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The ‘absolute existence’ of phlogiston: the losing party's point of view

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2011

VICTOR D. BOANTZA  and
OFER GAL
VICTOR D. BOANTZA
Affiliation:
Department of History, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke St West, Montreal, H3A2T7, Quebec, Canada. Email: [email protected].
OFER GAL
Affiliation:
Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, Carslaw F07, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Long after its alleged demise, phlogiston was still presented, discussed and defended by leading chemists. Even some of the leading proponents of the new chemistry admitted its ‘absolute existence’. We demonstrate that what was defended under the title ‘phlogiston’ was no longer a particular hypothesis about combustion and respiration. Rather, it was a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions and the empirical practices associated with them. Lavoisier's gravimetric reduction, in the eyes of the phlogistians, annihilated the autonomy of chemistry together with its peculiar concepts of chemical substance and quality, chemical process and chemical affinity. The defence of phlogiston was the defence of a distinctly chemical conception of matter and its appearances, a conception which reflected the chemist's acquaintance with details and particularities of substances, properties and processes and his skills of adducing causal relations from the interplay between their complexity and uniformity.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 2011 , pp. 317 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2011

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References

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18 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 8.

19 This is not to deny the significance of such philosophical commitments. For a comprehensive study of Priestley's intellectual debt to Locke, Hartley and versions of materialism, utilitarianism, determinism, Socinianism and so on, see McEvoy, John G., ‘Joseph Priestley, ‘aerial philosopher’: metaphysics and methodology in Priestley's chemical thought, from 1762 to 1781’, Ambix (1978) 25, pp. 1–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 93–116, 153–175, and ibid. (1979) 26, pp. 16–38. For what has been designated the totality (or synoptic nature) of his thought see McEvoy, John G. and McGuire, J.E., ‘God and Nature: Priestley's way of rational dissent’, Historical Studies in Physical Sciences (1975) 6, pp. 325–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Lavoisier's indebtedness to Condillac's philosophy of language see Roberts, Lissa, ‘Condillac, Lavoisier, and the instrumentalization of science’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (1992) 33, pp. 252–271Google Scholar.

20 The methodological, historiographic and philosophical literature on scientific controversies is vast, much of it within the sociology of scientific knowledge. There are important social factors in the relations between the main figures of our account, but analysing them is beyond the scope of our argument. For a challenging study of the social context of the chemical revolution see Simon, Jonathan, Chemistry, Pharmacy and Revolution in France, 1777–1809, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005Google Scholar. For a singular sociological analysis see McCann, H. Gilman, Chemistry Transformed: The Paradigmatic Shift from Phlogiston, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1978Google Scholar. For a more general perspective see Boantza, Victor and Dascal, Marcelo (eds.), Controversies within the Scientific Revolution, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, forthcomingGoogle Scholar. For a philosophical analysis of the role of controversies in the historiography of science see Ofer Gal's contribution to that volume and his ‘Controversies over controversies: an ontological perspective on the place of controversy in current historiography’, in Han-liang Chang and Marcelo Dascal (eds.), Controversies: East and West, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007, pp. 267–280.

21 Priestley, op. cit. (8).

22 Nicholson, op. cit. (11), p. 160.

23 Fourcroy, op. cit. (5), pp. xvi–xix.

24 Levere, Trevor H. and Turner, Gerard L'E., Discussing Chemistry and Steam, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 196CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Siegfried, Robert, ‘The Chemical Revolution in the history of chemistry’, Osiris (1988) 4, pp. 34–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 35. For a study of Priestley's scientific methodology see Boantza, Victor D., ‘Collecting airs and ideas: Joseph Priestley's style of experimental reasoning’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2007) 38, pp. 506–522CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to Holmes, Priestley was not defending Stahl's property-bearing phlogiston at all, but advocating a novel pneumatic theory in its stead, only loosely committed to traditional phlogiston, and his phlogistic perceptions were merely ‘scattered responses to particular observations … not connected into a broader framework’. Holmes, Frederic L., ‘The “revolution in chemistry and physics”: overthrow of a reigning paradigm or competition between contemporary research programs?’ Isis (2000) 91, pp. 735–753CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, 748. Again, it is not Priestley's phologiston theory that we examine here, but his defence of the existence of ‘something’. For a discussion of the slight historiography, privileging the merits of Priestley's phlogistic defense over Kirwan's, see Boantza, Victor D., ‘The phlogistic role of heat in the Chemical Revolution and the origins of Kirwan's “Ingenious modifications … into the theory of phlogiston”’, Annals of Science (2008) 65, pp. 309–338CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Taylor, Georgette, ‘Unification achieved: William Cullen's theory of heat and phlogiston as an example of his philosophical chemistry’, BJHS (2006) 39, pp. 477–501CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Priestley, Joseph, Experiments and Observations Relating to the Analysis of Atmospherical Air, London: J. Johnson, 1796, p. 58Google Scholar.

26 Priestley, op. cit. (25), p. 42; italics in original.

27 Priestley, op. cit. (25), p. 42; italics in original.

28 For details on Wiegleb's life and work see Riddick Partington, James, A History of Chemistry, 4 vols., London, 1961–70, vol. 3, pp. 567–569Google Scholar. See also Hufbauer, op. cit. (17), pp. 88–92.

29 Wiegleb, Johann Christian, ‘Doctrine de Stahl sur le Phlogistique, rectifiée et appuyée par des preuves, en opposition au nouveau Systême chimique des François, dont on cherche en même tems à démontrer le peu de solidité, Extrait des Annales de Chimie de Crell’, Observations sur la physique (1792) 41, pp. 84–85Google Scholar, 84, italics added: ‘Serait-il raisonnable de mettre l'existence de ce principe en doute, parce qu'on ne peut le recueillir immédiatement? Je réponds par la négative car l'expérience prouve que pendant la calcination des métaux, ou pendant que d'autres corps brûlent avec une flamme, il se répand dans l'air une matière particulière sensible à l'odorat, et qui doit être la même dont dépend l'inflammabilité de ces corps; car ces derniers ayant été dépouillés de ce principe, sont ou entièrement consumés, ou cessent d’être inflammables.’

30 For such portrayals of Priestley see, for example, Maurice Crosland, ‘“Slippery substances”: some practical and conceptual problems in the understanding of gases in the pre-Lavoisier era’, in Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor H. Levere (eds.), Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 79–104, 88; Schofield, Robert E., The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004, p. 138Google Scholar, p. 193; Uglow, Jenny, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, New York: Faber, 2002, p. 237Google Scholar.

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32 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), pp. 128–129; italics added.

33 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 135.

34 Berthollet, Fourcroy and Morveau, op. cit. (1), p. 221; italics added.

35 In her thorough study of the concept of affinity Kim stresses that the difference between Kirwan and Lavoisier could not be ascribed to Kirwan's disinterest or incompetence in quantitative analysis – quite the contrary. Concentrating on Lavoisier's perspective on the controversial issues, she comments only on Kirwan's empirical arguments and not on their intellectual motivations: ‘Kirwan's entire critique of the antiphlogistic camp rested on precise measurements of specific weights. He was in fact one step ahead of his French opponents in advocating the importance of these measurements for chemical theory … Lavoisier differed from Kirwan not in his deeper commitment to the rule of the balance but in his algebraic vision of chemistry and in his grammatical understanding of nature. That is, the superior explanatory power of his system lay in the interlocking algebra of all the components, rather than in its application to particular cases at hand.’ Kim, op. cit. (13), p. 380.

36 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 138; italics added. Compare Roberts, Lissa, ‘The death of the sensuous chemist: the “New” Chemistry and the transformation of sensuous technology’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (1995) 26, pp. 503–529CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 142.

38 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), pp. 142–143; italics added.

39 Nicholson, op. cit. (11), p. 59. Although Nicholson admitted by this point that phlogiston was not without its problems, he still thought that the antiphlogistic system was equally problematic and in his First Principles of Chemistry he presented both systems. See Partington, op. cit. (28), vol. 3, p. 490.

40 Cavendish, Henry, ‘Experiments on air’, Philosophical Transactions (1784) 74, pp. 119–153CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 152.

41 Jungnickel, Christa and McCormmach, Russell, Cavendish: The Experimental Life, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999, esp. pp. 355–392Google Scholar, p. 359. This refers specifically to his pneumatic practice.

42 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), 7. On the Lavoisians’ ‘rhetoric of precision’ see Golinski, Jan, ‘Precision instruments and the demonstrative order of proof in Lavoisier's chemistry’, Osiris (1994) 9, pp. 30–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘“The nicety of experiment”: precision of measurement and precision of reasoning in late eighteenth-century chemistry’, in M. Norton Wise (ed.), The Values of Precision, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 72–91.

43 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. vii.

44 Priestley, op. cit. (31), p. 15; italics added.

45 Bergman, op. cit. (31), p. 65.

46 Bergman, op. cit. (31), p. 4.

47 Bergman, op. cit. (31), p. 67.

48 Nicholson, op. cit. (11), p. 131.

49 Priestley, op. cit. (31), p. 35.

50 Priestley, op. cit. (25), pp. 39–41; italics added.

51 Priestley, op. cit. (25), p. 49; italics in original.

52 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 5; italics added.

53 Priestley, op. cit. (31), p. 42; italics in original.

54 Finery: a hearth where cast iron is made malleable, or in which steel is made from pig-iron (Oxford English Dictionary).

55 Priestley, op. cit. (31), pp. 46–47.

56 Priestley, op. cit. (31), pp. 76–77; italics added.

57 Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, Essays Physical and Chemical, 2nd edn (tr. Henry, Thomas), London: Frank Cass, 1970Google Scholar (first published 1776), 121. See note 30 above for historians adopting this portrayal.

58 For an insightful study of ‘substances’ in eighteenth-chemistry, focusing on various technologies of their preparation, manipulation and especially classification, see Klein, Ursula and Lefèvre, Wolfgang, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science: A Historical Ontology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007Google Scholar.

59 Priestley, op. cit. (31), pp. 35–36.

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61 Priestley, op. cit. (60), p. 392.

62 See Trevor H. Levere, ‘Measuring gases and measuring goodness’, in Holmes and Levere, op. cit. (30), pp. 105–135.

63 Priestley, op. cit. (8), p. 208; italics in original.

64 As exemplified by Kirwan's approach, which mostly revolved around endowing phlogiston with a material existence in its presentation as inflammable air.

65 Watson, Richard, Chemical Essays, 4th edn, London, 1787, p. 167Google Scholar.

66 Lavoisier, op. cit. (10), p. 7.

67 Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Chemical Observations and Experiments on Air and Fire (tr. Johann Reinhold Forster; intr. Torbern Bergman; added notes Richard Kirwan, Joseph Priestley), London, 1780, pp. 97–99; italics in original.

68 Scheele, op. cit. (67), p. 178.

69 Boantza, op. cit. (24).

70 Lavoisier, op. cit. (10), p. 29; Nicholson, op. cit. (14), vol. 2, p. 959.

71 Nicholson, op. cit. (14), vol. 2, p. 959.

72 Nicholson, op. cit. (14), vol. 1, p. 72.

73 See Taylor, op. cit. (24); and Klein, Ursula, Verbindung und Affinität: die Grundlegung der neuzeitlichen Chemie an der Wende vom 17. zum 18. Jahrhundert, Basel: Birkhaüser, 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Tools and Modes of Representation in the Laboratory Sciences, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. For two outstanding histories of chemical affinity see Kim, op. cit. (13); Sadoun-Goupil, Michelle, Du flou au clair? Histoire de l'affinité chimique de Cardan à Prigogine, Paris: CTHS, 1991Google Scholar, esp. pp. 89–190 (for the post-Newtonian era until the end of the eighteenth century).

74 Geoffroy, Etienne-François, ‘Des different Rapports observes en Chymie entre differentes substances’, Histoire de l'Academie royale des sciences, avec memoires (1718), pp. 256–269Google Scholar. Also translated as ‘Table of the different relations observed in chemistry between different substances’, Science in Context (1996) 9, pp. 313–319Google Scholar. Kim, op. cit. (13), p. 103, argues that ‘Geoffroy's “sulphur principle” invariably referred to the concrete oily substance contained in bodies. He later identified it with Stahl's phlogiston … the oily substance that restored metallicity to metals, formed the empirical core of the phlogiston theory in the course of the eighteenth century’; in the early 1770s Lavoisier traced ‘the phlogiston theory in France back to Geoffroy's experiments with the burning glass. He had to work hard to dissociate phlogiston and the matter of fire’. See also Holmes, Frederic L., ‘The communal context for Etienne-François Geoffroy's “Table des rapports”’, Science in Context (1996) 9, pp. 289–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Bergman, op. cit. (31), p. 11. See also Kim, op. cit. (13); Goupil, op. cit. (73).

76 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), pp. 244–246; italics in original.

77 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 46.

78 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 51.

79 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 252.

80 Bergman, op. cit. (31), p. 4.

81 Bergman, op. cit. (31), pp. 2–3.

82 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 46.

83 This is a complex subject and a leading theme in the historiography of chemistry. For an informative discussion in relation to the Chemical Revolution and Lavoisier's work in particular see Guerlac, Henry, ‘Chemistry as a branch of physics: Laplace's collaboration with Lavoisier’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (1976) 7, pp. 193–276CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Melhado, Evan M., ‘Chemistry, physics, and the Chemical Revolution’, Isis (1985) 76, pp. 195–211Google Scholar; see also the related responses and critiques by Arthur Donovan and C.E. Perrin in the same journal.

84 Albrecht Carl Gren, Friedrich, Principles of Modern Chemistry, Systematically Arranged, 2 vols., London, 1800, vol. 1, p. 50Google Scholar; italics in original.

85 For details on Gren's life and work see Partington, op. cit. (28), vol. 3, pp. 575–577. For an extensive and informative discussion of Gren's phlogistic work and the various criticisms adduced against it during the last two decades of the eighteenth century see Partington and McKie, op. cit. (17), third article. See also Hufbauer, op. cit. (17).

86 Bergman, op. cit. (31), p. 5; italics in original.

87 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), pp. 45–46.

88 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 45.

89 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 249.

90 Bergman op. cit. (31), pp. 69–70.

91 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 167.

92 On Kirwan's capitulation see Mauskopf, op. cit. (31).

93 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 248.

94 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 250; italics added.

95 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 249; italics added.

96 Lavoisier, op. cit. (10), p. 186.

97 Lavoisier, op. cit. (10), p. 185.

98 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 166.

99 Lavoisier, op. cit. (10), p. 149.

100 Lavoisier, op. cit. (10), p. 168; italics added.

101 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), pp. 7–8.

102 Nicholson, op. cit. (14), vol. 1, p. 720.

103 Kirwan, op. cit. (7), p. 8.

104 Bergman, op. cit. (31), p. xxxiii.

105 Priestley, op. cit. (8), pp. 282–283; italics in original.