Introduction
The philosophy of chemistry is a new subdiscipline ofthe philosophy of science. Only a decade ago this philosophi-cal field branched off from the traditional philosophy of sci-ence and acquired autonomy with respect to the philosophyof physics. This late development was mainly due to an as-sumption about the relationship between chemistry and phys-ics: the impressive predictive power of quantum mechanicsled most chemists, physicists, and philosophers of science to consider that chemistry can be completely reduced to phys-ics. Dirac’s famous dictum, according to which chemistry can be explained in principle by quantum mechanics (1), ex-presses a position that counts against the autonomy of chem-istry and its status as a scientific discipline: whereas physics is conceived as a “fundamental” science that describes reality in its deepest aspects, chemistry is viewed as a “phenomeno-logical” science, which merely describes phenomena as they appear to us