SUBJECTS Philosophical Society

If the reader has access to the Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (11. 145, 1871), A. de Morgan s paper On Infinity, is worth reading in connection with this subject. 

From the first meeting of the Alchemical Society, recent theories in atomic chemistry and physics immediately entered the discussions. Redgrove s paper, mentioned above, brought up the subject. Walter Gorn Old raised Crookes s theory of the protyle as an essentially alchemical notion. Sijil Abdul -Ali discussed the resemblance of properties of the Philosopher s Stone to those of the ether (Journal of the Alchemical Society. 1913a, 15-16). The early... 

Boerhaave s many experimental researches described in his textbook or in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, or the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences of Paris, show no discoveries that are in any sense epoch-making. By his experiments on the transmutation of metals he assisted materially in giving the death blow to the traditional belief, still more or less accepted by chemists of his time, that mercury was capable of being rendered a hard metal by long subjection to heat and that it was a constituent of other metals. He kept mercury for fifteen years at a warm temperature in an unsealed vessel, and for six months at high temperature in a sealed vessel, and distilled mercury five hundred times,... 

J. Watt, Thoughts on the Constituent Parts of Water and ofDephlogisticated Air with an Account of some Experiments on that Subject. In a Letter from Mr James Watt, Engineer, to Mr. De Luc, F. R. S. j Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 74 (1784), pp. 329-53. 

Additional Experiments and Observations Relating to the Principle of Acidity, the Decomposition of Water, and Phlogiston. With Letters to Him on the Subject by Dr Withering and James Keir Esq. , Philosophical Transactions ofthe Royal Society of London, 81 (1791), pp. 213-22. 

The subject of his philosophical disputation in 1686 was on cohesion. On the intellectual environment of Leyden, see F. L. R. Sassen, The Intellectual Climate in Leiden in Boerhaave s Time, in Boerhaave and His Time, ed. Lindeboom H. A. M. Snelders, Professors, Amateurs, and Learned Societies ... 

The first platinum to be subjected to experimental investigation was brought to England in 1741 by Charles Wood, an assayer from Jamaica. He determined that the metal could not be fused by the force of any fire then available, formed low-melting alloys with several metals, and had a density similar to that of gold. His results were communicated in 1750 to the Royal Society of London by William Watson and later were published in the Philosophical Transactions (6). This publication sparked interest throughout Europe, for the discovery of a new noble metal was as much a surprise to chemists as the discovery of the new planet Uranus by Herschel was to be to astronomers 30 years later. 

The first part of this book deals with problems that today are studied by philosophers and economists. The second part is more closely related to history, sociology and political science. The distinction is largely one of convenience, yet sufficiently robust to provide a useful way of organizing the subject-matter. It can be stated rather starkly as follows. In this first part I discuss Marx s analysis and indictment of capitalism as an economic system, and the ideal of communist society which is constantly present in the background. In the second part, social change and collective action form the focus of attention, mainly but not exclusively with a view to understanding Marx s theory of the transition from capitalism to communism. To be sure, these dynamic problems are also treated in the first part, notably in the discussion of capitalist crises (3.4), but they take second place to an equilibrium analysis of capitalism and a normative assessment of what it does to human beings. 

There is increasing interest among philosophers of science to study chemistry as a distinct branch of science. An emergent group (e.g. McIntyre, 1999 Scerri, 1996) have contributed to the formulation of the new field of philosophy of chemistry . The First International Conference on Philosophy of Chemistry was held in 1994. The annual meetings of the American Chemical Society have been devoting sessions to issues surrounding the interplay of philosophy and chemistry. The first issue of a new journal. Foundations of Chemistry, dedicated to philosophy of chemistry was published in 1999. There is now an on-hne journal, HYLE, where philosophical analyses of chemistry are reported. Finally, numerous recent books have focussed on philosophy of chemistry as their subject of study (e.g. Bhushan Rosenfeld, 2000 van Brakel, 2000). 

From his early writings (the—once—famous philosophical-economical manuscripts from 1844), Marx succumbs to the (Feuerbach-ian) temptation of formulating alienation and class society in the terms of the mirror-reversal of the proper relation of causality in capitalism, the subject is enslaved to its own product, dead labor (capital) rules over living labor (the workers productivity)—predicate becomes... 

Home E. Hints on the subject of animal secretions. In Abstracts of the papers printed in the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1800-1814. London Taylor, Red Lion, Court, Reet Street, 1832. 

Ever since 1665 when the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was founded the number of scientific periodicals has grown steadily until today there must be not far short of 100,000 scientific and technical journals in existence. Chemical Abstracts at present scans a total of 9,700 serial and non-serial publications for information of chemical interest alone. The importance of periodical publications lies in the fact that they are issued at regular and frequent intervals and so the information they contain is always the most recent available. In addition, an article in a journal usually deals with just one special topic so that it can go into much greater detail of methods, apparatus and results than can a book which deals broadly with a much greater variety of subjects. It is normally only after several years that the information contained in periodicals becomes available in textbooks, encyclopaedias, etc., and for this reason scientists often write letters to journals especially to notify their colleagues of a new discovery they have made or to inform them of the nature of the research they are undertaking. 

One sign of the influence of these core ideas is that they have profoundly influenced the shape of the modem social sciences, thanks especially to the work of Max Weber. Now, understandably eager to enjoy the power and prestige of the natural sciences, modem social sciences have sought to imitate them. One visible sign of this is the widespread use of modem mathematics in the study of society the flip side of this is the effort to exclude values from the subject matter. The modem social sciences are to be value free to the extent possible and to avoid the value laden questions that would keep them from claiming to be sciences properly understood. But perhaps the most eye- and ear-catching thinker to stress the resistance of values to philosophic justifications was Friedrich Nietzsche, who went so far as to say our preference for truth over falsehood is itself merely a value. As he put it, It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than mere appearance it is even the worst proved assumption there is in the world. ... 

This splendid paper was rejected by the Royal Society. But it was printed in the Philosophical Magazine, and in this way the scientific world learned not only of Joule s fundamental insights and confirmatory experiments but also of his penetrating criticisms of Clapeyron and Carnot. For the first time the fundamental ideas of thermodynamics were subject to the (constructive) criticism of a first-class scientific intellect ... 

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