The philosophy of chemistry

Although chemistry is by far the largest scientific discipline according to any quantitative measure, it had, until recently, been virtually ignored by professional philosophers of science. They left both a vacuum and a one-sided picture of science tailored to physics. Since the early 1990s, the situation has changed drastically, such that philosophy of chemistry is now one of the most flourishing fields in the philosophy of science, like the philosophy of biology that emerged in the 1970s. This article narrates the development and provides a survey of the main topics and trends.