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The philosophy of chemistry : From infancy toward maturity

s) 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, geophysics, 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. In addition, 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 Chemical Abstracts. The earth sciences, less than a 10th of the size of chemistry, are even smaller than the social sciences and psychology. The quantitative dominance of chemistry is no new phenomenon. To the contrary, many of the other abstract journals have grown more rapidly than Chemical Abstracts during the past three to four decades for various reasons. They could benefit from booming trends, as Psychological Abstracts from cognitive psychology; they absorbed new fields, as Science Abstracts did with computer science and information technology to become INSPEC; or they increased the overlap with chemistry, as Biological Abstracts did with biochemistry. By 1979, when no philosopher of science THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHEMISTRY 21 could even imagine the existence of philosophy of chemistry, Chemical Abstracts was more than four times as big as Science Abstracts (physics) and about three times as big as Biological Abstracts. Had those philosophers without prejudice gone into the laboratories, then they would have stumbled on chemistry almost everywhere. Nowadays, philosophers overall write as many publications per year as chemists do in four days. Ironically, the figure suggests a rule of thumb about the philosophers’ interest in the sciences: the smaller the discipline, the more do philosophers write about it, with the exception of the earth sciences. In the approximate order, philosophers write: (1) about philosophy, as history of philosophy or, to be more correct, about what philosophical classics have published or left unpublished; (2) about mathematics, as mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematical physics (“philosophy of science”); (3) about psychology, as philosophy of mind or naturalized epistemology; (4) about the social sciences, as social and political philosophy and philosophy of social sciences; (5) about experimental physics, as “philosophy of science”; (6) about biology as philosophy of biology; and (7) to the smallest degree, about chemistry. Thus, if philosophers produce general ideas about “science,” there are good reasons to be mistrustful. On the other hand, if one really wants to understand the natural sciences, there are good reasons to start with chemistry. A history of philosophy explanation Many explanations have been advanced for the fact that philosophers have so stubbornly neglected chemistry as if it were virtually non-existent. Is it the lack of “big questions” in chemistry, its close relationship to technology, or the historically rooted pragmatism of chemists and their lack of interest in metaphysical issues? Or, is the alleged reduction of chemistry to physics (quantum mechanics) the main obstacle, so that, if chemistry were only an applied branch of physics, there would be no genuine philosophical issue of chemistry? What all these approaches have in common is that they try to explain the neglect of philosophers by reference to chemistry, as if there were something wrong with chemistry. If there is only a bit of truth in our rule of thumb, however, it is the strange order of interest of philosophers that calls for explanation. In such an explanation, the neglect of chemistry would turn out to be only a special case, albeit an extreme one. I do not intend to provide a full explanation, but some hints from the disciplinary history of philosophy. Although we can, in retrospect, build a history of texts that we nowadays call philosophy, there is anything else than a continuous history of a discipline called philosophy, i.e., a history of a profession. The topical preferences of today’s philosophers reflect the surprisingly young and awkward history of their discipline. The relationship to mathematics goes back to a time, still at the turn to the 19th century, when “philosophy” was just the generic term for all the arts and sciences