User:Ragesoss/Joseph Priestley and science
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Joseph Priestley (March 13, 1733 (old style)–February 8, 1804) was a British polymath best known for his role in the chemical revolution: he discovered, simultaneously with Antoine Lavoisier, oxygen gas. Priestley was a prominent natural philosopher as well as a widely known political and theological controversialist; his science was never divorced from his religion and he consistently tried "to combine Enlightenment principles with a modernized Christian theism."[1] His contemporary scientific reputation rested on his invention of soda water, his writings on electricity and his discovery of several "airs" (gases), the most famous being what Priestley named "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen). But Priestley's determination to reject Lavoisier's "new chemistry" and to cling to phlogiston theory left him isolated within the scientific community.
Priestley's role in the isolation and characterization of oxygen has been used frequently by historians and philosophers of science as a case study on the nature of scientific "discovery". The discovery of oxygen, and the shift from phlogiston theory to Lavoisier's oxygen theory of combustion, is one of Thomas Kuhn's central examples of a paradigm shift in his influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.