The Philosophy of Chemistry From Infancy Toward Maturity

Abstract

Section 1. Introduction The time of complaining about the neglect of the philosophy of chemistry is over now. With more than 700 papers and about 40 monographs and collections since 1990, philosophy of chemistry is one of the most rapidly growing fields of philosophy. 1 Perhaps too rapidly, as it has become arduous for insiders to keep up-to-date, troublesome for newcomers to approach the field, and virtually impossible for outsiders to survey the main ideas. Being involved since the late 1980s, I think it appropriate to pause for a while and write a paper of the kind "Where do we come from?-Where are we now?-Where should we go to?" 2 Thus, my paper is divided into three parts. We come from philosophical neglect-that is, virtually from nowhere-which I try to explain in the first part by recalling the disciplinary history of philosophy. We are now in a state of rapid growth, of prolific publishing , to which I provide some structure, in the second part, by pointing out the major trends and topics. 3 "Where should we go to?" is a question to which I can give only a personal answer, based on a pragmatist judgment of topics of infancy and topics of m turity that I try to justify in the third part. a-Section 2. The philosophers' neglect of chemistry in context Section 2.a A rule of thumb about the philosophers' interest in the sciences Let me start with a look at the amount of literature published in the various sciences. Such data provides a good estimate of the relative size of the disciplines, in contrast to the coverage in the media and other talk about science. Figure 1 presents the number of new publications (books, papers, patents, etc.) as indexed by the major abstract journals in 2000 and 1979. The most striking point is that chemistry is not only the biggest discipline, it is bigger than the total of all the other natural sciences, including all their related flourishing technologies. The INSPEC database (formerly, and strangely, called Science Abstracts) has besides physics also "electrical engineering, electronics, communications, control engineering, computers and computing, and information technology" and a "significant coverage in areas such as materials science, oceanography, nuclear engineering, geophys-ics, biomedical engineering and biophysics". 4 Yet, despite the rapid growth of computer sciences and information technology, all that now comes to less than 40% of the coverage of Chemical Abstracts. Also Biological Abstracts could greatly flourish in the past decade by covering besides biology also "biochemistry, biotechnology, pre-clinical and experimental medicine, pharmacology, agriculture, and veterinary science". 5 Despite the boom of the biomedical sciences and the overlap with chemistry, it is still only 40% of Chemi