Abstract
This essay takes its point of departure from a post-Nietzschean reading of Kant and the limits of logic and critique. The focus is on science, particularly chemistry and alchemy via mercurial cinnabar (HgS), to this day the primary source of elemental mercury. Seeking to raise the question of science as Nietzsche names it along with the question of truth, this essay undertakes to raise the question of historiography in science, using the illustration of alchemy.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Babette Babich is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University in New York City. She writes hermeneutic and phenomenological philosophy of science/technology (including AI) as well as on aesthetics and ancient philosophy. In addition to editing New Nietzsche Studies, she has published 11 monographs and edited 14 collective volumes. She also edited Patrick Aidan Heelan’s last book on phenomenology and quantum mechanics in Einstein/Bohr/Heisenberg, The Observable (2016).
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of the current essay for their comments. Portions of this text, here substantially expanded, were originally published in “On the ‘Very Idea of a Philosophy of Science’: Chemistry and Cosmology in Nietzsche and Kant,” Axiomathes (December 2021), 1–24. I am also grateful for correspondence with Marco Buzzoni, Emilio Mazza, John Warwick Montgomery, Howard Caygill, Kenneth Westphal, and Lawrence Principe. I am grateful to Professor Annabelle Dufourq for discussion and for the opportunity to present elements of this essay as an online lecture for her students at Radboud University, Nijmegen in November of 2021. This essay is dedicated to Tracy Burr Strong (1943–2022).
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