- Volume 1 (2017)
- Vol. 1 (2017)
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- Issue 1
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- Pages 195 - 200
- pp. 195 - 200
Aristotle agreed with his predecessor Empedocles that Fire, Water, Air, and Earth are the four elements, distinguished from compounds like flesh and bone but like them in being, contrary to the atomists’ view, homoeomerous: “any part of such a compound is the same as the whole, just as any part of water is water” (
1 Aristotle, (1984), The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Vol. 1, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
2 Hendry, R. F., (2005), “Lavoisier and Mendeleev on the Elements”, Foundations of Chemistry 7: 31-48.
3 Hendry, R. F., (2012), “Elements”, in Hendry, R. F.; Needham P.; Woody, A. J. (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, vol. 6: Philosophy of Chemistry, Elsevier: Amsterdam.
4 Kragh, H., (2000), “Conceptual Changes in Chemistry: The Notion of a Chemical Element, ca. 1900-1925”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 31B: 435-50.
5 Lavoisier, A., (1965), Elements of Chemistry, trans. by Robert Kerr (1790) of Traité élémentaire de Chimie, Paris 1789. Dover reprint, New York.
6 Needham, P., (2002), “Duhem’s Theory of Mixture in the Light of the Stoic Challenge to the Aristotelian Conception”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33: 685-708.
7 Needham, P., (2006), “Substance and Modality”, Philosophy of Science, 73: 829-40.
8 Needham, P., (2008), “Is Water a Mixture? – Bridging the Distinction Between Physical and Chemical Properties”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39: 66-77.
9 Needham, P., (2009), “An Aristotelian Theory of Chemical Substance”, Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy 12: 149-64.
10 Paneth, F. A. ([1931] 1962), “Über die erkenntnistheoretische Stellung des chemischen Elementbegriffs”, Schriften der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft, Naturwissenschaftliche Klasse 8 (Heft 4): 101-25. Translated by Heinz Post as “The Epistemological Status of the Chemical Concept of Element”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 13: 1-14 and 144-60.