Introduction

Abstract

The Philosophy of Chemistry emerged in Europe during the 1990s—or to be more precise, in the year 1994. Since that time, the field has grown in stature and importance, offering a unique perspective on chemistry and its place within the natural sciences. For example, the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC) was formally established in 1997, following some earlier gatherings among the early enthusiasts of the field, and has held meetings every year since. The journal of the society, Foundations of Chemistry, began appearing in 1999 and is now in its sixteenth year of publication, with full recognition from the Science Citation Index. But the emergence of the philosophy of chemistry has hardly been an easy process. As Joachim Schummer points out in his editorial for the journal Hyle, the other journal dedicated to the philosophy of chemistry, the philosophy of chemistry had been mostly ignored as a field, in contrast to that of physics and, later, biology. This seems to have been due to a rather conservative, and at times implicitly reductionist, philosophy of physics whose voice seemed to speak for the general philosophy of science. It has taken an enormous effort by dedicated scholars around the globe to get beyond the idea that chemistry merely provides case studies for established metaphysical and epistemological doctrines in the philosophy of physics. These efforts have resulted in both definitive declarations of the philosophy of chemistry to be an autonomous field of inquiry and a number of edited volumes and monographs. Philosophy of chemistry, like any other field of inquiry, has a historical and social context. But from a broad conceptual perspective, its birth pains seem difficult to reconcile with a rather obvious property of chemistry: Within the natural sciences, chemistry’s domain borders both physics and biology. In this regard, philosophy of chemistry is potentially unrivalled in its philosophical importance within the philosophy of natural sciences. Since it shares it boundaries with both physics and biology, no other discipline has the capacity to do more to edify the complex interactions between the life and physical sciences.