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Lädt ... Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science: A Historical Ontologyvon Ursula Klein
Keine Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.   ipublishcentral | Jul 28, 2009 |  If one can get over the jargon-filled, mechanistic prose of this book, there is an interesting story lurking within. Chemistry and chemists' understanding of materials were shaped significantly by how those materials were used in other contexts (mining, metallurgy, medicine, craftsmanship, &c.) and how chemists went about acquiring those materials for study. It was practical experience, observation and experimentation brought about by the wide overlap between chemical study and artisanship that led to the development of certain classifactory practices within the discipline and beyond. Klein and Lefèvre provide an analysis of how chemistry terms have changed dramatically over time, noting that words in use today (compound, or composition, for example) would have been understood and used very differently in the eighteenth century, thereby making our own analysis of how earlier chemists operated much more difficult. In several chapters the authors analyze early attempts at systematic classification of chemical substances; this gets a bit sloggy at times, but they do provide alternative chapters for those whose interests lie elsewhere. Finally, the third section examines how the classification of plant-based chemical products changed over time. I suspect this book might have been made more interesting for the general reader by removing some of the jargon and adding a bit more narrative structure, but for what it is, it's a tough but interesting read. http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/06/book-review-materials-in-eighteenth.html (  )1  JBD1 | Jun 30, 2007 | Zeige 2 von 2 keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
A history of raw materials and chemical substances from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries that scrutinizes the modes of identification and classification used by chemists and learned practitioners of the period, examining the ways in which their practices and understanding of the material objects changed.In the eighteenth century, chemistry was the science of materials. Chemists treated mundane raw materials and chemical substances as multidimensional objects of inquiry that could be investigated in both practical and theoretical contexts--as useful commodities, perceptible objects of nature, and entities with hidden and imperceptible features. In this history of materials, Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefevre link chemical science with chemical technology, challenging our current understandings of objects in the history of science and the distinction between scientific and technological objects. They further show that chemists' experimental production and understanding of materials changed over time, first in the decades around 1700 and then around 1830, when mundane materials became clearly distinguished from true chemical substances. The authors approach their subject by scrutinizing the modes of identification and classification used by chemists and learned practitioners of the period. They find that chemists' classificatory practices especially were strikingly diverse. In scientific investigations, materials were classified either according to chemical composition or according to provenance and perceptible qualities. The authors further argue that chemists did not live in different worlds of materials before and after the Lavoisierian chemical revolution of the late eighteenth century. Their two main studies first explore the long tradition that informed Lavoisier's new nomenclature and method of classifying pure chemical substances and then describe the continuing classification of plant materials according to a pre-Lavoisierian scheme of provenance and perceptible qualities even after the chemical revolution, until a new mode of classification was accepted in the 1830s. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)540.9Natural sciences and mathematics Chemistry Chemistry Biography And HistoryKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (3.5)
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