Chemical philosophy Dumas

This distinction between "theoretical" and "practical" chemistry was one observed in textbooks throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A tradition of "philosophical chemistry" answered Libavius s challenge for chemistry to abandon alchemical magic and Paracelsian iatrochemistry in favor of newly philosophic principles in chemistry. Jacob Bamer s seventeenth-century work, Chymiaphilosophica, is an early example later, more famous texts in chemical philosophy are those of John Dalton (1808), Davy (1812), and Dumas (1837). 14 But texts called chemical philosophy were fewer than those in "natural philosophy," and very few texts in chemical philosophy were written after 1840.15 Why was this the case ... 

John Dalton, A New System of Chemical Philosophy (Manchester S. Russel, 1808) Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy (London Printed for J. Johnson by W. Bulmer, 1812) Jean-Baptiste Dumas, Legons sur la philosophie chimique (Paris Ebrard, 1837). 

Dumas was more explicit about principles and causes in his lectures on chemical philosophy to students at the Sorbonne in 1837 ... 

In short, Dumas s chemical philosophy aimed at general abstract principles, which were identified with chemical atoms and chemical forces and it taught the history of chemistry as a guide to the progress of philosophical truth. 

Dumas was at a crossroads in the mid-1830s, and his interpretation of the explanatory aims of chemistry was shifting from an atom-and-force program of explanation to a structure-and-function one. In so shifting, he appears to move in the direction of Lavoisier s definition of chemistry and away from the notion of a chemical philosophy of mechanical forces that he and Davy had espoused. In short, Dumas was shifting to positivist and conventional methods of chemistry from the more mechanical, realist, and "philosophical" method. 

This statement of the meaning of theoretical chemistry lies within the methodological tradition of chemistry that we have termed "positivist" or "exact," in contrast to the "philosophical" or "realist" tradition of the chemical philosophy that aimed, in the words of Humphry Davy, to "ascertain the causes of all [chemical changes], and to discover the laws by which they are governed" and that, according to Dumas, studies "the material particles chemists call atoms and the forces to which these particles are submitted. "24... 

See chap. 3, referring to H. Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, 1 and J. B. Dumas, Legons de philosophie chimique, 12. 

Friedrich Kekule was a student of architecture who was so impressed by Liebig s lectures that he decided to study chemistry. Couper was a Glasgow philosophy student in his late twenties when he became interested in chemistry and went to Paris to study. He worked in the laboratory of Charles Adolphe Wurtz, an eminent chemist and early investigator of the ammonia type. While at Wurtz s laboratory early in 1858 Couper wrote a paper entitled On a New Chemical Theory that probably contained the first statement about the tetravalence of carbon and its chain-forming ability. Couper asked Wurtz to help him have his paper read at the French Academy of Sciences, but Wurtz was not a member of the academy (all papers had to be sponsored by a member), so there was a delay while he secured the cooperation of a member. A few months later a paper by Kekule appeared in print stating the same ideas. Couper was so upset that he raged at Wurtz and ended up being dismissed from the laboratory. Dumas was persuaded to sponsor Couper s paper, and it was finally read on June 14, 1858. 

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