Chemistry: The Impure Science (2nd Edition)

Chemistry: The Impure Science (2nd Edition) PDF Author: Jonathan Simon
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 1908977620
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
What do you associate with chemistry? Explosions, innovative materials, plastics, pollution? The public's confused and contradictory conception of chemistry as basic science, industrial producer and polluter contributes to what we present in this book as chemistry's image as an impure science. Historically, chemistry has always been viewed as impure both in terms of its academic status and its role in transforming modern society. While exploring the history of this science we argue for a characteristic philosophical approach that distinguishes chemistry from physics. This reflection leads us to a philosophical stance that we characterise as operational realism. In this new expanded edition we delve deeper into the questions of properties and potentials that are so important for this philosophy that is based on the manipulation of matter rather than the construction of theories./a

Chemistry: The Impure Science (2nd Edition)

Chemistry: The Impure Science (2nd Edition) PDF Author: Jonathan Simon
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 1908977620
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
What do you associate with chemistry? Explosions, innovative materials, plastics, pollution? The public's confused and contradictory conception of chemistry as basic science, industrial producer and polluter contributes to what we present in this book as chemistry's image as an impure science. Historically, chemistry has always been viewed as impure both in terms of its academic status and its role in transforming modern society. While exploring the history of this science we argue for a characteristic philosophical approach that distinguishes chemistry from physics. This reflection leads us to a philosophical stance that we characterise as operational realism. In this new expanded edition we delve deeper into the questions of properties and potentials that are so important for this philosophy that is based on the manipulation of matter rather than the construction of theories./a

The Lost Elements

The Lost Elements PDF Author: Marco Fontani
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199383340
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
The story of the false entries, good-faith errors, retractions, and mistakes that occurred during the formation of the Periodic Table of Elements as we know it.

Compound Remedies

Compound Remedies PDF Author: Paula S. DeVos
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987945
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Compound Remedies examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City’s Herrera pharmacy—natural substances with known healing powers that formed part of the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. Paula S. De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition from its foundations in ancient Greece to the physician-philosophers of medieval Islamic empires and the Latin West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering a global history of the transmission of these materials, knowledges, and techniques. Her detailed inventory of the Herrera pharmacy reveals the many layers of this tradition and how it developed over centuries, providing new perspectives and insight into the development of Western science and medicine: its varied origins, its engagement with and inclusion of multiple knowledge traditions, the ways in which these traditions moved and circulated in relation to imperialism, and its long-term continuities and dramatic transformations. De Vos ultimately reveals the great significance of pharmacy, and of artisanal pursuits more generally, as a cornerstone of ancient, medieval, and early modern epistemologies and philosophies of nature.

A Philosophical Essay on Molecular Structure

A Philosophical Essay on Molecular Structure PDF Author: Ochiai Hirofumi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527564312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Molecular structure is something taken for granted by chemists. Together with elements, atoms and bonds, it is the basis for talking about organic chemistry. Given molecular structure, chemists are engaged in designing molecules and performing chemical syntheses of a variety of compounds. The structure-activity relationship in drug research is an illuminating example. However, of course, nobody has ever seen molecular structure. Molecules are too small to see. Moreover, molecular structure cannot be derived a priori from fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. This book explores why this is the case. Is what chemists take to be molecular structure real? This book addresses head-on the ontological, as well as epistemological, grounds of one of the most fundamental concepts of chemistry. Its arguments are grounded on the learning of the history of chemistry, philosophy (Kant in particular), quantum mechanics and organic chemistry. The book will serve as a good introduction to the philosophy of chemistry.

Love, Order, and Progress

Love, Order, and Progress PDF Author: Michel Bourdeau
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822983419
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Auguste Comte's doctrine of positivism was both a philosophy of science and a political philosophy designed to organize a new, secular, stable society based on positive or scientific, ideas, rather than the theological dogmas and metaphysical speculations associated with the ancien regime. This volume offers the most comprehensive English-language overview of Auguste Comte's philosophy, the relation of his work to the sciences of his day, and the extensive, continuing impact of his thinking on philosophy and especially secular political movements in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Contributors consider Comte’s reasons for establishing a Religion of Humanity as well as his views on domestic life and the arts in his positivist utopia. The volume further details Comte's attempt to apply his "positive method," first to social science and then to politics and morality, thereby defending the continuity of his career while also critically examining the limits of his approach.

Good Chemistry

Good Chemistry PDF Author: Jan Mehlich
Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
ISBN: 183916039X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Practicing chemists face a number of ethical considerations, from issues of attribution of authorship through the potential environmental impact of a new process to the decision to work on chemicals that could be weaponised. By keeping ethical considerations in mind when working, chemists can build their own credibility, contribute to public trust in the chemical sciences and do science that benefits the world. Divided into three parts, methodological aspects, research ethics, and social and environmental implications, Good Chemistry introduces tools and concepts to help chemists recognise the ethical and social dimensions of their own work and act appropriately. Written to support chemistry students in their studies this book includes practice questions and examples of relevant situations to help students engage with the subject and prepare for their professional life in academia, industry, or public service.

Essays in the Philosophy of Chemistry

Essays in the Philosophy of Chemistry PDF Author: Eric R. Scerri
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019049459X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
The philosophy of chemistry has emerged in recent years as a new and autonomous field within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. With the development of this new discipline, Eric Scerri and Grant Fisher's "Essays in Philosophy of Chemistry" is a timely and definitive guide to all current thought in this field. One of the themes of this collection is how philosophy of chemistry can make a contributions to problems of philosophy more generally, such as how chemistry and quantum chemistry contribute to the philosophy of the mind.

A Guided Science

A Guided Science PDF Author: Jaan Valsiner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351535412
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
That sciences are guided by explicit and implicit ties to their surrounding social world is not new. Jaan Valsiner fills in the wide background of scholarship on the history of science, the recent focus on social studies of sciences, and the cultural and cognitive analyses of knowledge making. The theoretical scheme that he uses to explain the phenomena of social guidance of science comes from his thinking about processes of development in general--his theory of bounded indeterminacy--and on the relations of human beings with their culturally organized environments. Valsiner examines reasons for the slow and nonlinear progress of ideas in psychology as a science at the border of natural and social sciences. Why is that intellectual progress occurs in different countries at different times? Most responses are self-serving blinders for presenting science as a given rather than understanding it as a deeply human experience. For Valsiner, scientific knowledge is cultural at its core. Major changes have occurred in contemporary sciences--collective authorship, fragmentation of knowledge into small, quickly published (and equally quickly retractable) journal articles, and the counting of numbers of such articles by institutions as if that is a measure of "scientific productivity." Scientists are inherently ambivalent about the benefit of these changes for the actual development of knowledge. There is a gradual "takeover" of the domain of scientific knowledge creation by other social institutions with vested interests in defending and promoting knowledge that serves their social interests. Sciences are entering into a new form of social servitude.

Intangible Intangibles

Intangible Intangibles PDF Author: Brad Sherman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009479652
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This book takes as its starting point recent debates over the dematerialisation of subject matter which have arisen because of changes in information technology, molecular biology, and related fields that produced a subject matter with no obvious material form or trace. Arguing against the idea that dematerialisation is a uniquely twenty-first century problem, this book looks at three situations where US patent law has already dealt with a dematerialised subject matter: nineteenth century chemical inventions, computer-related inventions in the 1970s, and biological subject matter across the twentieth century. In looking at what we can learn from these historical accounts about how the law responded to a dematerialised subject matter and the role that science and technology played in that process, this book provides a history of patentable subject matter in the United States. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Chemistry

Chemistry PDF Author: Choon H. Do
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1351858742
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This book discusses the vital role of chemistry in everyday life. It encourages readers to understand how the knowledge of chemistry is important for the development of society and a better future. The text is organized into three parts. Part 1 covers the historical aspects of chemistry and discusses how countless discoveries since the beginning of life on earth have benefited human beings. Part 2 focuses on modern life and describes chemistry’s contribution to the developments in the fields of food and agriculture, energy, transportation, medicine, and communications. Part 3 emphasizes the role of chemists and educators in making the layperson aware of the benefits of chemistry without having them to go through its complexities. Written in an easy-to-understand manner and supplemented by ample number of figures and tables, the book will cater to a broad readership ranging from general readers to experts.