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Who are we?
Sarah Hijmans
I am a historian and philosopher of chemistry studying nineteenth-century chemical (laboratory) practice and the ways in which experimentation, classification and analogy work together in chemists' reasoning.
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My PhD at the Laboratoire Sphère (Université Paris-Cité, France) focused on the identification of chemical elements in practice between 1770 and 1870. Chemists agreed in theory that a substance was elementary when it could not be decomposed in the lab, but it was not always possible to apply this criterion in practice. Instead, I have argued that they generally relied on a complex argumentation that integrated existing knowledge, experimental results and chemical similarities or 'analogies' among the substances that they studied.
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Currently I am working on a postdoctoral project that studies the laboratory of Jöns Jacob Berzelius in early nineteenth-century Sweden and the people who worked there.
Vanessa Seifert
I am interested in examining standard issues of the philosophy of science, from the novel and relatively unexplored perspective of chemistry. This includes questions such as: how does chemistry contribute to our understanding of the world around us?; what is the relation between chemistry and other sciences like physics and biology; and, do chemical entities and properties like molecules and chemical bonds, exist?
I am currently a teaching fellow at the University of Athens. Previously, I was a post-doctoral research associate with the ERC project 'Metaphysical Unity of Science' (grant no. 771509) at the University of Bristol.
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My undergraduate studies were in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. I then pursued an MSc in Philosophy of Science from the London School of Economics. I completed my PhD in Philosophy under the supervision of James Ladyman at the University of Bristol.
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For more info on what I do, check out my personal website!
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Karoliina Pulkkinen
I'm a philosopher of science with a special interest in how values influence chemistry and climate modeling.
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I’m currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Prior to moving to Stockholm, I was a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge. In my doctoral research, I investigated the role of values in developing the periodic systems of chemical elements.
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In my PhD monograph, I argued that examining the competing periodic systems with the framework of values gives us an especially insightful explanation of their differences. My thesis demonstrates how three chemists – Mendeleev, Julius Lothar Meyer, and John Newlands – emphasised different values when developing their systems in 1863-1875. While no chemist emphasised just one value, I argue that Newlands elevated simplicity (“simple relation”), Mendeleev completeness (polnost’), and Meyer carefulness when systematising the elements. I also identified a relationship between values guiding the development of the systems and chemists’ subsequent uses of their systems.