Wrestling with Nature
From Omens to Science
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Natural Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia
Francesca Rochberg
2. Natural Knowledge in the Classical World
Daryn Lahoux
3. Natural Knowledge in the Arabic Middle Ages
Jon McGinnis
4. Natural Knowledge in the Latin Middle Ages
Michael H. Shank
5. Natural History
Peter Harrison
6. Mixed Mathematics
Peter Dear
7. Natural Philosophy
John L. Heilbron
8. Science and Medicine
Ronald L. Numbers
9. Science and Technology
Ronald Kline
10. Science and Religion
Jon H. Roberts
11. Science, Pseudoscience, and Science Falsely So-Called
Ronald L. Numbers & Daniel P. Thurs
12. Scientific Methods
Daniel P. Thurs
13. Science and the Public
Bernard Lightman
14. Science and Place
David N. Livingstone
Contributors
Index
“[A] brilliant volume. . . . Highly compelling. . . . Taken as a whole, the fourteen chapters present state of the art historiography in a way that historians as well as non-specialised readers will gain many new and inspiring insights.”
“Wrestling with Nature offers lucid, concise, and empirically up-to-date surveys of major slices of our current historical understandings of the scientific enterprise.”
“Wrestling with Nature is a marvelous and much-needed set of essays that surveys how students of nature conceptualized their studies and how they presented their work to a wider audience including patrons, readers, and other students of nature. Broad in its scope, the book offers impressive contributions from leading scholars that take us from the ancient Near East to more modern times and invite us to reexamine everything we thought we knew about what ‘science’ means and has meant in the Western tradition. Because of its scope, the provocative questions that it raises, and the expertise of the contributors, Wrestling with Nature will be required reading in history of science and science studies classrooms.”
“A refreshing reflection on that old word, ‘science,’ that has risen to mean so much. Wrestling with Nature is indispensable for clarifying the many different things people throughout history meant when they tried to make sense of nature and of themselves.”
“Here is a lively exploration, across cultures and through time, of human nature’s approach to the rest of nature. It begins its search for the origins of ‘science’ in the days when natural and supernatural were one and the same. The volume’s expert contributors catch their curious forebears in the difficult acts of extracting nature’s secrets—dividing nature into categories for study, divining in nature the handiwork of gods or mathematical laws, devising observational techniques, and developing experimental methods. The grand sweep of Wrestling with Nature fosters a new appreciation for the flowering of scientific enterprise.”
History: General History
Physical Sciences: History and Philosophy of Physical Sciences
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