Overview

In an age when the nature of reality is complicated daily by advances in bioengineering, cloning, and artificial intelligence, it is easy to forget that the ever-evolving boundary between nature and technology has long been a source of ethical and scientific concern: modern anxieties about the possibility of artificial life and the dangers of tinkering with nature were shared by opponents of alchemy long before genetic science delivered us a cloned sheep named Dolly. In Promethean Ambitions, William R. Newman uses alchemy as a means to discuss the thinning boundary between the natural and the artificial. Focusing primarily on the period between 1200 and 1700, Newman examines the labors of pioneering alchemists and the impassioned - and often negative - responses to their efforts. The twelfth-century philosopher Averroes, for example, noted that regardless of the resemblance of the artificial to the natural, the two would forever be separated by an impassable gulf. Leonardo da Vinci attacked alchemy as an irreligious fraud. But Newman here shows that alchemy was not an unformed and capricious precursor to chemistry; it was an art founded on coherent philosophical and empirical princ

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Reviews

With close attention to historical and textual detail that is never less than engaging, Newman unpacks the historical accidents and political machinations that led to alchemy's marginalization, bringing sympathy, wit, and imagination to his account. - Simon Ings, New Scientist Newman chooses the fascinating topic of alchemy as his case study in the long history of human efforts to breach the barriers between nature and human artifice....A thought-provoking book. - Iwan Rhys Morus, Science Newman argues [that] the methods and ideas of modern science, including concepts of experimentation, far from breaking with alchemical researches, evolved out of them....Newman, a clear and graceful writer, keeps his goal in view. He is an initiate - tapping, testing, and transmuting - until something different, still called alchemy, gradually takes shape. - Edward Rothstein, New York Times

Author Information

William R. Newman is professor in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University. He is the author of Gehennical Fire and, with Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

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