Concept and Form:
The Cahiers pour l’Analyse
and Contemporary French Thought

This project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research grant and is supported by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) and Kingston University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Lavoisier is widely considered to be the founder of modern chemistry as a scientific discipline. Although he discovered no new elements and made few technical innovations, he helped to clarify and codify the experimental discoveries made by his contemporaries and predecessors, and to establish a single theoretical framework for the domain as a whole. He was the first to formulate the general law which recognises that the mass of a given amount of a substance does not vary with changes to its form or state. He helped to discredit phlogiston theory, and rather than accept water and air as elementary substances, he recognised that they were compounds formed of more basic components. In collaboration with his contemporaries Claude-Louis Berthollet, Antoine Fourcroy and Guyton de Morveau, Lavoisier developed a new, simplified method of chemical nomenclature, first published in 1787. His major work was the 1789 Traité Élémentaire de Chimie: it provides a systematic account of chemical elements conceived as simple, unanalysable elements, which serve as the basic units of compound substances.