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Wednesday, December 03, 2025

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Accolade Session: Visiting Fellow Talk
IAS Seminar Room - Zeeman Building
More information | Tags: IAS Event Accolade |
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Our 'Irrational' Past | Sergei Zotov, The Warburg Institute | Hybrid Event
IAS Seminar Room (C0.02) - Zeeman Building

Talk title: Reason in the Furnace: Philosophers, Alchemy, and the Birth of Modern Physics

Abstract:

This talk revisits the alchemical pursuits of early modern philosophers — Leibniz, Kant, and Newton — to ask how their 鈥渋rrational鈥� experiments shaped the rational sciences that followed. Far from a marginal curiosity, alchemy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offered a laboratory for testing matter theory, causation, and transformation — concepts that would later underpin chemistry and physics.
Through close readings of manuscripts and laboratory notes, I will explore how Newton鈥檚 search for the vegetative spirit, Leibniz鈥檚 monadic metaphysics, and Kant鈥檚 fascination with the 鈥渄ynamic鈥� nature of matter reveal an early attempt to unite physical observation with metaphysical reasoning. I will also touch on the actual chemical practices behind their ideas — from distillation to metallic transmutation — to show that their 鈥渙ccult鈥� operations often yielded real and replicable results.
The lecture will conclude by tracing how alchemical notions of the mutability of matter informed the philosophical groundwork of atomic physics in the early 20th century. Ideas first articulated in alchemical discourse — that nature was a continuum of interconvertible substances — directly shaped the intentions behind some of the earliest atomic experiments. In this sense, alchemy鈥檚 speculative models of change and hidden structure anticipated not irrationality, but a vital prehistory of the modern physical sciences.

 

Hybrid seminar: Please for the meeting link in case you want to attend online.

More information | Tags: IAS Event P2K |

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