Founder myth

On Lavoisier, see Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, "A Founder Myth in the History of Science The Lavoisier Case," 5378, in Loren Graham et al., eds., Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook VII (Dordrecht Reidel, 1983). 

On chemistry courses in nineteenth-century France, see Bensaude-Vincent, "A Founder Myth in the History of Science " n. 3, 7677. 

Lavoisier s dictum that physics should precede chemistry became a logicohistorical interpretation, as he meant it to be, instead of a statement of pedagogical or disciplinary strategy. Paradoxically, the contemporary prestige of physics is associated with this logicohistorical tradition and with the classical and aesthetic appeal of abstract mathematics, rather than with the precision laboratory tradition on which much of modern physics, like chemistry, is based. The founder myth of Lavoisier has been perpetuated in the hagiography of the disciplinary clan of chemistry because of his role not only in the conceptual and linguistic foundations of nineteenth-century chemistry but also in a community of practitioners who refined the social definition of the chemical discipline its formal distinction from "physique" in the Paris Academy, its autonomous status as the subject of the Annales de Chimie, its Janus-faced position astride the abyss that previously divided the philosophical science of the university from the technical practice of the laboratory. 

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, A Founder Myth in the History of Sciences. The Lavoisier Case, in Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Fiistories, ed. L. Graham et al. (Reidel, 1983) idem, Une Mythologie Revolutionnaire dans la Chimie Frangaise, Annals of Science 40, 1983, 189-196. 

The Founder Myth stressed the demarcation between science and nonscience and the determining role in the progress of science of individual men of genius... 

Proponents of the Founder Myth offered a number of different perspectives on the generation of modern chemistry depending on their view of the specific... 

Albury used his analysis of Lavoisier s chemistry to support the Founder Myth, claiming that Lavoisier s attempt to devise a formally algebraic mode of reasoning applicable to all chemical problems made the 7mzte the foundation of modern chemistry . In a similar maimer, Beretta insisted on the radical discontinuity between Lavoisier s chemistry and that of his phlogistic and alchemical... 

Working in the wake of Bensaude-Vincent s seminal analysis of the historical origins of the Founder Myth, and lending partial support to the hermeneutical identification of an event with its subsequent effects and interpretations, Christoph Meinel and Mi Gyung Kim showed how the image of Lavoisier as the... 

Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800, p. 208 C. C. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, I960), p. 205 See B. Bensaude-Vincent, A Founder Myth in the History of Science - the Lavoisier Case , in L. Graham, P. Lepinies and W. Weingart (eds). 

---