Natural History, Chemistry, and Teaching in Modern Scientific Culture

Abstract

This work proposes that a historically delimited study can offer teachers the opportunity to problematize with students the historicity of scientific knowledge and its social, economic, pedagogical, and philosophical implications. The authors intend to draw attention to the centrality of chemical knowledge in modern scientific culture and how chemistry teaching is a manifestation of that social interest. Francis Bacon’s new program for natural history in the seventeenth century, more specifically his view of the history of arts, was adopted as the core idea of the work.

The first goal is to describe the reasons that made chemistry the fundamental knowledge of Bacon’s new program. The purpose is to point out the shared objectives between the natural history of arts and chemistry teaching, as laid out in the manuals and courses inspired by the lessons about the Baconian chemical philosophy of the physician–chemist Herman Boerhaave and his French “disciples.” The authors highlight the case of the chemist Guyton de Morveau and his group at the Dijon Academy, not only for their pedagogical innovations but, above all, for their central role in French chemistry at the end of the eighteenth century and their active participation in the reformulation of chemical nomenclature. However, they point out that this linguistic–conceptual revolution also marked a pedagogical rupture, in which the history of chemistry was no longer necessary for the learning of this science.