Natural History, Chemistry, and Teaching in Modern Scientific Culture

Abstract

This work proposes that a historically delimited study can offer teachers the opportunity to problematize with students the historicity of scientific knowledge and its social, economic, pedagogical, and philosophical implications. The authors intend to draw attention to the centrality of chemical knowledge in modern scientific culture and how chemistry teaching is a manifestation of that social interest. Francis Bacon’s new program for natural history in the seventeenth century, more specifically his view of the history of arts, was adopted as the core idea of the work.