Historical and epistemological development of the concepts chemical element, substance and simple substance (First part)

Abstract

The epistemology of any scientific concept acquires its full meaning taking into account the problem that made its conceptualization possible at a given historical moment and its subsequent development. The objective of this article will be to recall the problem that originated the epistemological need to introduce the idea of the chemical element throughout history and how it has developed until the 18th century to influence the epistemology of the concept of (pure) substance and how its relationship with the chemical element changed. This manuscript is divided into four main sections, the first one entitled “The natural world of the Greek philosophers of the 4th century BC”, followed by the section “Aristotelianism and alchemy”, to continue with the third section “Construction of the empirical concept of substance (pure) in the 16th and 17th centuries”, and finally the last section on “The concepts of simple substance and chemical element in the 18th century”.