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This book represents a philosophical and scientific journey that will proceed according to three stages of increasing levels of complexity, beginning with the atom, then moving to macromolecules, and finally moving to the threshold of life. The first stage analyzes the transition from the qualitatively undifferentiated atom to differentiated atoms. The second stage analyzes the passage from atoms to molecule and the third stage examines the passage from molecule to macromolecule.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. Qualitive Atomism and Life Within the 18th Century Atomistic Perspective
- Chapter 2. Early Modern Mechanistic Atomism and the Concept of Structure
- Chapter 3. Newton and the Newtonians
- Chapter 4. Lavoisier and the Quantification of Chemistry
- Chapter 5. Affinity, Compounds, and the Laws of Definite Proportions
- Chapter 6. John Dalton and Chemical Atomism
- Chapter 7. Valency, Chemical Bonds, and the Theory of Elements
- Chapter 8. Organic Chemistry, Molecules, and the Implications for Atomism
- Chapter 9. The Relationship Between Chemistry and Biology in the 19th Century
- Chapter 10. The Quantum Revolution
- Chapter 11. The Birth of the Concept of 'Macromolecule'
- Chapter 12. From the Gene to Metagenomics: The Frontiers of Molecular Biology
- Chapter 13. Cellular Chemism
- Chapter 14. What is Life? The Chemical Perspective and Its Relation to Other Perspectives
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
About the author
Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino is professor of philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. Her work has appeared in many professional journals including Synthese, Husserl Studies, Philosophy East & West, Continental Philosophy Review, The Review of Metaphysics, and Foundations of Chemistry. She co-edited The Philosophies of Environment and Technology and Shifting the Geography of Reason: Science, Gender, and Religion and she is the author of The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: Mechanicism, Chymical Atoms, and Emergence (2020).
Giovanni Villani is Senior Researcher of chemistry at the Istituto di Chimica dei Composti OrganoMetallici of the Italian CNR. His work has been published in many scientific journals including the Journal of the American Chemical Society, The Journal of Chemical Physics, The Journal of Physical Chemistry, Chemical Physics, Journal of Molecular Structure, Inorganic Chemistry, Advances in Quantum Chemistry, Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics,
Molecular Physics, Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, New Journal of Chemistry, Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, and Foundations of Chemistry. He is author of Chemistry: A Systemic Complexity Science (2017).
Summary
From the Atom to Living Systems represents an original historico-epistemological approach to follow the passage, in the microscopic analysis of reality, from the atomic to the molecular to the macromolecular levels and then to the threshold of life itself. Naturally, some parts of this journey have been developed in other works, some highly specialized and others of a more general nature. However, although this journey has often been traced in specialized scientific detail, the philosophical implications of the journey have not been discussed to any satisfactory degree. This scientific journey does have important philosophical consequences that constitute an integral part of this book, which is framed within the perspective of systems science and the so-called sciences of complexity, which are areas fundamental to 21st century science. In fact, the possibility of studying and understanding the material world through levels of complexity opens a great philosophical space that proposes to provide systemic and complex explanations, rather than reductive accounts that pretend to explain all phenomena through the interactions of elementary particles while considering all phenomena implicit and deterministic.
The systemic and complex approach implies substituting unique bottom-up explanations, which move exclusively from the microscopically simple to the macroscopically complex, with a series of explanations that are horizontal within planes of complexity, vertically bottom up between various levels of complexity, vertically top-down, as well as circular in a manner that renders all levels of reality and the disciplines that study them as both autonomous and interconnected.
Additional text
This book is recommended for readers who already have a strong grounding in chemistry and want to explore the relationships between chemistry and adjacent disciplines, and scientists at large who want to examine their understandings of the thresholds that distinguish one scientific discipline from another...Recommended. Graduate students and faculty.
