to reject the chemical tradition, handed down from the classical past, that sought to identify all substances as some combination of a few (usually four) elements. He argued that every substance that cannot be reduced to constituents should be regarded, at least provisionally, as an element.
-- Why did Lavoisier consider nomenclature to be of fundamental importance in chemistry?
-- Today we hold that all matter is formed from six elements, the six types of quarks. Was Lavoisier right or wrong to reject the tradition of a few basic elements?
-- Lavoisier distinguished between "-ic" acids and "-ous" acids (e.g., sulphuric and sulphurous). What was his explanation of the distinction?
-- What did Lavoisier call the relatively inert gas found in the air? Do his findings point toward the name "nitrogen?"
-- Lavoisier's theory of heat postulated a substance which he called caloric, the presence of which tended to cause other materials to fly apart (e.g., the boiling of liquid into gas). How does this theory compare to our understanding of heat?
Marquis de Condorcet. "Reception Speech at the French Academy," with author's notes.
In his speech upon election to the French Academy, de Condorcet made a forceful statement of Enlightenment belief in universal progress, which he believed had by his time become irreversable. The dissimination of printing, and the spread of Enlightenment values, he argued, put an end to the cyclical rise-and-fall pattern which he believed typified the past. He argued, among other things, for the total abolition of judicial torture, and for the emancipation of women.
To us his speech has an naive quality, coming as it did less than a decade before the paroxysm of the French Revolution, with its mass violence; likewise, though he believed that war was becoming limited and less destructive, the Napoleonic Wars would reverse that trend -- and the wars of the twentieth century woul...