When philosophy has engaged with science, it has privileged physics as holding the keys to the most important questions of existence and implicitly denigrated chemistry as an "impure" science. The authors of this work suggest, however, that it is precisely the impure status of chemistry--its mixing of science with technological applications and its eschewal of high theory--that makes it of philosophical interest and a challenge to the hegemony of the particular positivist conception of the philosophy of science currently holding sway in academia. They present a discussion, based in large part on the history of chemistry, of the intersection between philosophy and chemistry, in the end promoting their own particular view of the philosophy of chemistry, which they briefly summarize as "the proposition that you can know the material world as well if not better by making and doing things rather than by constructing theories." Distributed in the US by World Scientific. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)