Philosophy, Vision, Mission

Philosophy 

The subject of energy has great practical significance in connection with questions

about scarcity and finite reserves, the economics of transforming one form of

energy into another, and the merits of different forms relative to their side effects

(pollution, degradation.) But the subject of energy has also great philosophical

importance due to its conceptual history and to the large number of cognitive tools

(statements, problems, explanatory and classificatory strategies) that have been

produced in the course of investigating its different forms and transformations.

(See Appendix at the end of this essay). In the early seventeenth-century, when the

field of chemistry was beginning to differentiate from the material culture of

pharmacists, metallurgists, and alchemists, everything that was manipulated in the

laboratory was considered to be a material substance. There were, on one hand,

substances that could be reacted with one another, such as acids and alkalis, so that

their capacity to affect each other was easy to verify, but which could also be

weighed and thus be attributed a certain corporality. There were, on the other hand,

incorporeal or imponderable substances, such as air, electricity, magnetism, heat,

light, and fire, which had capacities to affect – gases accumulating in a closed

container could make it explode; fire and heat made metals expand – but which

could not be weighed or even captured. 1 These were the most problematic

substances belonging to the chemical domain and their mastery would take more

than a century, involving practitioners and resources from a variety of fields

Vision, Mission