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Article ID: CBB001550422

Concluding Remarks: A View of the Past through the Lens of the Present (2014)

Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 29, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 298-309

DOI: 10.1086/678109

Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Title of volume: “Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World”
Language: English

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Reflecting on the upsurge of interest among historians of chemistry in the material, artisanal, and commercial aspects of early modern chemistry, this essay argues that they are attracting attention because of a number of similarities between the style of chemistry cultivated in this period and the new cultures of chemistry being developed today. The close interactions between knowing and making, academic knowledge and practical applications, the social value and prestige attached to chemistry, the public engagement in chemical culture, the concern with recycling, and even a specific relational ontology instantiated in the term “rapport” are characteristic features of the current technoscientific culture. However, these analogies between early modern chemistry and the technoscientific paradigm may turn into obstacles if they end up in hasty rapprochements and whiggish interpretations of the past. In keeping with the attempts displayed in many articles in this volume to identify and understand the meaning of the actors' categories, this essay emphasizes the contrast between the visions of the past and the future developed by eighteenth-century chemists and the concept of time that prevails nowadays. The concept of “regime of historicity” provides a useful conceptual tool to take a view of chemistry as embedded in a culture and integral part of the horizon of expectation of an epoch. On the basis of this contrast between the regimes of historicity, the essay recommends the pluralism of concepts of time (polychronism) as an antidote to anachronisms.

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