On November 14th, 1770, the young chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) read his ‘Sur la nature de l’eau’ to the Académie des Sciences. Eventually published in the Académie’s journal in 1773, the two-part memoire challenged a widely held view of earlier experimenters: the transmutability of matter. Specifically, experimenters such as Jean-Baptiste Van Helmont (1580–1644), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), and Ole Borsch (1626–1690) had noted that when distilled water was heated in a glass vessel, a small amount of earthy residue remained, (...) seemingly demonstrating the transmutation of water into earth. Antoine-Laurent designed an experiment to determine whether it was really to the ‘destruction of a portion of the water that this residual earth owed its origin, or if it was to that of the glass.’ In partial agreement with Jean-Baptiste Le Roy (1720–1800), a fellow academician, Antoine-Laurent aimed to disprove the antiquated belief – the transmutation of one element into another – by using a glass vessel from the alchemist’s cabinet: the pelican. (shrink)

BOTH Lavoisier and Columbus are universally and deservedly famous, but owing to the divergence between their fields of endeavour and the different periods in which they flourished, it will probably come as something of a surprise to the reader to find their names coupled together. They were thus connected by a French author, Franqois Pagbs (1745-1802), who wrote a collection of imaginary dialogues between well-known public figures of the past as well as of the times in which he lived. (...) Each dialogue illustrates a particular moral aphorism with which it closes. The dialogues of the dead with the maxims they are supposed to set forth are as follows. (shrink)

This essay focuses on an unknown Latin translation of Georg Ernst Stahl's treatise on the nature of sulfur (Zufällige Gedancken und Nützliche Bedencken über den Streit von dem so genannten Sulfure). The original edition, published in 1718, laid the foundation for the phlogiston theory, which dominated European chemistry until the early 1770s. However, the dissemination of the treatise on sulfur outside the German states remained limited. Its Latin translation proposes a different scenario as it was owned by three prominent French (...) chemists: Étienne-François Geoffroy, Jean Hellot and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Geoffroy's early interest in Stahl's chemistry has been evidenced and it is suggested that the acquisition of the manuscript might be linked to his connection with Stahl through Caspar Neumann, a chemist from Berlin. When he entered in the possession of the manuscript Jean Hellot wrote a long excerpt of Stahl’s work. Lavoisier acquired the manuscript in 1766, and his critical reading of Stahl's work significantly influenced his own effort to outline a new theory of combustion. This manuscript represents a significant historical connection between Stahl’s phlogiston theory and Lavoisier's revolutionary ideas. (shrink)

SINCE the publication in 1952 of Douglas McKie's Antoine Lavoisier, the standard biography which is of great value to all students of eighteenth-century science, there has been a steady increase in knowledge of most aspects of Lavoisier's life and work. This survey will be concerned ,mainly with monographs and papers in scientific and historical journals, but several important books may first be noted.

Implicit in the theoretical chemical writings of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier is a theory of language that is not in complete harmony with the philosopher of language whom he takes as his explicit authority, Condillac. Lavoisier's reform of the nomenclature of chemistry leads to his dividing scientific language into two sets with different properties: a denotative artificial nomenclature and connotative natural language. This division supposedly permits knowledge to be stored in the nomenclature while the natural language retains the (...) rhetorical tools necessary for creative thought and argument. The consequences of this reform of scientific language are, however, the opposite of what Lavoisier had intended. (shrink)

The list of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's opponents is a long and distinguished one, ranging from Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish to Jean-Paul Marat. Among the less distinguished members of this company is Antoine Monnet, a minor chemist and mineralogist whose fame rests in large part on the very fact that he and Lavoisier became enemies. Unlike his better-known contemporaries, Monnet remains almost wholly neglected, and no attempt has yet been made to sort out the issues in his (...) controversy with Lavoisier; instead, Lavoisier's biographers have been content to accept Lavoisier's own version of at least a part of the affair, with the result that Monnet has emerged as the villain of the piece and Lavoisier as the injured victim. The two men probably first came into close contact in 1776 or 1777, the nature of their relationship has remained obscure for the period 1777–1780, and the situation after 1780 has been summarized by biographers in a manner resembling that of Edouard Grimaux:“ayant en main tous les documents réunis par Guettard et Lavoisier, il [Monnet] ajouta de nouvelles cartes à celles qui étaient déjà gravées, et publia, en 1780, un altas minéralogique incomplet, qu'il signa avec Guettard, tout en s'attribuant la plus grande part du travail. Il cita, il est vrai, Lavoisier comme l'auteur des seize premières cartes, mais il utilisa sans son aveu et sans le nommer les matériaux préparés pour le reste du travail, et négligea d'indiquer que les coupes placées en marge de chaque carte étaient le résultat des nivellements faits au baromètre par Lavoisier. Celui-ci en fut vivement froissé … Il trouva toujours en Monnet un adversaire obstiné qui, en 1798, attaquait encore les doctrines nouvelles en publiant une soi-disant Démonstration de la fausseté des principes des nouveaux chimistes.”. (shrink)

Summary The balloon mania between 1783 and 1785 put an extraordinary strain on the Paris Academy of Sciences, threatening its status as the highest tribunal of European science. Faced with repeated royal directives and public frenzy, the Academy manoeuvred carefully to steer the research toward the hydrogen balloon and thereby to maintain its scientific superiority. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier seized this moment when the promise of ‘the empire of airs’ brought science to the centre of public attention to push his (...) theoretical reform for chemistry. He utilized the established protocol of the Academy and the resources of the Republic of Letters to broadly publicize his first decomposition of water in April 1784. Once he attained the publicity and the balloon fever began to cool, he staged a much more elaborate experiment for the experts in February 1785. Although this second, large-scale experiment cost much expense and effort, Lavoisier never published a full account. The differential care given to the two experiments can only be understood in their divergent rhetorical contexts. The written accounts in 1784 addressed the court of public opinion, while the exclusive performance in 1785 aimed at the court of experts to inaugurate the collaborative phase of the Chemical Revolution. (shrink)

Le laboratoire alchimique, qui passe volontiers pour le lieu privilégié de l’élaboration de la chimie ancienne, symbolisait à la fois le caractère privé, si ce n’est secret, de cette science et la nécessaire articulation de ses théories avec une pratique qui lui donnait son sens : il ne s’agissait pas seulement de trouver la pierre philosophale, mais aussi de fabriquer des médicaments et des substances chimiques répondant aux demandes sociales. Lieu privé, réservé à des disciples choisis, il...

Summary The balloon mania between 1783 and 1785 put an extraordinary strain on the Paris Academy of Sciences, threatening its status as the highest tribunal of European science. Faced with repeated royal directives and public frenzy, the Academy manoeuvred carefully to steer the research toward the hydrogen balloon and thereby to maintain its scientific superiority. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier seized this moment when the promise of ?the empire of airs? brought science to the centre of public attention to push his (...) theoretical reform for chemistry. He utilized the established protocol of the Academy and the resources of the Republic of Letters to broadly publicize his first decomposition of water in April 1784. Once he attained the publicity and the balloon fever began to cool, he staged a much more elaborate experiment for the experts in February 1785. Although this second, large-scale experiment cost much expense and effort, Lavoisier never published a full account. The differential care given to the two experiments can only be understood in their divergent rhetorical contexts. The written accounts in 1784 addressed the court of public opinion, while the exclusive performance in 1785 aimed at the court of experts to inaugurate the collaborative phase of the Chemical Revolution. (shrink)

Nietzsche once proclaimed himself the 'Buddha of Europe', and throughout his life Buddhism held enormous interest for him. While he followed Buddhist thinking in demolishing what he regarded as the two-headed delusion of Being and Self, he saw himself as advocating a response to the ensuing nihilist crisis that was diametrically opposed to that of his Indian counterpart. In this book Antoine Panaïoti explores the deep and complex relations between Nietzsche's views and Buddhist philosophy. He discusses the psychological models (...) and theories which underlie their supposedly opposing ethics of 'great health' and explodes the apparent dichotomy between Nietzsche's Dionysian life-affirmation and Buddhist life-negation, arguing for a novel, hybrid response to the challenge of formulating a tenable post-nihilist ethics. His book will interest students and scholars of Nietzsche's philosophy, Buddhist thought and the metaphysical, existential and ethical issues that emerge with the demise of theism. (shrink)

Le laboratoire alchimique, qui passe volontiers pour le lieu privilégié de l’élaboration de la chimie ancienne, symbolisait à la fois le caractère privé, si ce n’est secret, de cette science et la nécessaire articulation de ses théories avec une pratique qui lui donnait son sens : il ne s’agissait pas seulement de trouver la pierre philosophale, mais aussi de fabriquer des médicaments et des substances chimiques répondant aux demandes sociales. Lieu privé, réservé à des disciples choisis, il .

Assembly of minimal genomes revealed many genes encoding unknown functions. Three overlooked functional categories account for some of them. Cells are prone to make errors and age. As a first key function, discrimination between proper and changed entities is indispensable. Discrimination requires management of information, an authentic, yet abstract, cur- rency of reality. For example proteins age, sometimes very fast. The cell must identify, then get rid of old proteins without destroying young ones. Implementing discrimination in cells leads to the (...) second set of functions, usually ignored. Being abstract, information must nevertheless be embodied into material entities, with unavoidable idiosyncratic properties. This brings about novel unmet needs. Hence, the buildup of cells elicits specific but awkward material implementations, ‘kludges’ that become essential under particular settings, while difficult to identify. Finally, a third functional category char- acterizes the need for growth, with metabolic implementations allowing the cell to put together the growth of its cytoplasm, membranes, and genome, spanning different spatial dimensions. Solving this metabolic quandary, critical for engineering novel synthetic biology chassis, uncovered an unexpected role for CTP synthetase as the coordinator of nonhomothetic growth. Because a significant number of SynBio constructs aim at creating cell factories we expect that they will be attacked by viruses (it is not by chance that the function of the CRISPR system was identified in industrial settings). Substantiating the role of CTP, natural selection has dealt with this hurdle via synthesis of the antimetabolite 30-deoxy-30,40-didehydro- CTP, recruited for antiviral immunity in all domains of life. (shrink)

The epistemology of models has to face a conundrum: models are often described as highly idealised, and yet they are considered to be vehicles for scientific explanations. Truth-oriented—veritist—conceptions of explanation seem thereby undermined by this contradiction. In this article, I will show how this apparent paradox can be avoided by appealing to the notion of fiction. If fictionalism is often thought to lead to various flavours of instrumentalism, thereby weakening the veritist hopes, the fiction view of models offers a framework (...) much richer than it seems at first sight. To do so, I will call upon the concepts of modality, counterfactual structure and credible worlds. In the end, veritism of explanation and fiction can indeed go hand in hand, but the scope of explanations we can hope to draw from models must be more precisely delineated. (shrink)

To fulfill their crucial duty of relieving suffering in their patients, physicians may have to administer palliative sedation when they implement treatment-limitation decisions such as the withdrawal of life-supporting interventions in patients with poor prognosis chronic severe brain injury. The issue of palliative sedation deserves particular attention in adults with serious brain injuries and in neonates with severe and irreversible brain lesions, who are unable to express pain or to state their wishes. In France, treatment limitation decisions for these patients (...) are left to the physicians. Treatment-limitation decisions are made collegially, based on the presence of irreversible brain lesions responsible for chronic severe disorders of consciousness. Before these decisions are implemented, they are communicated to the relatives. Because the presence and severity of pain cannot be assessed in these patients, palliative analgesia and/or sedation should be administered. However, palliative sedation is a complex strategy that requires safeguards to prevent a drift toward hastening death or performing covert euthanasia. In addition to the law on patients' rights at the end of life passed in France on April 22, 2005, a recent revision of Article 37 of the French code of medical ethics both acknowledges that treatment-limitation decisions and palliative sedation may be required in patients with severe brain injuries and provides legal and ethical safeguards against a shift towards euthanasia. This legislation may hold value as a model for other countries where euthanasia is illegal and for countries such as Belgium and Netherlands where euthanasia is legal but not allowed in patients incapable of asking for euthanasia but in whom a treatment limitation decision has been made. (shrink)