From the Atom to Living Systems

Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino is professor of philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. Her work has appeared in many professional journals including Synthese, Husserl Studies, Philosophy East & West, Continental Philosophy Review, The Review of Metaphysics, and Foundations of Chemistry. She co-edited The Philosophies of Environment and Technology and Shifting the Geography of Reason: Science, Gender, and Religion and she is the author of The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: Mechanicism, Chymical Atoms, and Emergence (2020).Giovanni Villani is Senior Researcher of chemistry at the Istituto di Chimica dei Composti OrganoMetallici of the Italian CNR. His work has been published in many scientific journals including the Journal of the American Chemical Society, The Journal of Chemical Physics, The Journal of Physical Chemistry, Chemical Physics, Journal of Molecular Structure, Inorganic Chemistry, Advances in Quantum Chemistry, Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics,Molecular Physics, Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, New Journal of Chemistry, Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, and Foundations of Chemistry. He is author of Chemistry: A Systemic Complexity Science (2017).

• IntroductionChapter 1. Qualitive Atomism and Life Within the 18th Century Atomistic PerspectiveChapter 2. Early Modern Mechanistic Atomism and the Concept of StructureChapter 3. Newton and the NewtoniansChapter 4. Lavoisier and the Quantification of ChemistryChapter 5. Affinity, Compounds, and the Laws of Definite ProportionsChapter 6. John Dalton and Chemical AtomismChapter 7. Valency, Chemical Bonds, and the Theory of ElementsChapter 8. Organic Chemistry, Molecules, and the Implications for AtomismChapter 9. The Relationship Between Chemistry and Biology in the 19th CenturyChapter 10. The Quantum RevolutionChapter 11. The Birth of the Concept of 'Macromolecule'Chapter 12. From the Gene to Metagenomics: The Frontiers of Molecular BiologyChapter 13. Cellular ChemismChapter 14. What is Life? The Chemical Perspective and Its Relation to Other Perspectives ConclusionBibliography

This book is recommended for readers who already have a strong grounding in chemistry and want to explore the relationships between chemistry and adjacent disciplines, and scientists at large who want to examine their understandings of the thresholds that distinguish one scientific discipline from another...Recommended. Graduate students and faculty.