Abstract
The chemist Jeremias Benjamin Richter (1762–1807) coined the term “stoichiometry” and proposed the “law of definite proportions.” He is also commonly acknowledged as having been a student of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). This paper demonstrates how Kant’s philosophy positively shaped Richter’s approach to chemistry in the Anfangsgründe der Stöchiometrie (1792–1794) and outlines two ways in which Richter attempted to represent the chemical force in “pure intuition”: (1) “reductionistic forces,” in which qualitative features scale with the quantity of matter; and (2) generalized “abstracted forces,” in which a plurality of dissolution- and bonding-properties are latent within the chemical in the manifold of space-time.
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Notes
The book Grundriss der Experimentalchemie appeared in 1787 while Richter was a student at Königsberg. Snelders (1978, 8) contends that Richter had studied this book. A reference to Hagen’s experiments can be found in Richter (1793b, 224). It is uncertain, however, as to whether Richter attended his course, since Löwig (1874, 52) noted that: “According to the personnel files, as already noted, he occupied himself with philosophical and mathematical sciences; According to his own statements, he has not heard any chemical lectures.”
As given in Löwig (1874, 46): “Theses philosophicae ad ampliandam disputationis materiam: 1) Non datur universale criterium veritatis materiale, sed tantum formale. 2) Phaenomena tantum sed non Noumena cognita habemus. 3) Animi substantia realis et immortalitas non demonstrari potest. 4) Initium et aeternitas mundi demonstrari nequit. 5) Animi libertas est assumenda sed non demonstranda. 6) Physicotheologiae probationes de existentia Dei nituntur probatione Cosmotheologiae, de qua probatione rursus ratio in Ontotheologia quaerenda est, quae, autem omnino non valet. Plura demonstrationis genera nisi haec tria non inveniuntur.”
N.B. page numbers refer to the 1781/1922 (A) edition. These similarities suggest that Richter owned a copy of this text.
Richter’s works have never been translated into English. The German texts can be accessed online. Richter 1792: https://books.google.de/books?id=4e48ZwtNCYEC&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false;
Richter 1793a: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Anfangsgründe_der_Stöchyometrie/LusTAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwju7uSB08b2AhWilGoFHek-B_UQiqUDegQIEBAG;
Richter 1793b:
This reductionistic approach to the Kantian categories has been similarly noted by the twentieth century philosopher René Guénon (1886–1951) in the text The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times (1945): “Here a new confusion makes it appearance: modern physicists, in their efforts to reduce quality to quantity, have arrived by a sort of ‘logic of error’ to the point of confusing the two, and thence to the attribution of quality itself to their ‘matter’ as such; and they end by assigning all reality to ‘matter,’ or at least all that they are capable of recognizing as reality: and it is this that constitutes ‘materialism’ properly so called” (Guénon 1945/2001, 19).
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge Joachim Schummer for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper submitted to HYLE, as well as the constructive criticisms provided by two anonymous reviewers. Additionally, he wishes to thank Tilman Schmidt of Ruhr–Universität Bochum for a thorough review of the supplemental material. Further thanks must be added for the instructive suggestions provided by Dr. Helmut Pulte on Kant’s distinction between constitutive and regulative principles.
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Vilbig, R. Kant, Richter and the a priori representations of Anfangsgründe der Stöchiometrie. J Gen Philos Sci 55, 95–111 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-022-09626-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-022-09626-1