding of the substances these practices imply. In particular, the question will be discussed of whether these practices can be regarded as natural historical practices and, hence, whether chemistry itself was a special natural history (part I). Furthermore, discussion of the famous Methode de nomenclature chimique (1787) raises the question of what modes of classification tell us about chemists’ understanding of the substances they deal with (part II). Finally, in investigating what taxonomic orders reveal about deep structures of chemists’ understanding of the world of substances, the contribution will examine the question of whether Lavoisier’s anti-phlogistic chemical system was a revolution on the level of a deep structure or a revision within the untouched frame of such a structure (part III).
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Notes
Ursula Klein and myself have presented an elaborate investigation and discussion of classificatory practices in early modern chemistry and their various conceptual as well as technological implications in Klein and Lefèvre (2007). This article, particularly in “Part II: classifying according to composition” and “Part III: a deep structure of chemical conception”, draws on this book and tries to summaries some of its main arguments and results. In addition to these arguments, the article will investigate a further aspect of the topic, namely the question of whether early modern chemistry, because of its classificatory practices, must be regarded as one of the natural histories of the age (“Part I: chemistry—science of materials”).
See, for instance, Siegfried (1982).
For a recent discussion of this question, see Meinel (2010).
For the notion of “experimental history”, see Klein and Lefèvre (2007, pp. 22ff).
For the practices of individuating plant species in 18th-century botany, see Müller-Wille (1999, esp. Chap. 10.2).
See especially Klein (2005).
See, for instance, Lefèvre (2001).
Herman Boerhaave’s famous Elementa Chemiae from 1732 is a case in point; see Klein and Lefèvre (2007, p. 174).
For bibliographical as well as historical information on this publication, see Klein and Lefèvre (2007, Chap. 4).
It should be noted that “landmark” does not mean a radical rupture with the past. For the opposite claim, see Bensaude-Vincent (1983, p. 1).
The table contains also alloys: Since the notion of stoichiometric compounds was unknown before the last decade of the 18th century, chemists regarded all substances as compounds that could be subjected to reversible chemical operations—decomposing and re-synthesizing. See Ursula Klein’s contribution to this special issue.
For the following, see Klein and Lefèvre (2007, p. 113f).
In my view, this shift can only be ignored or denied if one denies, too, that the Paracelsian philosophy of elements and principles shaped 16th- and 17th-century chemists’ understanding of mixta and contends that a certain understanding of chemical substances as compositions in more or less the modern sense was always held by chemists since antiquity; see, for instance, Newman and Principe (2002).
See Klein and Lefèvre (2007, Chap. 6.3).
For the following, see ibid. p. 127.
Our oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen are placed in column II as compounds of the matter of heat, whereas the respective substances in column I (taxon Ia) are postulated substances unknown today.
For the following, see Klein and Lefèvre (2007, p. 185).
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Lefèvre, W. Viewing chemistry through its ways of classifying. Found Chem 14, 25–36 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-011-9125-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-011-9125-x