ИСТИНА

I.Kant, K.G.Hagen, I.B. Richter and the disciplinary status of chemistry by the end of the 18th century Elena A.Baum, Nadezda I. Ermakova The question of the place of chemistry in natural science of the 17th-18th centuries have been controversial during many decades. The central role in resolving this issue at the certain time belonged to the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who knеw all the ins and outs of the achievements of contemporary science and made an attempt, understanding the strengths of the experimental way of obtaining knowledge, to combine two opposing approaches in theory knowledge - rationalism and empiricism. Because of the "purely empirical principles" of chemistry and the empirical laws that follow from them, Kant called this discipline as a "systematic art." According to Kant, in any natural science there should be exactly as much pure (real) science as it contains mathematics and apriori knowledge. Karl Gottfried Hagen (1749-1829) soon became Kant’s colleague at the University of Königsberg. Revolutionizing the entire teaching of natural science he sets out in his textbooks on apothecary art and experimental chemistry in an accessible form and impeccable style the inductive method of working with Kantian logic and consistency. Kant, his great friend and teacher, called them "masterpieces of logic." Again, as first noted in our work, as a result of Hagen’s collaboration with Kant in 1789 was the defense of I. B. Richter (1762-1807). Не defended a unique dissertation which is one of early xamples of essays on mathematical chemistry. In it and subsequent ones Richter outlined in detail his doctrine of stoichiometry, formulated the law of equivalent ratios, which is still one of the main ones for calculating the masses of substances taking part in chemical transformations. These collaborations and personal multifaceted cooperation led to the fact that by the end of the 18th century in the light of Kantian scientific theory the disciplinary criteria of chemistry as a “science in the proper sense” were largely legitimized.