Philosophy of Chemistry, Reduction, Emergence, and Chemical Education

Abstract

In this article I hope to introduce chemical educators to some of the work carried out in the philosophy of chemistry. The relevance of such work and especially that carried out on the reduction of chemistry to physics is considerable, and especially so in the case of physical chemistry. As the very name of the discipline implies, physical chemistry juxtaposes aspects of chemistry with aspects of physics. The relationship between these two classical areas of science needs to be considered in order to ascertain the extent to which chemistry should be taught as applied physics or to inform the teaching of physical chemistry per se. The customary beginning of discussions on the reduction of any specific scientific field is to assume a form of hierarchy among physics, chemistry and biology. Biology deals with complex living systems, whose inner workings can be studied by looking to chemistry. It has become something of a truism these days that the discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s has been perhaps the single most important scientific discovery of the twentieth century. The subsequent strides achieved in molecular biology would seem to indicate that biology straightforwardly reduces to chemistry. But of course not everything about living systems is necessarily a matter of chemistry. The most global aspect that all living systems possess is just the fact that they are alive. To many commentators this attribute is not just the sum of so many chemical parts working together. Poets, mystics and theologians tell us that life is sacred. Philosophers, or at least some of them, tell us that consciousness, a property found in many living systems, is not reducible to chemical or biochemical goings on.