Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Philosophy

Major Professor

Roger Ariew, Ph.D.

Co-Major Professor

Alex Levine, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Douglas Jesseph, Ph.D.

Committee Member

William Parkhurst, Ph.D.

Keywords

chemistry, education, epistemology, history of science, textbook

Abstract

Philosophy, despite its proclivities towards history and contextualization, often neglects to properly note various characteristics of ideas. In particular, there seems to be a kind of blindness to a key component of how ideas come into being: namely, the role of writing that leads to the preservation and transmission of ideas. Textbooks, for instance, are a key instrument for containing, disseminating, and archiving knowledge of a specific domain that can be used to introduce those complex concepts to newcomers and the unspecialized. As such, a textbook is an epistemic device used for transmitting a condensed constellation of ideas, concepts, formulas, laws, facts, etc. with the motivation, of informing an exoteric group of that constellation in accessible ways. This dissertation is part philosophy and part intellectual history, which work in tandem to reveal conclusions about epistemology. With respect to philosophy, I discuss how writing is often forgotten in the role of creating and decaying knowledge, along with how domains rely on a principle of canonicity for their identity. With respect to intellectual history, I examine three chemists and their textbooks, along with how those textbooks had changed chemistry and scientific education. I conclude by discussing how textbooks create, maintain, and corrode scientific paradigms, and that critique itself is conditioned by ideological factors, some of which include pedagogic instruments, like textbooks, which result in stifling critique.

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