How to Run a Historiography, or: Chymistry Rides High July 3, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Chymistry.Tags: Allen Debus, Étienne-François Geoffroy, Bernard de Fontenelle, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, Bruce Moran, David Brewster, F. Sherwood Taylor, George Sarton, Herbert Butterfield, Herman Boerhaave, Isaac Newton, Joan-Baptista van Helmont, John Maynard Keynes, Kevin Chang, Lawrence Principe, Pamela Smith, Paracelsus, Richard Westfall, Walter Pagel, William Newman
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Principe
I know, I know, my scholarly crush on the chymistry literature is probably getting a little embarrassing. But I want to make sure everyone is taking notes like I am, because William Newman, Lawrence Principe, and their crowd are really putting on a clinic on how to run a proper historiography. The latest lesson is in putting together a good Isis Focus section: “Alchemy and the History of Science”, organized by Bruce Moran, and available free of charge in the latest issue.
I’ve been very happy to see this specialty spring to success, receiving both scholarly praise and public exposure in places like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Economist, and the New York Times. I am a bit worried that this success will be held up as simply a product of the virtues of historical scholarship. To an extent it should be, for reasons I will discuss, but I also think it’s important that the rest of us — including those of us working in decidedly remote terrain like 20th-century science — pay close attention to what these scholars are doing particularly right.
Clericuzio on Alchemy, Chemistry, Medicine, and Natural Philosophy December 26, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Chymistry.Tags: Agricolia, Albertus Magnus, Andreas Libavius, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Antonio Clericuzio, Guy de la Brosse, Nicaise Le Fèvre, Paracelsus, Rene Descartes, Robert Boyle, Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, Werner Rolfinck
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First off, for readers interested in current efforts to refine historical knowledge about early modern natural philosophical programs: there is a project blog, founded this past August, being run out of the University of Otago in New Zealand, called Early Modern Experimental Philosophy. Do read.
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Andreas Libavius (1555-1616)
This post is a further look at intellectual issues surrounding the relationship between early modern “chymistry” and the pursuit of natural philosophy, as discussed in a much earlier post on the dispute between Bill Newman and Alan Chalmers concerning the nature of Robert Boyle’s chymistry. There I understood Newman to argue that, to Boyle, philosophically important chemical knowledge deriving from experiment would have had to be fit within his mechanical philosophical framework, and that chemical taxonomies would not have fit that bill. Of course, in the seventeenth century, natural philosophy occupied one niche amid a full array of agendas to which chemistry was relevant. Many of these are dealt with in a recent article by the University of Cassino’s Antonio Clericuzio: “‘Sooty Empiricks’ and Natural Philosophers: The Status of Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century,” Science in Context 23 (2010): 329-350.
Ether Wave Propaganda 