The Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution

Abstract

The Chemical Revolution is becoming a focus of renewed interest among historians and philosophers of science, some of whom wish to relate it to the wider sociocultural context of eighteenth-century life. This context included the cultural movement known as the Enlightenment, at the core of which was a set of metaphysical presuppositions concerning the nature of the knowing mind and its relation to the object of inquiry. The Enlightenment notion of the self-defining subject established a unitary framework of regulative principles, dealing with the relation between science and metaphysics, the method of analysis, and the relation between thought and language, which were variously interpreted in the opposing views that Lavoisier and Priestley developed about the ontology of chemistry, the nature of experimentation, the reform of the chemical nomenclature, and the institutional organization of science. The ensuing dialectic occurred within an historiographical framework in which both sides viewed the chemical upheavals of the eighteenth-century in terms of the Enlightenment notion of the dawning of a new age, radically different from anything that had gone before. The interpretation of the Chemical Revolution developed here calls for a more balanced view of the moments of continuity and discontinuity in scientific change; it also suggests that an adequate conception of scientific change can be formulated only within a framework provided by a robust contextual model of science, in which the distinction between the constitutive aspects of science and the contextual factors is rejected in favour of a relational view of each as constitutive of the other.