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Alchemy, Mining, Speculation & Experimentation

Okan Nurettin Okur investigates the philosophy of chemistry.

Imagine a chemist and a philosopher going on a long walk. Do you think they could discover common ground while looking at nature together? On the one hand, we have a scientist, who believes in the infallibility of formulas, who accepts that numbers cannot lie, who measures and analyzes, who seeks the answer in the world he sees through the lens of a microscope; on the other hand, a philosopher, whose only tool is reason, and who questions everything to the finest detail, and yet is never fully convinced…

Actually, they’re not that far from each other. It was Aristotle who made the first systematic investigations into chemistry through observations and conceptual analysis in the fourth century BC. In addition, alchemy emerged through the blending of the natural philosophy of ancient Greece with Eastern mysticism.

A History of the Philosophy of Chemistry

Alchemy, which was popular throughout the Middle Ages, was seen as mystical philosophical knowledge during the Renaissance, but it would also lay the foundations of modern chemistry. With a history of at least 2,500 years, beginning in Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Iran, India, and China, alchemy’s greatest goal was to find the ‘philosopher’s stone’, a mystical substance believed to be able to transform all other metals into gold. They were also looking for the elixir of life, which gave immortality; love potions; and so on.

Alchemy was a source of inspiration for natural philosophers trying to unravel the secrets of nature during the Renaissance, in particular, those alchemical experiments aimed at examining the components of matter and understanding how the elements transformed into each other. During this investigation, techniques were used which would later form the basis of modern chemistry, such as metal purification, distillation, and fermentation.

By the seventeenth century, science and philosophy were developing on the basis of experimental and observational physics. René Descartes’ Principia Philosophiae, published in 1644, undoubtedly played an important role in the influence of physics on philosophy. Here Descartes likened all sciences to a tree whose trunk was composed of physics. He built his philosophy in this context. This dominant influence of physics was felt on the other sciences for centuries. But in the eighteenth century, with scientists such as Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), developments in chemistry could be considered revolutionary: I call this the ‘Copernican revolution’ of chemistry. Lavoisier’s ‘Law of Conservation of Mass’ in particular signalled the move of chemistry away from alchemy and the replacement of its mystical aura with an experimental, observational basis.

The transition from alchemy to chemistry brought with it important philosophical questions about the nature of matter and the scientific method. One debate was whether chemistry was a true science. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – who lived at the same time as Lavoisier – argued that the purely observational nature of chemistry was insufficient to produce precise laws because it did not involve mathematics. Kant divided the sciences into two main categories: the rational sciences, and the experimental sciences. The rational sciences were those that worked with mathematically precise laws, such as physics, while the experimental sciences were those that were based on observations of qualitative changes and reactions, but which could not develop precise laws. In Kant’s classification, chemistry was an experimental science because in chemistry, instead of universal mathematical laws, there were qualitative experimental results: changes one could see, but not measure. Therefore, Kant dismissed chemistry as ‘a part of natural philosophy’, and regarded it more as an applied endeavor. At this point, the main question is this: Is chemistry a theoretical science that seeks to understand the basic structure and principles of the physical universe, or is it an applied science that seeks only to obtain practical results? The emergence of a substantive philosophy of chemistry would have to wait until after Kant, when it came under the influence of later German idealist philosophy, such as Hegelian dialectics, which developed against Newtonian mechanistic philosophy.

The idealist philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1785-1854) was one of the first to use the term ‘philosophy of chemistry’. For Schelling, chemistry was an important discipline for understanding the unity and vitality of nature; but nature was not limited to material processes. In Schelling’s philosophy, nature does not consist only of inanimate physical processes: nature is alive itself, and has processes of movement and development of its own. He saw nature as a dynamic organic whole, and therefore opposed mechanistic chemistry. Instead, in Schelling’s thought, chemistry was a tool for studying both the material world and its metaphysical foundations. Schelling’s aim was to reach ‘transcendental’ conclusions for chemistry, biology and medicine.

Image © Abigail Vettese 2025

GWF Hegel (1770-1831) considered chemistry a part of natural philosophy. However, in Hegel’s dialectical system of the history of human intellectual development, chemistry was seen as a stage between physics and biology, as a field of study in which the organic had partially not yet fully emerged. According to Hegel, although chemistry considered a more advanced stage of nature than the mere matter physics studied, chemicals per se do not possess a fully organic existence, and so were of limited interest. Yet whereas in physics, matter was mostly explained by mechanical processes and forces, in chemistry, the mutual reactions of substances with each other became important. And chemistry consists of processes rather than components, and substances are the product of processes. So for Hegel, nature began to show its dialectical development through chemical processes.

When the place of physics, chemistry, and biology in the history of philosophy is considered, it’s clear that chemistry has had less influence than the others, and has been philosophized about less. Although there are many reasons for this, one major reason is that chemistry for a long time did not have core paradigms, as physics had with Newtonian and then quantum mechanics, or as with the theory of evolution in biology. The philosophy of science has also had problems in gaining an independent disciplinary identity, and has often been reduced to physics explanations. Or as the physicist Paul Dirac put it, since the laws governing the behavior of the constituents of the atom have become known, hasn’t doing chemistry been reduced to only dealing with the equations of physics? This question is especially acute as chemical reactions can now be explained through the physics of electron pairings in orbitals around atoms: what reacts with what is all about how the electrons of atoms interact with the electrons of atoms around them.

Especially after this emergence of quantum chemistry as well as thermodynamic studies early in the twentieth century, the view that chemistry can be mathematized has become stronger, and quantum studies also paved the way for a more refined philosophy of chemistry. So the philosophy of chemistry attracts increasing attention today.

The Philosophy of Chemistry

After giving all this information about the historical process, let’s do some philosophy of chemistry.

The view accepted for centuries by scientific disciplines ranging from chemistry to physiology, was that matter is inert. That is to say, physical objects cannot move on their own they need an external force to be applied. This view is a general metaphysical thesis rather than a hypothesis specific to any science, but it wasn’t questioned for centuries and was seen as a presupposition for scientific practice. But those who started with this presupposition did not get very far. The inertness of matter posed problems in many areas when an external force was sought every time, from fermentation to the emergence of mind. For example, how does bread or wine ferment? Those who argued that it was impossible for matter to do this on its own kept looking for a force that enabled chemical reactions. So from antiquity to almost the modern period, it was claimed that there was a force that set matter in motion for both chemistry and life, which was variously called the anima mundi, spiritus universi, weltgeist, or elan vitale. For instance, in his seventeenth century textbook Cours de Chymie, the famous chemist Nicolas Lemery (1645-1715) tried to explain fermentation under the presupposition of inert matter. According to Lemery, the spirits in substances such as sugar, which were carriers of power, bubbled as they left the substance, causing fermentation. It’s possible to see countless chemical reactions in this sort of way, from breathing, to the fermentation of bread, from medicines to the weather. However, for a long time, chemical reactions were considered the subject of research by scientists, and did not interest philosophers. It was simply assumed that it was enough to explain the basic properties and reactions of matter scientifically. But as we have seen, the philosophy of chemistry has been gradually developing over the centuries.

Generally, we can say that the philosophy of chemistry is the field of thought that philosophically interprets the principles and contents of chemistry. So if the main subject of chemistry is the transformations and interactions of matter, then typical subjects in the philosophy of chemistry are the epistemological and metaphysical aspects of these transformations, including the causal relationships, and questions of determinism or indeterminism. For example, is it possible to talk about causality in chemical reactions, and how? Other questions that could be asked here include: What are the basic properties of a substance, either element or compound? How are the properties of a compound derived from the properties of its component elements? Can chemistry as a discipline be reduced to physical processes, and explained by physics and mathematics alone? Or if it is an independent discipline, does it have its own rules and concepts? What kind of differences do reductive and holistic approaches to matter make? Are chemical laws really universal? And so on.

It’s impossible to address all these questions here. Instead let’s take another journey to understanding the strange world of matter.

Victor Cyprien, the mining engineer hero of Jules Verne’s 1884 novel The Vanished Diamond, wants to produce an artificial diamond so that he can get rich and marry the girl he loves. His experiments seem to work at first, but the end result is failure. No matter what he does, he cannot artificially produce a diamond – mainly because the formation of diamonds depends on volcanic processes, the compression of the earth’s crust, and, of course, the crucial millions of years to cook. (Although synthetic diamonds are now produced, they are usually used for industrial purposes and are still no match for natural diamonds.) But diamond is simply the most valuable form of carbon, which can also appear as coal, graphite, petroleum… Carbon is even the basic component of DNA: and the chemistry of carbon is even called ‘organic chemistry’. And due to the natural carbon cycle, the interconnection of all living and non-living things is also thanks to carbon.

So what is the metaphysical essence underlying all these appearances of carbon? The bonding possibilities of carbon atoms, of course. Carbon takes completely different forms through the carbon atoms bonding together differently under different conditions. And carbon’s ability to be part of so many different substances is based on its unique capacity to form strong but flexible bonds with other elements. These properties make carbon the basic building block of organic chemistry, thus constructing the basic components of life, such as proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids.

Since we see these different modes of existence in the element carbon, I think we can claim that matter is not static even in its solid state. Rather, matter is in constant chemical reaction, and environmental factors such as temperature, pressure, or magnetism cause matter to change in different ways.

Chemistry by Paul Gregory

Issues in the Philosophy of Chemistry

According to Joachim Schummer in his 1996 book Realismus und Chemie, ‘substance philosophers’ define a chemical reaction by the changes of substances, while ‘process philosophers’ define substances by their characteristic chemical reactions. But let’s here briefly remember the two philosophers who started this debate in about the sixth century BC: Heraclitus, who defended dynamism in nature by saying that everything flows, and Parmenides, who argued that change is only an illusion. Heraclitus defended the philosophy of process by accepting constant change; Parmenides defended the philosophy of inert matter by accepting that the universe is ultimately one, and static. These ideas fed into the thinking of alchemists about the nature and behaviour of matter.

It would also be appropriate to mention Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) at this point. Bachelard coined the term ‘metachemistry’ as an alternative to metaphysics. According to Bachelard, metaphysics has only one possible concept of matter – static matter – because it confines itself to the study of the form of matter as characterized through general physical properties. Metachemistry, on the other hand, makes use of knowledge of various essential chemical activities, and accepts that chemical substances are products of chemical techniques (rather than simply ‘being substances’, say). In ‘non-Lavoisian chemistry’ (that is, in metachemistry), matter becomes process, and a dynamic understanding of being emerges. Thus, static, stable, defined matter loses its status, and becoming comes to the fore. Bachelard also argues that all substances are artificial; for he said, once they have been analyzed, purified, and characterized, chemicals have become hybrid products of nature. As he puts it, even “Hydrogen and oxygen are in many respects, so to speak, social, highly civilized gases” (Le matérialisme rationnel, 1953). He further argues that chemistry is a human science rather than a natural science, saying that “Nature really wanted to realize chemistry, so he invented the chemist” (Ibid).

Developments in chemistry and other sciences show that the apparent properties of matter depend on downward causality. Downward causality is related to the concepts of emergence, self-organization, and supervenience, and adopts the principle that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. For example, the question ‘How can a white salt be obtained by combining a soft silver metal like sodium with a greenish gas like chlorine?’ (Na+Cl=NaCl) is for most chemists a rhetorical question naively asked by philosophers; in reality, sodium chloride is not the product of metallic sodium and chlorine gas. Rather, it is the product of the combination of sodium hydroxide with hydrochloric acid. Nevertheless, this philosophical naiveté has been fruitful in discussing extremely complex philosophical issues raised by chemical reactions, such as causality, emergence, and the ontological status of chemical entities.

Another important issue in chemistry is axiomatization, or the effort to build a coherent system based on fundamental principles. Chemistry has principles and laws that are similar to fundamental axioms, and which help us understand chemical events. Some basic axioms in chemistry are: atomic theory; the law of conservation of mass (Lavoisier’s Law); the law of constant proportions (Proust’s Law); the law of multiple proportions (Dalton’s Law); the conservation of energy; Avogadro’s principle… These axioms play a crucial role in understanding the fundamental structures and relationships in chemistry, and theories in chemistry are built on these fundamental axioms.

Chemistry can be more difficult to axiomatize than physics because chemistry deals with complex physical systems, and it studies many unique processes and interactions. Complex systems at the atomic and molecular level are much more diverse than the basic systems of physics (compare chemical axioms with Newton’s laws of motion, say), due to the much more complex structures. In addition, it’s often not possible to perform direct calculations in chemistry. Usually, observed changes in macro-structure phenomena are extrapolated to the microstructure. In other words, while the processes take place on a macroscopic scale that can be observed and measured by humans, the chemical phenomena themselves happen on a microscopic scale, and conclusions about them are based on the effects seen on the larger scale. The fact that an element or compound performs different chemical reactions at different temperatures and pressures makes axiomatization even more difficult. In addition, observing complex dynamic processes in chemistry means that chemical reactions and properties require a large set of axioms. Modelling and mathematizing chemical processes has also required the development of mathematics, particularly statistics. (It could be questioned how adequate our current mathematical knowledge is for analyzing complex chemical reactions and processes.)

Chemistry is not only a science dealing with the structure and reactions of substances, but also has a critical role in helping us understand the building blocks of nature and the functioning of the material world. Moreover, these days, the philosophy of chemistry emphasizes that chemistry is not only a scientific but also a social phenomenon. Chemical processes shape society in many fields, from pharmaceuticals to agriculture, from industry to food production. Nanotechnology, biochemistry, and environmental chemistry are also at the center of much innovative research. All this raises the ethical and social responsibilities of chemistry. The societal impact of chemical technologies, the responsibilities of chemists, and the shaping of chemical policies, are new areas of discussion.

Overall, we can see that the philosophy of chemistry treats chemistry not only as a scientific discipline, but also as a philosophical tool for gaining a deeper understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature.

Okan Nurettin Okur is a biomedical engineer and a doctoral researcher in the philosophy of science, with a particular focus on the philosophy of biology.