This essay provides an introduction to the philo­sophy of chemistry with a focus on ontological, epistemological, methodological, and ethical issues.

Rather than surveying the vast and diverse literature, I address four questions: What is chemistry about? Is chemistry reducible to physics? Are there funda­mental limits to chemical knowledge? And is chem­ical research ethically neutral? The answers to these questions follow two threads: radical change and dealing with real-world complexity.

First, I argue that chemistry is essentially about radical change that cannot adequately be captured by physics; and because radical change enables unlimited synthesis, chemical knowledge is fundamentally incomplete and chemical research ethically relevant in a particular sense. Second, chemistry deals with real-world complexity by adjusting the material world in the laboratory to its classificatory concepts and by following methodological pluralism, both of which pose fundamental limits to understanding the world outside the laboratory, including predictions of how its synthetic products behave in that world. Unlike the ideal of universalism, the methodology of chemistry provides a kind of pragmatic patchwork knowledge, which is paradigmatic of most experimental laboratory sciences and which requires reconsidering standard philosophy of science approaches as well as the ethical dimensions of science and technology.

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