Could a Practicing Chemical Philosopher Be a Cartesian?
When Descartes touches upon objects and operations of chemistry in the fourth part of Principia philosophiae (1644), he destroys any possibility of chemistry becoming a specific science. He reduces all chemical operations to matters of size, shape and mot
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Could a Practicing Chemical Philosopher Be a Cartesian? Bernard Joly
Abstract When Descartes touches upon objects and operations of chemistry in the fourth part of Principia philosophiae (1644), he destroys any possibility of chemistry becoming a specific science. He reduces all chemical operations to matters of size, shape and motion of particles. In the frame of Cartesian natural philosophy, chemistry vanishes into mechanics. In this chapter, I would like to examine how, under these conditions, some philosophers or chemists who were sometimes regarded as Cartesian thinkers introduce chemical discourse in their natural philosophy. Some of them, such as Boyle, said that the mechanical structure underlies all chemical operations. Therefore, chemistry can only exist as empirical knowledge. Others however, such as Lémery (father and son) proposes new mechanical explanations specific to chemistry, in a way which is opposite to the theories of Principia philosophiae. Chemistry, which cannot be developed without laboratory work, leads to an unusual empirical Cartesianism which I suggest we examine in the light of the debate between some French chemists at the Académie royale des sciences at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Descartes did not like chemists, whom he also called alchemists. Like most of his contemporaries, he considered the two words to be synonymous. He often jested at alchemists and their little secrets, their vain quest after the philosopher’s stone. But he levelled at them more fundamental criticisms, concerning both the nature of their knowledge, and the shortcomings of their theorizing. This led him, in the fourth part of his Principia philosophiae, to operate a grand scale reduction of the workings of chemistry to the principles of his mechanistic conception of matter,
B. Joly (*) Université Lille 3, UMR 8163 “Savoirs, textes, langage,” Lille, France e-mail: [email protected] M. Dobre and T. Nyden (eds.), Cartesian Empiricisms, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 31, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7690-6_6, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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such as had been expounded in previous sections of his work. Under such conditions, one could have imagined that chemistry, in the eyes of Cartesian philosophers, could have no future. Fully integrated into Cartesian physics, it seemed doomed to extinction as a specific discipline.1 This proved in no way to be true. It will be examined here why and how chemists were in a position to claim that they belonged to Cartesianism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a claim that induced them to develop a conception of Cartesianism which granted an important place to laboratory experimentation.2 But eventually it will have to be asked whether such a standpoint made these Cartesian chemists genuine empiricists.
6.1
The Mechanistic Reduction of the Objects of Chemistry
Descartes’ attitude towards chemistry may appear paradoxical, since he criticized it while
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