Before Nature – Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith) - Hardcover

Rochberg, Francesca

3.78

9 ratings by Goodreads

9780226406138: Before Nature – Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022640613X ISBN 13: 9780226406138

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2017

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In the modern West, we take for granted that what we call the "natural world" confronts us all and always has but we are wrong. In reality, nature is a human construct. Before Nature is an exploration of that almost unimaginable time when there was no such thing as "nature" no word, reference, or sense for it. Long before the concept of nature formed over the long history of European philosophy and science, our ancestors in ancient Assyria and Babylonia developed the cuneiform script, the earliest system of writing used for documenting and observing the world in a way not wholly dissimilar to our modern science With Before Nature, Francesca Rochberg explores that Assyro-Babylonian knowledge tradition and shows how it relates to the history of science, despite not being focused around a conscious category of nature. From a modern, Western perspective, a world not conceived somehow within the framework of physical nature is difficult if not impossible to imagine. Yet, as Rochberg lays out, ancient Assyro-Babylonian investigations of regularity and irregularity, norms and anomalies clearly established an axis of knowledge between the knower and an intelligible, ordered world. Rochberg is the first scholar to make a case for how exactly we can understand cuneiform knowledge, prediction, and explanation in relation to science without recourse to later ideas of nature. Systematically examining the whole of Mesopotamian science from a remarkable analytic and historical perspective, Before Nature will open up surprising new pathways for studying the history of science.

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Review:

"Rochberg examines knowledge about the non-human world embodied in Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform texts. This volume is concrete, detailed, and scholarly in descriptions of how these texts treat observations, regularities, and explanations; the author also teases out an enormous range of implications for the history and philosophy of science. The contrast between the ways in which these texts describe and conceptualize knowledge of the world highlights the manner in which more familiar modern Western concepts of science and knowledge are cultural constructs rather than necessary or inevitable. Precise and clear writing eases an intrinsically challenging work that calls presuppositions into question and raises subtle but consequential distinctions. Scholarly footnotes and a wide-ranging bibliography will facilitate further work, and no doubt some revisions of the author's conclusions. This work will stand as a fundamental reference in any good library of history, philosophy, or cultural studies. Recommended."--Choice "The naturalness of the concept of nature has recently been challenged by work in social anthropology, philosophy, cognitive science, and history. In this brilliant new book Rochberg brings to bear her unparalleled scholarship and analytic skills to examine what light the ancient Mesopotamians can throw on this fundamental issue. They were arguably the first people we know to undertake the systematic observation, prediction, and explanation of a whole range of phenomena, especially but not exclusively in the heavens. But they did not have 'nature' as their target since they had no such concept. So the aims they set themselves, the methods they used, and the assumptions they made about the world they were investigating are crucial to our understanding of the earliest endeavors to engage in what we can recognize as scientific research."--Geoffrey Lloyd, Needham Research Institute "Before Nature's formidable erudition will fascinate cuneiformists....For noncuneiformists, the book's most compelling parts will be its discussions of western civilization's philosophical attempts to define 'nature', postdating the cuneiform world--from Aristotle to Einstein and his successors."--Science "Before Nature is a challenging book in the best sense: it invites readers to rethink their most basic categories--including nature itself--through the lens of ancient Near Eastern conceptions of order and practices of observation, interpretation, and prediction. The evidence for an alternative form of knowledge is presented with rigor and imagination, and the result is an enlarged understanding of order, without nature or causes. Before Nature should be read by all historians of science, regardless of their specialties."--Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science "Rochberg makes a forceful, erudite, eloquent, and persuasive case that nature was not conceived as a discrete entity in Mesopotamia and that Mesopotamian scientific practices can only be properly understood and accorded their rightful place in the history of science when it is recognized that these practices were not informed by the goal of understanding nature and how it functions. Her command of the pertinent primary and secondary literature relating to Mesopotamian science is truly impressive and is one of the many strengths of the book. The author navigates effortlessly the most recent scholarship in the history of science, anthropology, and many other disciplines in the humanities in which the topics covered in the book have been treated from different perspectives. Before Nature is the only work to examine systematically and comprehensively the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of the whole of Mesopotamian science from such a remarkable analytic and historical perspective. For this and many other reasons, not the least of which is the depth, breadth, and erudition that informs every page of the study, this book will certainly become the stand-alone reference point for this topic for many decades to come."--Paul Delnero, Johns Hopkins University

About the Author:

Francesca Rochberg is professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

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