Book Description

This comprehensive volume marks a new standard in scholarship in the still emerging field of the philosophy of chemistry. With selections drawn from a wide range of scholarly disciplines, philosophers, chemists, and historians of science here converge to ask some of the most fundamental questions about the relationship between philosophy and chemistry. What can chemistry teach us about longstanding disputes in the philosophy of science over such issues as reductionism, autonomy, and supervenience? And what new issues may chemistry bring to the forefront now that it has joined physics and biology as a serious topic for philosophical reflection? This newest addition to the prestigious Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science series marks the true arrival of philosophy of chemistry within the corpus of the philosophy of science.

Book Description
How did chemistry and physics acquire their separate identities, and are they on their way to losing them again? Mary Jo Nye has written a graceful account of the historical demarcation of chemistry from physics and subsequent reconvergences of the two, from Lavoisier and Dalton in the late eighteenth century to Robinson, Ingold, and Pauling in the mid-twentieth century.
Using the notion of a disciplinary "identity" analogous to ethnic or national identity, Nye develops a theory of the nature of disciplinary structure and change. She discusses the distinctive character of chemical language and theories and the role of national styles and traditions in building a scientific discipline. Anyone interested in the history of scientific thought will enjoy pondering with her the question of whether chemists of the mid-twentieth century suspected chemical explanation had been reduced to physical laws, just as Newtonian mechanical philosophers had envisioned in the eighteenth century. ... Read more

Book Description
Professor Szabadváry's history of analytical chemistry is the first systematic, continuous description of our attempts to find the composition of substances and then apply them to definite purposes. Included are essential biographical details of more than 800 chemists, providing the valuable personal stories behind the advances in analytical methods.
Ferenc Szabadváry is a director general at the National Museum for Science and Technology, Budapest, and a professor of general chemistry at Technical University, Budapest ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Metaphysics, published by Philosophy Education Society, Inc. on December 1, 1997. The length of the article is 947 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Real Process: How Chemistry and Logic Combine in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature.
Author: George Di Giovanni
Publication: The Review of Metaphysics (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 1997
Publisher: Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
Volume: v51Issue: n2Page: p410(2)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
At first glance twentieth-century philosophy of science seems virtually to ignore chemistry. However this paper argues that a focus on chemistry helped shape the French philosophical reflections about the aims and foundations of scientific methods. Despite patent philosophical disagreements between Duhem, Meyerson, Metzger and Bachelard it is possible to identify the continuity of a tradition that is rooted in their common interest for chemistry. Two distinctive features of the French tradition originated in the attention to what was going on in chemistry. French philosophers of science, in stark contrast with analytic philosophers, considered history of science as the necessary basis for understanding how the human intellect or the scientific spirit tries to grasp the world. This constant reference to historical data was prompted by a fierce controversy about the chemical revolution, which brought the issue of the nature of scientific changes centre stage. A second striking-albeit largely unnoticed-feature of the French tradition is that matter theories are a favourite subject with which to characterize the ways of science. Duhem, Meyerson, Metzger and Bachelard developed most of their views about the methods and aims of science through a discussion of matter theories. Just as the concern with history was prompted by a controversy between chemists, the focus on matter was triggered by a scientific controversy about atomism in the late nineteenth-century. ... Read more

Book Description
Of Minds and Molecules is the first anthology devoted exclusively to work in the philosophy of chemistry. The essays, written by both chemists and philosophers, adopt distinctive philosophical perspectives on chemistry and collectively offer both a conceptualization of and a justification for this emerging field. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Of Minds and Molecules
Let me be the first to congratulate Nalini Bhushan and the late Stuart Rosenfeldon editing a new anthology just published by Oxford University Press and entitled Of Minds and Molecules.

They have assembled together a very interesting and diverse collection of articles on the subject of philosophy of chemistry.Their editorial introduction and introduction to the field is excellent as are many of the articles written by philosophers, chemists and educators.

At the end of the day you can have international conferences, web servers, new journals, internet journals and special issues but what really defines a field is still one slim monograph which collects together, in a coherent and inter-related fashion, all the modern themes being studied.

This is the book which will define the field.If you have even a passing interest in history and philosophy of chemistry you need to own this book. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program. ... Read more