There is nothing self-evident about nature. We tend to assume that what we call the natural world confronts us all and always has. This book is about the almost unimaginable state of relation to the world in which there was no sense of nature, no reference or word for it. Before the concept took shapeand changed shape, across the long history of European philosophy and sciencefor an equally long period beginning roughly in the early second millennium B.C.E., the author shows, the cuneiform world engaged in activities ...
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There is nothing self-evident about nature. We tend to assume that what we call the natural world confronts us all and always has. This book is about the almost unimaginable state of relation to the world in which there was no sense of nature, no reference or word for it. Before the concept took shapeand changed shape, across the long history of European philosophy and sciencefor an equally long period beginning roughly in the early second millennium B.C.E., the author shows, the cuneiform world engaged in activities manifestly kindred with science in its engagement with and understanding of phenomena. The first book to make sense of this, Before Nature sets out how to understand cuneiform knowledge, prediction, and explanation in relation to sciencewithout recourse to the idea of nature. Its central claim is that there was an Assyro-Babylonian tradition of knowledge about phenomena that bears relation to the history of science, regardless of the absence of a conscious category of nature around which to focus that epistemic tradition."
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