ON THE NEGLECT OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHEMISTRY1

ABSTRACT. In this paper I present a historiography of the recent emergence of philosophy of chemistry. Special attention is given to the interest in this domain in Eastern Europe before the collapse of the USSR. It is shown that the initial neglect of the philosophy of chemistry is due to the unanimous view in philo-sophy and philosophy of science that only physics is a proper science (to put in Kant’s words). More recently, due to the common though incorrect assumption that chemistry can in principle be reduced to physics, the neglect continued, even when interest in sciences such as biology and psychology entered more strongly in philosophy of science. It is concluded that chemistry is an autonomous science and is perhaps a more ‘typical ’ science than physics. Kant said that there are in the world ‘two things which never cease to call for the admiration and reverence of man: the moral law within ourselves, and the stellar sky above us. ’ But when we turn our thoughts towards the nature of the elements and the peri-odic law, we must add a third subject, namely, ‘the nature of the elementary individuals which we discover everywhere around us.’ Dmitri Mendeleev (1889) Physicists in general tend to restrict themselves to the small part of the physical world with which they deal, and to leave out of their studies all such features as the structure and properties of substances in relation to their chemical composition, and the reactions that change one substance into another