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I argue that it was rational for chemists to eliminate phlogiston, but that it also would have been rational for them to retain it. I do so on the grounds that a number of prominent phlogiston theorists identified phlogiston with hydrogen in the late 18th century, and this identification became fairly well entrenched by the early 19th century. In light of this identification, I critically evaluate Hasok Chang’s argument that chemists should have retained phlogiston, and that doing so would have (...) |
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This is the first of a pair of papers. It focuses on the development of the most notable phlogistic theories during the period 1766–1791, including the main experiments that their proponents proposed them to interpret. There was a rapid proliferation of late phlogistic theories, particularly from 1784, and the accounts of composition and important implications of the main theories are set out and their issues analysed. Each of them either reached impasses due to internal problems, or included features that made (...) |
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Some think that issues to do with scientific method are last century's stale debate; Popper was an advocate of methodology, but Kuhn, Feyerabend, and others are alleged to have brought the debate about its status to an end. The papers in this volume show that issues in methodology are still very much alive. Some of the papers reinvestigate issues in the debate over methodology, while others set out new ways in which the debate has developed in the last decade. The (...) |
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The term philosophy of chemistry is here construed broadly to include some publications from the history of chemistry and chemical education. Of course this initial selection of material has inevitably been biased by the interests of the author. This bibliography supersedes that of van Brakel and Vermeeren (1981), although no attempt has been made to include every single one of their entries, especially in languages other than English. Also, readers interested particularly in articles in German may wish to consult the (...) |
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For the history of science the 1940s were a transformative decade, when salient scholars like Herbert Butterfield or Alexandre Koyré set out to shape postwar culture by promoting new standards for understanding science. Some years ago I placed these developments in a tradition of enduring arts–science tensions and the contemporary notion that previous, “scientistic”, historical practices needed to be confronted with disinterested codes of historical craft. Here, I want to further explore the ideological dimensions of the processes through which the (...) |
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During the second half of the twentieth century, historians of science have shown a considerable interest in ‘presentism’, a term first applied to the kind of history of science in which past knowledge is judged to celebrate and legitimize modern science. Taking Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig interpretation of history as a point of reference, ‘presentism’ has been usually associated with ‘Whig history’ or ‘Whiggish history’. Nevertheless, Butterfield’s essay is one of many approaches to this question. In this article, I examine (...) |
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Why do some epistemic objects persist despite undergoing serious changes, while others go extinct in similar situations? Scientists have often been careless in deciding which epistemic objects to retain and which ones to eliminate; historians and philosophers of science have been on the whole much too unreflective in accepting the scientists’ decisions in this regard. Through a re-examination of the history of oxygen and phlogiston, I will illustrate the benefits to be gained from challenging and disturbing the commonly accepted continuities (...) |
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A number of prominent defenders of the phlogiston theory identified phlogiston with hydrogen in the late eighteenth century, and I argue that this identification was fairly well-entrenched by the early nineteenth century. In light of this identification, I examine the ways in which retaining phlogiston could have retarded scientific progress, and also the ways in which it could have benefited science. I argue that it was rational for chemists to eliminate phlogiston, but that it also would have been rational for (...) |
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During the past hundred years or so, those scholars studying science have isolated themselves as much as possible from scientists as well as from workers in other disciplines who study science. The result of this effort is history of science, philosophy of science and sociology of science as separate disciplines. I argue in this paper that now is the time for these disciplinary boundaries to be lowered or at least made more permeable so that a unified discipline of Science Studies (...) |
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Considering the case of Juan de Vilanova y Piera, often celebrated as the first scientist to accept the prehistoric antiquity of palaeolithic paintings, we explore some of the problems related to the concept of ‘precursor’ in the field of the history of science. In the first section, we propose a brief history of this notion focusing on those authors who have reflected critically on the meaning of predecessors. In the second section, the example of Vilanova illustrates the ways in which (...) |
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