Abstract

When compared with other areas of the philosophy of science, the philosophy of chemistry is a new branch that entered an already highly developed field of research about science. For this reason, in spite of having opened its own agenda, the philosophy of chemistry inherited a style of philosophizing modeled by the post-positivistic analytic tradition. Although one cannot deny the powerful conceptual tools that this tradition offered to the philosophy of science of the twentieth century, one can neither ignore the strong boundaries that it imposed to what can be thought in the field. One of the areas that remained beyond those boundaries was the Kantian philosophy. In fact, the debates about scientific realism were usually confined to the non-observational domain, whereas the existence of a realm of observable entities independent of any knowledge was acritically accepted by the traditional philosophy of science. And although the ?new philosophy of science? began to challenge that strongly entrenched assumption, the analytic tradition rapidly drove the discussions to the domain of language. As a consequence, the problem of realism in science is still analyzed by many authors in terms of the search of a theory of reference for the scientific language, a strategy that confines the debate to a context where the analytic philosophers feel comfortable. The general purpose of this article is to contribute to revert this trend in the contemporary philosophy of science by taking seriously the Copernican revolution proposed by Kant, which places the subject at the center of any research about knowledge. We will argue that Kantian ideas supply a new perspective to face several of the most discussed topics in the philosophy of chemistry, in particular, the relationship between chemistry and physics, as well as the existence of laws in chemistry and the question about chemical kinds.