Abstract
Lavoisier was born in 1743 into a wealthy family of lawyers, and initially prepared for a legal career, being awarded a baccalaureate in law in 1763. Antoine Lavoisier played the central role in what has come to be known as the chemical revolution and he was active also in agricultural and fiscal reform as well as technological development. He is credited with establishing that oxygen is an element and water its compound with hydrogen, refining experimental methods in chemistry, reforming chemical nomenclature along systematic lines, defining element operationally, and denying phlogiston a place in chemical explanation. This chapter critically examines the analytical conception of the elements that Lavoisier proposes in the preface to the Trait´e El´ementaire de Chimie (Lavoisier 1790), questioning whether it is strong enough to play the explanatory role allotted to elements in Lavoisier's compositional theories.
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