Inglês

Resumen

The present work succinctly addresses the content present in the text "Sunto di un corso di filosofia chimica" by Stanislao Cannizzaro, written in the form of a letter addressed to his colleague Sebastiano de Luca. The author presents the path and the didactic strategy that he adopts in his Chemistry classes at the University of Genoa and is divided into eight "lessons", from the a priori acceptance of the hypothesis of Avogadro and Ampère, the already known results that validate this hypothesis, the confrontation of this with the ideas of Jacobus Berzelius and its application in the determination of the atomic weights of constituent atoms of an immense range of molecules, as well as the determination of their formulas. Cannizzaro points out that both the "physical" methods (Dumas' measurements of vapor density, as well as the correlation between atomic weights and the heat capacity of solids, Dulong and Petit's law), and the "chemical" methods (determination of masses, percentages and atomic proportionalities in chemical reactions) provide the same values of atomic weights, as long as the hypothesis of Avogadro and Ampère is previously accepted. The introduction to this article presents in a summarized way the life and work of the Italian chemist.