Of Minds and Molecules: New Philosophical Perspectives on Chemistry

Przednia okładka
Nalini Bhushan, Stuart Rosenfeld
Oxford University Press, 14 gru 2000 - 320
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.

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Spis treści

INTRODUCTION
3
Autonomy and Antireductionism
15
Missing Elements What Philosophers of Science Might Discover in Chemistry
17
Laws and Theories in Chemistry Do Not Obey the Rules
34
Realism Reduction and the Intermediate Position
51
Instrumentation
73
Substance and Function in Chemical Research
75
Analytical Instrumentation and Instrumental Objectivity
90
Butlerovs Vision The Timeless the Transientand the Representation of Chemical Structure
143
The Nature of Chemical Substances
162
Chemical Synthesis Complexity Similarity Natural Kinds and the Evolution of a Logic
187
Models and Metaphors
209
Models and Explanations Understanding Chemical Reaction Mechanisms
211
How Symbolic and Iconic Languages Bridge the Two Worlds of the Chemist A Case Study from Contemporary Bioorganic Chemistry
230
The Chemical Senses
249
Archiving Odors
251

Structure and Identity
115
Realism Essentialism and Intrinsic Properties The Case of Molecular Shape
117
Space and the Chiral Molecule
129
The Slighting of Smell with a Brief Word on the Slighting of Chemistry
273
Index
291
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Strona 284 - If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?
Strona 60 - I'Alchimie," 1885, 313, has simply mixed up the fundamental idea of the law of periodicity with the ideas of Prout, the alchemists, and Dcmocritus about primary matter. But the periodic law, based as it is on the solid and wholesome ground of experimental research, has been evolved independently of any conception as to the nature of the elements ; it does not in the least originate in the idea of a unique matter, and it has no historical connection with that relic of the torments of classical thought...
Strona 285 - ... blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master's wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the...
Strona 62 - We have here a proof that there is in the atom a fundamental quantity, which increases by regular steps as we pass from one element to the next. This quantity can only be the charge on the central positive nucleus, of the existence of which we already have definite proof.
Strona 285 - In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women.
Strona 84 - Ramdas obtained the first spectrograms with a gaseous substance (ether vapour) at atmospheric pressure. In interpreting the observed phenomena, the analogy with the Compton effect was adopted as the guiding principle. The work of Compton had gained general acceptance for the idea that the scattering of radiation is a unitary process in which the conservation principles hold good. Accepting this idea it follows at once that, if the scattering particle gains any energy during the encounter with the...
Strona 285 - ... stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life that was not accompanied by stench.17 Indeed, the French historian Alain Corbin writes that in the eighteenth century, smells were so ferocious that much of the nation could "hardly breathe.
Strona 18 - The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble.
Strona xiv - Fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies at The Pennsylvania State University.
Strona 127 - The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.

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