Alchemy restored2011

Alchemy has been restored from its previous status of pseudoscience, a status created in 18th century in part for polemical reasons. The last academic oration about this subject in Netherlands was straight trolling (Kaau). Alchemy had no defenders, and was used to show what was not chemistry. Twenty years earlier this was not the case: another lecturer (Boerhaave) was proud and apologetic at the same time. At the time chrysopoeia was synonymous with chemistry. The author prefers the term chymistry to refer to the whole subject pre-split. The banishment of chrysopoeia had little to do with any advancements, as the same old criticisms from the Middle-Ages were the ones used to discredit it. Focus shifter towards the fraudulent nature of the endeavor, and it was casted as taboo, and its practitioners as disruptors.

The hate was a huge success, although many continued to practice in secret. Alchemy was the reinterpreted later as spiritual and not really about the stone, and its original symbiosis with chemistry became hard to imagine. Psychoanalysts did this too in clinical terms. Alchemy was shown as anti-scientific, a muddle, for fools or rascal knaves. How was this ever corrected? The author points to Sherwood Taylor's The Alchemists (1952), who was very good and humble. Another reason involved the discovery that Newton, Boyle, and other scientists were practitioners. Either the alchemy was more rational than previously thought, or the heroes of science were less so. Now, we know Newton's alchemy was just as important to him as optics and math. A similar thing happened with Boyle, who throughout his life searched for the stone and other adepti. We should instead be rather surprised when an early thinker interested in matter did not study chrysopoeia.

This new historiography shows is how diverse the field was. One classic involving of alchemy involved lumping all practitioners together, in a synecdoche (I just watched the movie) of criticism. Using the ones to refer to the whole, a collage of undifferentiated pastiche. There is also some dissing of Brian Vickers. This is the typa beef you can not encounter online. Careful readings suggest the discipline was never static. Theories were very diverse: Scholastic and anti-Aristotelian, Paracelsian and anti-Paracelsian, Hemetic, Neoplatonic, mechanistic, vitalistic, etc. Alchemists experimented with many process.

It was hard for us to know what they actually did daily because of the enigmatic aura of the texts, practices, etc. It had to be shown that these texts so allegedly obscure did rely on chemical foundations. Pricipe re-did a lot of the experimients, and once the impurities in modern metal are removed, the results were replicable. There were many skeptics. Alchemy is of course not science, but the paper has been arguing that they were absolutely a part of contemporary natural philosophy. Early thinkers pursued this mixture of science, theology, and metaphysics. For alchemists, chymical transformations were linked with theology, literature, and other fields. Thus, the exile of Alchemy was more-so due to narrow views of what science is (progressivism, positivism, etc.) and not by reason or experiment. A lot of times science is noy developed through these means. Alchemy was vilifies when it was not possible to know that it was not possible.

The people against this new historiography need science to have a certain myth of rational and reasonable foundation, and they need alchemy to not be it. Now we know this to be false. Scoience is very complex, and a human affair.