The Historiography of the Chemical Revolution:

Patterns of Interpretation in the History of Science

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John G McEvoy

Until recently, the Chemical Revolution was the Cinderella of scientific revolutions, demurely wedged between her noisier and more noticeable sisters – the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century (which saw the birth of modern science), and the Darwinian Revolution of the nineteenth century (which evoked passionate debates about the origin of life and human destiny) – the more prosaic issues associated with the Chemical Revolution attracted the interest of only a handful of historians and historically minded chemists. The last fifty years, however, have witnessed almost as many studies of the Chemical Revolution as occurred in the preceding century.

This study offers a critical survey of past and present interpretations of the Chemical Revolution designed to lend clarity and direction to the current ferment of views. Concerned with interpretive patterns rather than particulars, it relates this sequence of interpretive styles – positivism, post-positivism and the sociology of scientific knowledge – to the emergence and development of philosophical and sociological models of science. It explores within this framework a range of different interpretations of the Chemical Revolution, noting conflicts and tensions between rationalist and relativist, realist and antirealist, materialist and idealist, and essentialist and nominalist philosophical sensibilities. Finally, it outlines an alternative, historical interpretation of the Chemical Revolution, highlighting continuity and discontinuity, identity and difference, permanence and mutability, in the phenomenon of scientific change.

Sample pages

• Chemical Revolution: Introduction
• Chemical Revolution: Index

Readership

Eighteenth-Century Studies, History of Science and Chemistry

Contents

Introduction: The Philosophical and Historiographical Terrain
1 Positivism, Whiggism, and the Chemical Revolution
2 Postpositivism and the History of Science
3 Postpositivist Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
4 From Modernism to Postmodernism: Changing Philosophical Images of Science
5 The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Science
6 Postmodernist and Sociological Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
7 The Chemical Revolution as History

Reviews

'[a] formidable work of scholarship ... The text requires close, analytic reading and repays this effort with a comprehensive view of the scholarship of the chemical revolution. It includes extensive notes, a full bibliography and a comprehensive index. Highly Recommended.'
– CHOICE

'a scholarly and analytical work that requires and deserves close reading ... a major contribution to the history of chemistry.'
– Harold Goldwhite, Bulletin for the History of Chemistry

'McEvoy’s book makes a valuable contribution in its insistence that the Chemical Revolution should be considered in relation to historiography.'
– Jan Golinski, Ambix

Related titles

• James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age
• Literature and Science, 1660–1834
• Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire
• Robert Boyle: By Himself and His Friends: With a Fragment of William Wotton's lost Life of Boyle
• The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 1636–1691
• The Works of Robert Boyle

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