The ‘triumph of the anti-phlogistians’ is a familiar story to the historians and philosophers of science who characterize the Chemical Revolution as a broad conceptual shift. The apparent “incommensurability” of the paradigms across the revolutionary divide has caused much anxiety. Chemists could identify phlogiston and oxygen, however, only with different sets of instrumental practices, theoretical schemes, and philosophical commitments. In addition, the substantive counterpart to phlogiston in the new chemistry was not oxygen, but caloric. By focusing on the changing visions (...) of chemical body across the revolutionary divide with a more sensitive probe into the historical actors’ material manipulations and linguistic usage, we can historicize their laboratory realities and philosophical agenda. An archeology of chemical bodies that configures the fragile stability of the material worlds chemists created in succession promises a philosophical horizon that would recognize our hybrid (natural–artificial) environment as an evolving investigative object of science. (shrink)

Bachelard regarded the scientific changes that took place in the early twentieth century as the beginning of a new era, not only for science, but also for philosophy. For him, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics had shown that a new philosophical ontology and a new epistemology were required. I show that the type of philosophy with which he was more closely associated, in particular that of Léon Brunschvicg, offered to him a crucial starting point. Brunschvicg never considered scientific (...) objects as independent of the mind, and as a consequence questions such as the existence of particles independently of the mind, theory or apparatus, were absent from his philosophy, which was rather aimed at analyzing the mind critically, and above all historically. Bachelard accepted the fundamental ideas of Brunschvicg’s philosophy; however, his own reading of contemporary science enabled him to go beyond it, as shown by his emphasis on the social production of knowledge, and by his removal of the distinction between ideas and technologically produced objects of knowledge. For him, modern science teaches philosophy that knowledge is not a phenomenology but rather a ‘phenomenotechnique’. I argue that Bachelard’s view that philosophy ‘should follow science’ stems from moral considerations.Keywords: Gaston Bachelard; Léon Brunschvicg; Phenomenotechnique; Chosisme; Theory of relativity; Quantum mechanics. (shrink)