期刊名称：Hyle : International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry
印刷版ISSN：1433-5158
出版年度：2004
卷号：10
期号：1
页码：3-4
出版社：HYLE Publications, Karlsruhe and University of Karlsruhe
摘要：Is chemistry primarily about things or about processes, about chemical sub-stances or about chemical reactions. Is a chemical reaction defined by the change of certain substances, or are substances defined by their characteristic chemical reactions. What appears to be a play on words to the modern scien-tist, is actually one of the most fundamental ontological question since antiq-uity, prompted by the most radical change – the chemical change or the 'coming-to-be and passing-away' as Aristotle's treatise on theoretical chemis-try came to be known. The question has bothered philosophers ever since, who were not satisfied with the much too simplistic answer of atomism, ac-cording to which the basic elements of nature are atoms, i.e. things, persisting in full integrity through time, and any perceived change is only a rearrange-ment of the otherwise unchangeable atoms. We know that the answer is wrong, that today's atoms are no atoms in the original sense, that their elec-tronic structures and sometimes even their nuclear states, change in the course of a chemical reaction. And yet, while the burden of atomism has shifted towards high energy physics, towards the begging for money for in-creasingly bigger and more expensive particle accelerators that might prove or disprove the existence of ultimately elementary particles, persisting in full integrity through time, the original question, which is a philosophical issue of chemistry proper, has somewhat disappeared from the radar screen of both philosophers and chemists
