Found Chem (2012) 14:193–203 DOI 10.1007/s10698-012-9161-1

Philosophy of chemistry as intercultural philosophy: Jaap van Brakel Klaus Ruthenberg • Rom Harre´

Published online: 8 August 2012  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract After a brief biography of Jaap van Brakel we set out his appropriation and use of the distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image of the world. In a certain sense van Brakel gives priority to the manifest image as the ultimate source of meaning in chemical discourses. He does not take sides in the debate about nominal and real essences, twin earths and so, but presents a compromise. As an active practitioner of the chemical arts he emphasises the indispensability of models as a main tool for chemical thinking. We then turn to van Brakel’s interest in forging an intercultural point of view in which philosophy of chemistry plays an important part. Keywords Natural kinds  Models  Manifest and scientific images  Intercultural  Reduction  Kind terms  Forms of life

A biographical sketch Van Brakel began to study chemical engineering at Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, and received his M.Sc. in 1968. Four years later, additional philosophical studies at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, led him to a M.A. in philosophy. He obtained his Ph.D. from Delft University of Technology in 1975. From 1968 until 1980, he held professorships in chemical technology at Delft and the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada. From 1972 he taught philosophy of science in Utrecht, first at the Department of Physics, and since 1985 at the Department of Philosophy. In 1994 he moved to Delft1 to 1

According to an older entry to the ‘‘Commentators Biographies’’ of the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, van Brakel’s research interests at that time included: (1) giving form to philosophy of technology by integrating (and ‘‘fusing’’) methodological, epistemological, and ontological aspects on the one

K. Ruthenberg Coburg University of Applied Sciences, Coburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] R. Harre´ (&) Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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become a professor in philosophy of technology, and in the same year he eventually joined the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, as ordinarius at the Institute of Philosophy (HIW). Van Brakel has held visiting positions in philosophy at Simon Fraser University (Canada), University of Victoria (Canada), and University of Stellenbosch (South Africa). After his retirement he is still teaching, for example in the People0 s Republic of China. Whereas in the 1970s—as a chemical engineer2—he published mainly on transport phenomena in porous media, he devoted his output of the 1980s particularly to the philosophy of technology, probability, and analytic topics. Although his very first entry to philosophy of chemistry proper was published in 1981,3 we should say that the late 1980s and the following years particularly brought the philosophy of chemistry to the forefront of his interests. Crucial papers such as The chemistry of substances and the philosophy of natural kinds (1986), Chemistry as the science of the transformation of substances (1997), On the neglect of the philosophy of chemistry (1999), On the inventors of XYZ (2005), Kant’s legacy for the philosophy of chemistry (2006), and Chemistry and physics: No need for metaphysical glue (2010) appeared during that time.

Philosophy of chemistry: the textbook We owe to van Brakel a strong emphasis on an important insight—that philosophy of chemistry is integral to philosophy of science in general. Too much attention has been paid to philosophy of physics in our era, and more recently to philosophy of biology. Chemistry is the once and future core natural science. Among his many publications the most influential has been his Philosophy of Chemistry (2000), the first systematic textbook in the field. Writing a textbook is a key moment in the development of any academic discipline. First of all it makes teaching courses possible, not only in one’s home university but across the world. It is the foundation of a community of philosophers of chemistry. Having a textbook in a field is an encouragement for university administrators to look favourably on the founding of philosophy of chemistry as a field to be supported. In the case where no textbook exists and the literature is mostly journal articles the advent of a text book serves partly to define the field. Apart from the depth and breadth of scholarship that Jaap van Brakel’s book displays it has at least two striking features: 1. Philosophical problems of chemistry are presented within the context of a certain version of ‘mainstream’ analytical philosophy, an important academic tradition in the United States, that flourished in the 1960s and 70s. So, existing problem fields in philosophy that were relevant to philosophy of chemistry as an autonomous discipline were the framework which was ‘seeded’ by introducing issues in the philosophy of

Footnote 1 continued hand with social, political, and moral aspects on the other; (2) philosophical aspects of ‘‘sustainable’’ technological development; (3) foundations of cognitive science; (4) natural kinds; (5) colour; (6) emotion; (7) ethnocentricity and intercultural communication; (8) foundations of the concept of chance. Interestingly enough, philosophy of chemistry is not on that list. 2

Like Jaap van Brakel, both authors have their first academic education in chemical engineering. Indeed, there are other philosophers with an engineering background: Descartes (military engineering) and Wittgenstein (aeronautics), for example.

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On the Philosophy of Chemistry, (van Brakel and Vermeeren 1981) is still a very useful bibliographic commentary, though van Brakel does not refer to it in his textbook.

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chemistry which slotted into the discussions in analytical philosophy. However, what van Brakel shows is the inadequacy of the mainstream discussions and distinctions to throw much light on the nature of chemistry as a science and of the best way of conceiving of the material stuffs which are its subject matter. Though starting at this point made philosophy of chemistry less alien to the philosophy community than the alternative approach in which ab initio reflection on chemistry and its practices brings certain intellectual puzzles to light and the techniques of analytical philosophy called on ad hoc to resolve them, it demonstrated the conceptual distinctions that chemists make in their thinking do not map neatly on those that have lately been characteristic of mainstream philosophy. 2. Unlike the ‘mainstream’ tradition which was focused on the study of the logical form of scientific discourses, for example the writings of Hempel (1970), the ‘explanationprediction symmetry’, and Popper (2002), ‘the falsifiability criterion of empirical status’, van Brakel’s book included a serious attempt to display the role of models in scientific thinking. We will return to discuss this important step below. The leading ideas and techniques that van Brakel drew from the ‘mainstream’ literature for assessment, so to say, included the Sellars’ (1963) distinction between the manifest and the scientific image of the world, the discussions by Kripke (1980) and Putnam (1975) of the modality of kind terms, and Kim’s suggestion of supervenience as a more plausible concept to link one level of scientific theorising to another than reduction. In each case he shows how they fail to catch the leading philosophical aspects of chemistry as the science of the transformation of material stuffs.

The manifest and the scientific image This became a starting point for his reflections on the place of chemistry in the intellectual landscape of human affairs. In Chapter Two van Brakel presents a detailed study of how the manifest and the scientific images are related to one another. The upshot of his discussion re-asserted a refined version of the distinction while avoiding assigning priority to one or the other as the core of the chemical picture of the world. In her review of Philosophy of Chemistry for Synthese, historian of science Ursula Klein (2002) criticises van Brakel for assuming the viability of the manifest image -scientific image dualism and for adopting a cross-historical universalism. According to her, van Brakel assumes a universal interest in substance and matter throughout the Western foundation of literary and scientific culture. On the one hand the latter critique touches a fundamental historiographical problem (‘‘Can modern chemistry be compared with eighteenth century chemistry at all?’’) but on the other hand the critique is bypassed by historians themselves, when they tell their stories from the side of their ‘‘life-form’’. Van Brakel’s approach, which is already evident in his Philosophy of Chemistry, opens up an escape from whiggish historiography. It is just the opposite of universalism: My use [of the notion of manifest image] should [differently to Sellars’] be thought of as akin to the concept ‘‘form(s) of life’’. That is to say ‘‘manifest image’’ is short for ‘‘manifest form(s) of life, understood interculturally’’, and that is how the term will be used in the sequel … In particular, the manifest image in my sense should not be associated with the view that there are basic-level categories (‘‘natural kinds’’) like water and red, which are ‘‘manifest’’ natural categories because of the way the

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world and our neurophysiology have been fine tuned by evolutionary processes. (p. 42) Like the empiricists, he emphasizes the manifest departure issue, because scientific interpretations depend on the applied perspectives and can change. Van Brakel keeps the scientific interpretation of the world as an open field. Klein’s attack against the ‘‘manifestscientific duality’’ and the alleged ‘‘universalism’’ misses the point of the place of the former in van Brakel’s discussion. In fact it serves him as a preliminary if not heuristic starting point for argumentation rather than as a doctrine or dogma. Those who read the book and his other contributions carefully will discover that van Brakel criticises Sellars for claiming primacy for the scientific image.4 He neither tends to subscribe to only one central philosophical assumption nor to any one stance or attitude. Moreover, the ‘‘anomalous monism’’, which he unconventionally borrows from Davidson’s philosophy of mind, and which is quite prominent in the concluding chapter of his monograph, should have sensitized a benevolent reviewer to the prudent agnosticism of van Brakel’s approach. In fact van Brakel argues for the priority of the chemical concepts of sophisticated common sense—in short the concepts of the laboratory over both those of everyday life and those of physics. Certainly, he makes use of Wilfrid Sellar’s distinction between the manifest image of the world and the scientific image, and develops the distinction into a working philosophical tool. In chemistry the manifest image includes objects (for example, stuff portions) in the ordinary physical world as they are refined by chemical experience; the scientific image includes the molecular structures that supposedly underpin them. Van Brakel argues that the scientific image is methodologically dependent on the manifest image. Given the claims to reduction and primary reality made on behalf of the scientific image ontologically, it is presented as a rival to the manifest image. Here van Brakel’s discussion takes an interesting turn because he notes that among the primary objects in the manifest image are people—for example those who do experiments. Van Brakel’s conclusion is: ‘the scientific image cannot replace the manifest [image] without rejecting its own foundations’ (p. 44) and that in consequence the scientific image cannot ‘account for everything’. Further developments of this insight are possible—for example into a philosophical analysis of experimentation—but van Brakel seems to take this aspect of the philosophy of chemistry, namely the key role played by people, for granted. Summing up (p. 147) van Brakel remarks: ‘Why not equal ontological room for manifest water… [and many other aqueous items]… [and] the proper quantum mechanical equation for an isolated water molecule?’ This insight ties in with Scerri’s observation (1999) that when Bohr populated the electron shells he tried to maintain agreement with experimental data.

The reduction issue This has come up again and again from the end of the nineteenth Century in various forms. Setting aside such proposals as Benjamin Brodie’s reduction of chemistry to the study of the observable changes brought about in a region of space by chemical operations, a kind of chemical phenomenalism, the core of the debate in philosophy of chemistry has been

4

In one of van Brakel’s very last introductory lectures on philosophy of science at Leuven (May 4th, 2010), K. R. has experienced this substantial critique of the science-centered views of Sellars, among other topics.

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whether the advent of quantum chemistry as an underlying, universal explanatory theory of chemical phenomena eliminates an autonomous chemical domain of knowledge. In accordance with his way of introducing chemistry into philosophy by insertion into an existing ‘mainstream’ philosophical discussion, van Brakel uses Jaegwon Kim’s concept of supervenience as a point of origin for discussions of the threat of reducing chemistry to physics. However, he shows that Kim’s notion of supervenience is fatally ambiguous. Is the relation between the domain that is supervenient on the ‘lower’ domain symmetrical or asymmetrical? Whichever way we go in interpreting ‘supervenience’ it does not illuminate the question of whether there are autonomous chemical phenomena which are not just quantum mechanically explicable. At this time British and French philosophers of science were taking other directions. There were prominent discussions of what ‘scientific realism’ might mean and how one or other version of this doctrine might be defended. Equally important were arguments for and against the subversive trend to transform all branches of philosophy including philosophy of science into a form of the sociology of knowledge. The sociological turn was in part an attempt to close the gap between logicist paradoxes and scientific practice. Fierce debates raged around Karl Popper’s ‘take-over’ bid to treat philosophy of science as a discussion of the scope and limits of ‘rational reconstruction’ of scientific discourses. Attending to the local rationality of that practice the gap between logic and scientific method in the explanation of what people came to believe was argued for by Kuhn (1970), and Latour (1993). Van Brakel did not take up either of these issues in his book.

The modality of the uses of kind terms One key question concerning the nature of chemical kinds and the conceptual structures that chemical terminologies depend upon, is whether the seventeenth century conception of the logic of kind terms as balancing the relative importance of nominal and real essences, proposed by John Locke, for instance, is still of value in understanding the way chemical kind terms, such as ‘silver’ or ‘ammonium chloride’ work. Nominal essences are defined as the necessary criteria for admission of a sample or an instance to a kind, while real essences are taken to be empirical hypotheses about the actual nature of distinct substances that can account for the practical success of the use of the associated nominal essences. In the twentieth century this tidy conceptual structure was subject to a good deal of criticisms, mainly as a result of realising that nominal essences are to some extent arbitrary and context relative, and real essences are, at any one time, no more than theoretical concepts which are revisable indefinitely since they are empirical hypotheses, largely about what is unobservable at some moment in history. The discussions by Kripke and Putnam about these issues can perhaps best be seen as sharpening the distinction between nominal and real essences. But can we do without this distinction? Without this concept pair most of chemistry lacks an ordering principle for the difference in kinds of knowledge between the everyday criteria for identifying chemical kinds and the ever enriching chemical theory which explains them—the two sides of the Periodic Table. After surveying the issue from several sides van Brakel comes through as agnostic about the viability of the distinction taken as some kind of absolute. Van Brakel makes the important point that the way categories of substances are bounded is dependent on ‘the contingent context’. He uses this feature of taxonomies to argue that boundaries ascribed to the beings in the microscopical world of atoms and

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molecules are no less and no more natural or conventional as those we draw in the macroscopic world of substances, operations and apparatus where chemistry actually ‘takes place’. The logic and epistemology of chemical classifications and chemical conceptions of substance or ‘stuff’ were connected with the puzzles of the modality of referential discourse discussed by Kripke in his Naming and Necessity (1980). These discussions were further advanced by Putnam’s famous reflections on the ‘chemistry’ of water on twin earths, on which van Brakel published an important criticism (On the Inventors of XYZ). In the latter, he comes to the same result as in his textbook: Perhaps the most disturbing fact about this literature is the insistence of sticking with an example that simply makes no sense at all.(p. 115, emphasis original) His criticism of the analytical microessentialism a` la Kripke and Putnam could have been acknowledged much earlier. However, so far there has been no reaction from mainstream analytical philosophy to van Brakel’s telling criticism.5 Though van Brakel does not use the terminology of nominal and real essences he gave a very detailed critical analysis of Putnam’s discussion of the exemplary (but scarcely typical) chemical statement that ‘Water is H2O’. Most of van Brakel’s commentary in his textbook is effective with respect to the philosophy of compounds, like water. Because he is not giving an explicit example how his approach applies when the topic is the chemical elements6 as natural kinds, we present a short attempt to describe the element hydrogen according to Jaap van Brakel here. We refer to one of his recent articles in which he suggests four different discourses (van Brakel 2010): the manifest discourse (which might include phenomenology), the macroscopic scientific discourse (which might include thermodynamics), the microscopic discourse (which might include atoms and molecules), and the submicroscopic or microphysical discourse (which mainly is the quantum mechanical approach). In the manifest discourse ‘‘hydrogen’’ appears as gaseous entity. It is encountered by humans for example in experiments like the electrolysis of water; it yields water in lively chemical reactions with oxygen; it does not smell and has no colour; it is very light compared with other gases, it easily reduces other substances like oxides, etc. We can call this hydrogen entity an elemental stuff, because it can’t be transformed into a simpler stuff by further analysis (unless we would decide to consider a small population of hydrogen atoms at very low pressure an elemental stuff). The macroscopic scientific discourse, which mainly consists of thermodynamical investigations, shows that there are very useful ceteris paribus relations like Boyle’s law and Charles‘ law which apply for the elemental stuff hydrogen. If we do not require too extreme precision, the ideal gas law applies, too. The two discourses mentioned so far are very close to each other with respect to the applicable experimentation. If we refer to the microscopic description level or discourse, we talk about hydrogen molecules or hydrogen atoms. The instrumental equipment turns to spectrometry on this level. There is no use of ‘‘stuffy’’ notions here, although we still might talk of the element 5

In a recent article about microessentialism, Paul Needham states the following: ‘‘But an early critique of the application of this line of thought [the importance of manifest descriptions] to chemical substances (van Brakel 1986) has not been similarly acknowledged, and later efforts in the same general direction … seem to have made little impression on philosophers writing on natural kinds’’. (Needham 2011)

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In his Philosophy of Chemistry, Jaap van Brakel does not particularly refer to chemical elements and the periodic table of the elements which might surprise some of the readers.

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hydrogen, but on a more abstract level. Hydrogen atoms are measurable after the thermal dissociation of elemental hydrogen, for example. Atomic hydrogen can’t easily be analysed thermodynamically. Elementary particle physics and quantum mechanics treat hydrogen no longer as a stuffy or atomic entity. Rather these disciplines consider hydrogen to consist of nuclei with one and only one proton. Certainly the atomic number is not a chemical property (it can’t be displayed by chemical means). We might call this kind of hydrogen elemental matter. Although we do not know whether or not Jaap van Brakel would subscribe to the notions elemental stuff and elemental matter suggested here, something like the proposed description would be the result of the application of his suggestion for the forms and content of chemical discourses. Interpreting this presentation of possible discourses according to van Brakel, it seems most important to point to his claim that there is no need to look for strong relations like reduction, emergence or supervenience between these discourses. This means that there is no priority, for example, to be given to microphysical descriptions. There is only a wide field of possible descriptions from which we can choose what might be important by further negotiations. These negotiations, however, are not a subject matter of the sciences. What about explanations then? At first sight, van Brakel, like the positivists, seems to neglect explanation. If we buy Davidson’s kind of monism, we accept a sort of materialism which is a materialism without reductionist methodology. That is, if anomalous monism is applied to different description discourses, it allows so to speak for the talk about two (or even more) sides of the same coin. Hence, macroscopic and microscopic pictures of chemical processes, for example, describe the same thing, but differently. Claims from different perspectives or discourses might thus be independent, so there is ‘‘no need for metaphysical glue’’. But to keep the logic right, explanations and reductions, for example, are not generally excluded in anomalous monism. In that respect, van Brakel’s approach is significantly wider than classical positivism. Referring to natural kinds, van Brakel, already in the preface of his textbook, consistently claims the following: I argue that we are confronted with a dilemma. Either we must favour a plurality of natural kinds, embedded in a variety of manifest, macro-, and micro-discourses. Or we must choose to eliminate them completely, at least all those kinds ordinary people might know of (van Brakel 2000, p. vi).

Models Van Brakel sets out an interesting catalogue, or better a list, of kinds of models that appear in the sciences (p. 156). The principle of classification is more with reference to their utility in chemical practice than to their philosophically relevant types. By that we mean their epistemological standing and their metaphysical implications. This tends to elide formal models with iconic models—though the methods of using each kind are quite distinct. However, he is very clear that his own focus is on what he calls the ‘old’ concept of model (pp. 154–157), that is the iconic or representational role. He criticises the ‘model-theoretic’ use of the concept by pointing out that the formal account of models ‘says little or nothing about how these models are hooked up to the material world’ (p. 155). Rightly he argues that a fundamental role of models is related to their content by which they ‘give meaning to expressions of the language’, particular those which are used to describe aspects of nature

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with which we are not yet familiar and which may not as yet have been made matters of observation. Iconic models on which chemistry has long depended are assessed by balancing similarities and differences to source and subject of a model (Harre´ 2005). We can think of the long history of the ‘Bohr model’ as a back and forth between planetary systems and electron shells. Thus his criticism of the model-theoretical view, that it concerns only abstract structures, is correct van Brakel could have taken his emphasis on the ubiquity of model thinking a good deal further, in that properly considered, the ‘old’ model conception (as he calls it) is the deepest analysis of the sources and meaning of theories. We can see this very clearly if we understand ‘model’ as role in actual chemical practice. For example, the transition from early nineteenth century type theory to later structural chemistry displays a reinterpretation of a convenient abstract formulaic device for classifying groups of compounds, the water type, the ammonia type and so on, into a proposed picture of an actual layout of the constituents of compounds in space. The upshot of van Brakel’s discussion, despite some unclarity about the kinds of models that appear in chemistry and the rules for their uses as cognitive and experimental tools, is a restoration of models to the central position they occupied in the 50s and 60s of the last century. Thus his revival of ‘model’ as a key tool in chemical thought and practice is very important. Nevertheless, in his examples of modelling in chemistry, he does not perhaps stress enough one of the essential points of the uses of models as cognitive tools: namely the possibility of the existential testing of iconic models—e.g., X-ray diffraction methods, such as those of Dorothy Hodgkin, depends on taking the lattice model of molecular structure seriously. Dorothy Hodgkin’s successful analysis of the structure of complex molecules is an independent check on the plausibility of some iconic model as a representation of real structures. The uses of models as cognitive tools depends on the possibility of ranking them for empirical adequacy (do they underlie discourses from which descriptions of experimental and observational phenomena can be recovered) and for plausibility as possible existents.

Intercultural interpretation of interdiscourse relations In his article titled ‘‘We’’ in the journal Ethical Perspectives from 1999, van Brakel asks for what sort of wes (pluralities of persons under some principle of coherence, however weak) there are. Referring to the writings of Bernard Williams he suggests four different wes: The all-in-the-universe we; Kant’s moral we; the transcendental we; and the you-andme we. The latter he describes as the we of the encounters between yous and mes, sharing a project of inquiry or having other motivations to interact. In the article he chooses this youand-me we and the transcendental we—taken to be the plural of the idealist I—for his analysis. Addressing Williams’s claim that there are inclusive wes embracing anyone who shares in the investigation of the world, he suggests ‘‘…that the only really inclusive we is the we of the encounters between yous and mes; all other wes are variants of a (super-) capitalized parochial I.’’ In the following five sections van Brakel orders his investigation as follows: 1. Background: Form(s) of Life; 2. The Collapse of the We of Science and Logic; 3. The Transcendental We; 4. The You-and-Me We—Part 1: First Contact We; 5. The You-and-me We—Part 2: Intercultural Communication and Objectivity. He borrows the notion of form(s) of life from Wittgenstein and characterizes it as that which makes meaning possible, because ‘‘… it refers to the complex of natural and social circumstances

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which are presupposed in language and thinking, and in any particular understanding of the world’’. According to van Brakel this life-form complex cannot be explained nor systematized. In section two he introduces what he calls the ultimate dichotomy: Well-known appearances of this dichotomy include Kant’s distinction between ‘‘the laws of the intellect’’ and ‘‘the laws of our actions’’; Nagel’s distinction between the objective and the subjective; and Sellars’s opposition of the manifest and the scientific image. Again we come across the polar notions of the manifest and the scientific image, this time linked with other well-known pairs of notions from philosophy. Contrasting the criticism regarding the alleged acceptance of Sellars’s dualism (s.a.), van Brakel himself approaches the ultimate dichotomy critically: Here I want to follow a line that is less common, viz. the issue of groundedness in manifest forms of life of ‘‘everything’’—science and logic included […] In each case it can be shown that the final justification of theories about these issues draws on groundings that are not part of science an logic. The claim of the priority of the scientific image does not hold, because the existence of natural kinds is, as van Brakel puts it here, ‘‘highly disputable’’ (see our discussion above). In addition, all scientific laws are ceteris paribus. The statement ‘‘Water is H2O’’, for instance, is ceteris paribus and imprecise. Any scientific interpretation is grounded in the manifest image of the manifest life forms. Moreover: The objectivity that both Nagel and Williams try to mark out is a hodgepodge, not a natural kind. And: However, one draws the dividing line between epistemic and pragmatic virtues, to claim truth, or empirical adequacy, or an economic rendering of one’s sensory input, or whatever, as the goal of science, such a goal is a value, not a scientific fact. Van Brakel argues strongly against natural kinds here, because he holds that there are no natural kinds independent of the life-form(s) in which they are involved. All ultimate goals we can think of for science are rather results of negotiations within the framework of the manifest image than constituents of science itself.7 In the following, van Brakel argues that even in the ‘‘last resort’’, namely logic, the same conclusion is inescapable: There is no choice but to start from, and return to, the world of manifest life forms. This is not to say that science has not produced all kinds of useful criteria of inquiry. It is to say that the judgement that these are good criteria is not itself a scientific judgement. As to the imaginable transcendental we in the third section van Brakel points to similarities between Kant and Wittgenstein. Accordingly, the move from ‘‘I’’ to ‘‘We’’ is already a transcendental idea. However, an external vantage point to talk about form(s) of life does not exist because anything one says comes from within a form of life. We explore

7

Additionally (this is not van Brakel’s claim), this fact offers a brilliant argument for the importance of philosophical activities.

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the border of the transcendental empirically, and we hardly can cross these borders. According to van Brakel, there is one threat with respect to transcendental facts: The real danger is that what is contingent, is easily thought of as truly transcendental. The question is not how to give content to talk about limits or transcendental facts in some general sense, but to show what can be said about them, and then it will become clear that the empirical (or natural) and the transcendental (or conceptual) features cannot be strictly separated. Consequently, the idea of a transcendent observer has to be rejected. In Sect. 4 of his article ‘‘We’’, van Brakel describes the You-and-Me We as First Contact We. As example for the very first encounter of two life-forms he takes the meeting of James Cook’s crew with people from New Zealand in 1773. As inferred from the diaries of Cook and Forster, van Brakel comes to the conclusion that although there could be complications with respect to the radical translation, non-linguistic communication is still possible.8 Hence, linguistic intercultural communication is preceded by radical translation, and radical translation is preceded by non-linguistic interaction. However, a universal core of intercultural communication does not exist although there might be similarities. Van Brakel is concluding that form(s) of life should be understood, at the same time, in the singular and plural, as local and universal, as empirical and transcendental. What is similar has to be claimed in first contacts and, strictly speaking, again and again in every human interaction. No particular form of life should be essentialized such that the contacted form of life is colonized.

Concluding remarks Jaap van Brakel argues for the application of an anomalous monism in intercultural philosophy and philosophy of science. Anomalous monism claims materialism but allows for independent, parallel, non-materialistic discourses (coin-of-many-faces). Although this concept has originally been suggested within the discussion of the body-mind-problem in analytical philosophy, it might also be applied to intercultural communication. This is the first essential move of van Brakel’s philosophy. From this viewpoint he arrives at the result that natural kind concepts, if applied at all, only belong to the form of life that is actually being lived, and can’t be essentialized. The second essential move which particularly refers to philosophy of science, is that van Brakel considers science to be an enterprise of intercultural communication. Applied to the sciences, anomalous monism means that several discourses or perspectives are possible without the necessity of, say, reduction, emergence, and supervenience. No particular discourse, for example the microphysical discourse, should be essentialized on the one hand and no discourse, for example the macroscopic discourse, colonized on the other. Hence, in the hands of Jaap van Brakel philosophy of chemistry becomes intercultural philosophy.

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In his presentation to the celebration session of the ISPC symposium in Oxford, one of us (K.R.) shortly referred to the first contact problem, using a scene from the Paramount Star Trek movie The First Contact: ‘‘Live long and prosper’’, said the first volcan on Earth to the constructor of the warp engine at first contact in that scene. Although these words are translated in the movie, the human does not understand the alien (!). However, both, partly reluctantly, shake hands.

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References Harre´, R.: Modeling: Gateway to Nature. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2005) Hempel, C.G.: Aspects of Scientific Explanation. Free Press, New York (1970) Klein, U.: Book review: v. Brakel, J., Philosophy of Chemistry, Leuven University Press, Leuven 2000 (Corrigendum). Synthese 57, 133–136 (2002) Kripke, S.: Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1980) Kuhn, T.H.: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago University Press, Chicago (1970) Latour, B.: We have Never been Modern. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1993) Locke, J.: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1690) Needham, P.: Microessentialism: what is the argument? Nous. 45, 1–21 (2011) Popper, K.R.: The logic of scientific discovery. Routledge, London (2002) Putnam, H.: Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1975) Scerri, E.R.: The Periodic Table: Its Story and its Significance. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2007) Sellars, W.: Science, Perception and Reality. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London (1963) van Brakel, J.: The chemistry of substances and the philosophy of natural kinds. Synthese 69, 291–324 (1986) van Brakel, J.: Chemistry as the science of the transformation of substances. Synthese 111, 253–282 (1997) van Brakel, J.: On the neglect of the philosophy of chemistry. Found. Chem. 1, 111–174 (1999) van Brakel, J.: Philosophy of Chemistry. Leuven University Press, Leuven (2000) van Brakel, J.: On the inventors of XYZ. Found. Chem. 7, 57–84 (2005) van Brakel, J.: Kant’s legacy for the philosophy of chemistry. In: Baird, D., Scerri, E., McIntyre, L. (eds.) Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, chap. 4. Springer, Dordrecht (2006) van Brakel, J.: Chemistry and physics: no need for metaphysical glue. Found. Chem. 12, 123–136 (2010) van Brakel, J., Vermeeren, H.P.: On the philosophy of chemistry. Philos. Res. Arch. 7, 501–552 (1981)

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