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" What did the Romans know? : "
Daryn Lehoux.
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BL
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| Record Number
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625329
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| Doc. No
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dltt
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| Main Entry
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Lehoux, Daryn,1968-
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| Title & Author
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What did the Romans know? : : an inquiry into science and worldmaking /\ Daryn Lehoux.
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| Page. NO
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xi, 275 pages :: illustrations ;; 24 cm.
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| ISBN
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9780226471143 (cloth : alkaline paper)
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: 0226471144 (cloth : alkaline paper)
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| Bibliographies/Indexes
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Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-268) and index.
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| Contents
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The web of knowledge -- A Roman world -- Knowing nature in the Roman context -- Overview -- Nature, gods, and governance -- Divinity and divination -- Roman virtues -- Nature and the legitimation of the republic -- A Ciceronian contradiction? -- Knowledge of nature and virtuous action -- Fabulae versus learned observation -- Conclusion -- Law in nature, nature in law -- Laws of nature -- Natural laws -- Human and divine governance -- Is a "law of nature" even possible in antiquity? -- Divinity, redux -- Conclusion -- Epistemology and judicial rhetoric -- Theory-ladenness and observation -- Observations as models -- Observational selectivity -- Examination of witnesses -- The natural authority of morals -- Declamation and certainty -- The embeddedness of seeing -- Doubts about vision -- Mechanisms of seeing in antiquity -- The eyes as organs -- Not every black box is a camera obscura -- Epistemologies of seeing -- The centrality of experience -- The trouble with taxa -- Knowledge claims and context-dependence -- Unproblematic facticity -- Problems with experience -- The lab section of the chapter -- The question of worlds -- Epilogue -- The long reach of ontology -- Kinds of justification for prediction -- Predictability and determinism -- Physical solutions to determinism -- The cascading effect -- Dreams of a final theory -- Explaining the cosmos -- Orbs, souls, laws -- Numbers in nature -- Harmony and empiricism -- Conclusion -- Of miracles and mistaken theories -- History as a problem for realism -- Quantum magnum pi? -- Can we avoid the problems history poses? -- First strategy: we have something they didn't -- Second strategy: the curate's egg -- Other ways out -- Worlds given, worlds made -- What's in a world? -- Kuhn's world -- What good is relativism? -- Coherence -- Truth and meaning -- Realism, coherence, and history.
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| Abstract
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Lehoux contends that even though many of the Romans' views about the natural world have no place in modern science--the umbrella-footed monsters and dog-headed people that roamed the earth and the stars that foretold human destinies--their claims turn out not to be so radically different from our own. He begins with Cicero's theologico-philosophical trilogy On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, and On Fate. Lehoux then guides readers through highly technical works by Galen and Ptolemy, as well as the more philosophically oriented physics and cosmologies of Lucretius, Plutarch, and Seneca, all the while exploring the complex interrelationships between the objects of scientific inquiry and the norms, processes, and structures of that inquiry.--From publisher description.
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| Subject
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Science, Ancient.
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Science-- History.
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| Dewey Classification
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930.1
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| LC Classification
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Q124.95.L44 2012
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