That there exists a relationship between scientific knowledge and philosophical thought is well known. Unfortunately, however, this relationship is often characterized by contrasting interpretations.
Scientific knowledge is interpreted in the context of philosophical thought and vice versa .
We must therefore be grateful to Paola Vasconi for offering us a book that concerns both the history of science and the history of philosophy. It is impossible, in a brief review such as this, to do justice to all the suggestions Vasconi puts forward in this work. I will, therefore, confine myself to one point that particularly captured my attention. Paola Vasconi is very successful not only in demonstrating the close relationship between chemistry and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, but also in analyzing Kant s conversion to Lavoisier s nouvelle chimie . For many years Kant thought that physics, or, more accurately, mechanics, represented a comprehensive explanatory model for all sciences.