"It is a laudable effort by Hettema to select, introduce and translate a well chosen set of papers by pioneers in the field from the original German into English and to make them available to a wider readership "Int. J. Quantum Chemistry, 2000"It will have a lasting value for theoretical chemists and science historians".Structural Chemistry, 2000" is a finely produced, useful, and highly thought-provoking book".Physics Today, 2001

Chemistry and physics are two sciences that are hard to connect. Yet there is significant overlap in their aims, methods, and theoretical approaches. In this book, the reduction of chemistry to physics is defended from the viewpoint of a naturalised Nagelian reduction, which is based on a close reading of Nagel's original text. This naturalised notion of reduction is capable of characterising the inter-theory relationships between theories of chemistry and theories of physics. The reconsideration of reduction also leads to a new characterisation of chemical theories. This book is primarily...