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Review of
The Scientists Atom and the Philosophers Stone:
How Science Succeeded and Philosophy Failed to Gain Knowledge of Atoms,
by Alan Chalmers:
Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 279. Springer, Dordrecht, 2009.
(ISBN 978-90-481-2361-2) 287 plus xi pages, $139.00. (Kindle edition, $99.69.)
by
Joseph E. Earley, Sr., Department of Chemistry, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA.
earleyj@georgetown.edu

Alan Chalmers has strong views about what does and does not deserve to be considered science. 1

In this book he examines a number of historical developments that are frequently cited in accounts of the
origin of the outlook he calls atomism the doctrine that all materials are composed of microscopic
components that account for the properties of those materials. In most such episodes the author finds
reason to challenge conventional understandings such as those generally used in introductory
chemistry courses and to take issue with specialized historians and philosophers.
Chalmers holds that testing the adequacy of scientific claims requires active experimental
intervention. (10)2 Only theories that suggest novel experiments (and can be confirmed by results of
those tests) count as science, in his view. Accounts that are merely accommodations to otherwise
known facts do not qualify. (113)

A key focus of the present work is understanding how

preconditions necessary to make possible an atomic theory that is experimentally testable came to be.
(11) The author aims to fruitfully draw a contrast between scientific and philosophical atomism in
order to illustrate instructive differences between the two modes of knowledge. (13)
Local historians concentrate on events in a specific town or a single county: this study
concentrates on the history of one sharply-defined aspect of recent science. The back cover of the book
1 Some years ago the same author wrote What is this thing called science? an introduction to
philosophy of science for students not majoring in philosophy.
2 Numbers in parentheses indicate page-numbers in the book under review.

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points out: This is not history for its own sake. The last paragraph of the book states: I presume that
in this book I have been engaged in philosophy (and some history) but I have not been practicing
science. One of these days someone should write a book called What is this thing called philosophy?
But not me. (268) Clearly this book is not philosophy for philosophys sake either.
Chalmers disputes the usual understanding that Leucippus and his pupil Democritus (ca. 460 BC
ca. 370 BC) were originators of atomism. He grants that Democritus used a doctrine involving atoms to
refute earlier claims of Parmenides that all change is mere illusion, but argues that Democritus had an
ambivalent attitude to the evidence of the senses (40) and that his atoms were stone-like. (19) On
this basis, Pre-Socratic Greek atomism has little, if any, claim to ancestry of modern scientific
atomism. Subsequently the Epicureans, whose doctrines the Roman poet Lucretius (~99 BC- ~55 BC)
later summarized, did value observation and modified Democritan atomism to deal with Zenos
paradoxes but nevertheless, in Chalmers opinion, they also did not make significant headway in
establishing the existence and properties of atoms.(57)
Aristotle vigorously opposed the atomistic approaches of Democritus and of the Epicureans, but
Chalmers holds that aspects of Aristotles discussion3 of how substances may combine suggest quite
openly that substances have minimal parts.(65) Chalmers considers this identification of minima as
more of an anticipation of current science than any aspect of the earlier atomisms that Aristotle rejected.
A brief treatment of the thought of the medieval Scholastics focuses on their discussion of whether
each entity has one substantial form or a multiplicity of such forms. A discussion of the work of two
alchemists is largely based on recent historical research of William Newman, 4 who identified the author
usually designated Pseudo-Geber as the thirteenth-century Franciscan, Paul of Taranto. The works of
Pseudo-Geber arguably contain the first mention of the important chemicals now known as nitric acid,
sulfuric acid, and aqua regia. Whether writing under his own name or that of Geber, Paul used
3 When considering the discussion of chemical interaction in Aristotles Generation and
Corruption, Chalmers correctly uses combination or mixt as translations of the Greek word that is
transliterated mixis. Present-day philosophers often erroneously translate this Greek word as mixture,
even though the English word mixture has a well-defined meaning in modern chemistry a meaning
that is quite different from what Aristotle meant by mixis.
4 William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the
Scientific Revolution (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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Aristotelian philosophy and recognized the existence of both minima and corpuscles. Chalmers
quotes Newmans opinion that it is not too much to view his notion of a fortissimo composition joining
discrete corpuscles as having a kinship with the chemical bond of contemporary chemistry but
Chalmers disagrees pointing out that Pauls atomism was only rough and ready, and in any case
Pauls work did not play a role in the academic discussions of his day.
The second alchemist considered is Daniel Sennert (15721637), professor of medicine at the
German University of Wittenberg. Sennert used Aristotelian concepts and taught that materials were
composed of atoms. Chalmers takes Newmans opinion to be that Sennerts research marks at least the
beginnings of experimental knowledge of atoms (91) but disagrees because Sennerts atomism was
accommodated to experimental phenomena rather than being confirmed or supported by them. (93)
Chalmers has little or nothing to say about the influence of the fifteenth-century rediscovery of the
poetry of Lucretius, or about changes in the notion of chemical principles and elements from the
fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries that other philosophical accounts5 regard as having been important
intellectual influences on early scientists.
Chalmers maintains that the version of the mechanical philosophy that Robert Boyle (1627-1691)
defended was close to Democritan atomism, since it involved rock-like atoms with unchanging shape
and size. (The philosophers stone mentioned in the books subtitle refers to such particles rather than
to any alchemical material.) He claims that the supposedly mechanical accounts that Boyle produced of
his many chemical experiments were adaptations of his theory to the observations rather than theorybased explanations of those results. He holds that Boyles strong opposition to the Scholastic notion of
substantial form accounted for his counterproductive opinion that classification of substances into kinds
are a human imposition rather than one arising naturally from the nature of the substances classified.
(151) Although Isaac Newton was a convinced atomist as well as a mathematician, practicing alchemist,
and physicist, Newtons atomism was Boyles mechanical atomism augmented by the addition of interparticulate attractive and repulsive forces governed by his laws of motion. (127). Chalmers claims that
the atomistic matter theories espoused by Boyle and Newton did not productively inform their
chemistry nor were they significantly supported by it.(150)
Chalmers holds that developments in technology (e.g., pharmacy, mining, weaponry) rather than
any theoretical progress accounted for the rapid increase in chemical knowledge that occurred during

5 E.g., Ivor Leclerc, The Nature of Physical Existence (New York: Humanities Press, 1972).

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the seventeen and eighteenth centuries.6 He generally follows Ursula Kleins account 7 of the clarification
of the notions of chemical substance, chemical compound, and chemical combination (140) in
eighteenth-century France. He argues that the chemical revolution that reformulated that knowledge in
terms of the present system of chemical elements did not involve important contributions from atomism.
While agreeing that Daltons atomic theory emerged out of a Newtonian atomistic theory of
gasses (174) and the three laws of proportion are straightforward and natural consequences of his
theory (180), Chalmers claims that there is much that is misleading about seeing Daltons atomic
theory as the beginnings of a testable theory version of atomism. (173) Rather than using Daltons
weight-centered system directly, nineteenth-century chemists developed their own similar approach
using equivalent weights. Chemistry developed rapidly after Berzelius invented a precursor of the
modern system of chemical formulae. This progress led to clarification of the status of isomers and the
determinations of reliable molecular weights for organic compounds. Chalmers considers that
nineteenth-century organic chemists operated as agnostic anti-atomists but that their work finally
established modern atomism as a proper part of science. However, it was a chemical atomism that
emerged out of chemical practice and owed little or nothing to the physical atomism that has a strong
history from Democritus to Dalton.
Chapters that concern the discovery of the electron and the development of thermodynamics and
kinetic theory8 seem rather anticlimactic; since the author clearly considers that the main thesis of the
book is demonstrated by the account of the rise of organic chemistry.

In A History of Chemistry, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) Bernadette

Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers discuss how such developments influenced the rise of
institutions to provide education in chemistry, which also functioned as centers of research.
7 E.g., Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefevre, Materials in Eighteenth-century Science: A Historical
Ontology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
8 Chalmers argues that the kinetic theory was not fully established until Perrins early twentiethcentury experiments on Brownian motion.

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Historians of science are often accused of producing Whig history. 9 British historian Hugh
Trevor-Roper10 described a classic example of this regrettable practice: The refusal to admit the
autonomy of the past, the insistence that the past must be judged in relation to the present, and is
responsible to the present, is fundamental to Macaulays historical interpretation and is the cause of
some of his historical errors. In presenting evidence to support his thesis, Chalmers systematically
ignores context. It is difficult to see how an adequate account of complex intellectual and practical
developments could emerge from such a Whiggish approach. Chalmers explicitly notes that distortions
result when current concepts are imposed on ancient sources, and writes I intend my characterizations
of past versions of atomism to meet the highest standards a historian could aspire to. (11) Readers may
come to different opinions on how successful he is in this.
While he properly notes that for Aristotle, form only exists in individual worldly entities (62),
Chalmers neglects to notice that the same restriction applies to Aristotles second component of all
entities, hyle, generally translated as matter.

The concept of hyle that figures in Aristotelian

hylomorphism was quite different from the notion of matter that emerged in the Renaissance. 11 In the
modern usage, matter has full existence in its own right. For Aristotle, strictly speaking, hyle (matter)
only exists as a component of entities (ousia12). In the hylomorphic system, it is no more possible to
have free-standing matter than it is to have free-standing form.13
This is related to one of the authors main points he correctly claims that the notion of the atom
that emerged from nineteenth-century chemistry was not the same as the physicists atom that had
figured in the thought of Boyle and Newton (and perhaps also of Democritus and Dalton). The reactive
atoms that emerged from nineteen-century chemistry were far from stone-like bits of inertial matter.
Chalmers understands atomism as holding that properties of composites are adequately understood
9 Nick Jardine, "Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science," History
of Science, 41 (2003): 125-140, at pp. 127-8.
10 Hugh Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010,
page 211.). Chapter 11 reprints the Introduction to Thomas B. Macaulay, The History of England,
edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper (London: Washington Square Press, 1968).
11 Ivor Leclerc, op. cit., p. 35.
12 In its primary meaning, that term refers to any specific individual entity.

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solely in terms of fully-independent, individual components. This view was a dominant aspect of science
in the first half of the twentieth century, and is now advocated by some reductive physicalists in the
philosophy of mind and by genetic determinists in biology. However the authors decision to end his
historical survey in the first decade of the twentieth century was a prudent one. Developments shortly
after that time called main concepts of simple versions of atomism into serious question.14 That approach
is now recognized as having a limited range of applicability. The main foci of contemporary science
have quite different emphases.15
Accepting the books second main point that accommodating ones theoretical approach to
independently known data does not qualify as science would lead to reclassification of much past and
present research, including most modeling and semi-empirical investigations. Chalmers seems to agree
with those Scholastics he called hard-line Aristotelians -- in holding that science has a single, clear,
and rigid definition (a single substantial form) that excludes all variations from the ideal. Ludwig
Wittgenstein famously showed that it is difficult or impossible to define what counts as playing a game.
Can doing science be less complex than game-playing? Even if readers may not agree with all the points
he raises, the authors reexamination of historical stories widely used as background for introductory
chemistry courses merits the serious attention of professional philosophers and historians, and also of
science educators. This book resembles George W. Bushs 2010 memoir Decision Points (New York:
Random House). Both books are based on well-developed presuppositions and are written with a clear
aim. Readers who share the presuppositions of each book will be interested, informed, and pleased:
readers with other understandings may not react so favorably.

13 Chalmers employs the modern understanding of the word matter in periods where such usage is
anachronistic. Few of the investigators that Chalmers considers would have considered themselves as
mainly interested in matter-theory as Chalmers presumes. The nineteen-century organic chemists that
Chalmers regards so highly had more interesting specifically-chemical concerns including making
expensive and rare stuff from cheap and available materials.
14 Bernard dEspagnat, On Physics and Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006
(Section 3-3-7).
15 E.g., Denis Noble, The Music of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006.