This chapter explores four different types of explanatory factors that might be invoked to account for the emergence of different groups of scientific theories, ontologies or cosmologies, namely ecology, language, technology and socio-political factors. It arrives at the negative conclusion that none of these singly nor all four taken in conjunction allow us to predict and explain the world-views and modes of scientific investigation that the historical record and the ethnographic data provide evidence for. The varying trajectories of the different developments that we encounter thus demand nuanced particular analysis.

This chapter accepts that biomedicine is the dominant influence on our ideas about health and disease but considers what qualifications need to be introduced to do justice first to the more complicated issues to do with mental health and then to the very diverse conceptions that have been entertained in this area in non-Western societies, ancient and modern. Drawing on Hacking’s work on natural kinds and Luhrmann’s analysis of the uncertainties of modern psychiatry, it suggests further respects in which we need to exercise caution in assessing competing claims for expertise in this area.

This chapter summarises certain conclusions concerning the scientific endeavours of different cultures at different periods. Cross-cultural understanding is fraught with difficulty but the recognition that there is no neutral vocabulary available in which to undertake our analyses does not mean that all mutual understanding is beyond reach. However, traditional views of the contrast between the literal and the metaphorical should be replaced by an acceptance of the pervasiveness of semantic stretch. Cross-cultural explorations provide an opportunity to examine our own preconceptions, including about the scope of science and the values it implies – and so also of its history.

Studies treating Augustine’s City of God normally begin with the year AD 410 and Alaric’s infamous Sack of Rome. Yet, might it not be more accurate to start in AD 380 when the Emperor Theodosius (d. AD 395) presented himself for Christian baptism at fifty-three years of age in the middle of a severe sickness? Upon recovering, this new and grateful Christian issued the Edict of Thessalonica, Cunctos Populos, along with the Emperors Gratian (d. AD 383) and Valentinian II (d. AD 392), now making Catholic Christianity the official religion of the the Roman Empire. Furthermore, in just a decade thereafter, in AD 391, the ancient rites would be banned, and the old ways authoritatively denounced. It was a truly watershed moment. The strength of the reliable Roman pantheon had been replaced with the weakness of religious novelty professing faith in a humbly vulnerable God-man hanging on a cross.

This chapter introduces the key theme of the book, which is to challenge the dominant agenda in the history of science which concentrates on developments in the West since the seventeenth century. Once we focus on aims and methods rather than on results, the explorations of the members of ancient societies and of modern indigenous groups can be given due attention. Their different approaches offer us the opportunity to revise our own assumptions and so expand the horizons of the history of science.

This chapter examines the varying roles that definitions may play in scientific investigations. Obviously they may laudably aim at clarifying the problem to be explored, but the demand and search for univocal definitions can have a limiting effect on the inquiry subsequently pursued. When a definition is presented as the goal of an investigation, for example of the characteristics of an animal species, that may have the effect of obscuring some of the complexities that may be uncovered along the way. The problem of the role of definitions in an axiomatic system such as Euclid’s lies in their presumed self-evidence.

translation across different natural languages and conceptual systems. While there is no totally neutral vocabulary in which this can be effected, this does not mean that mutual understanding is quite beyond reach, although that will depend on allowing for the revisability of some of the initial preconceptions in play. Comparing divergent schemata is indeed an important means of expanding the horizons of the history of science.

Nothing is more evident, seemingly, about Augustine’s ciu. Dei than its structure. Any reasonably serious relevant website reveals that it is divided into two “halves,” comprising Books 1–10 and 11–22, each further subdivided into halves and thirds, respectively. Augustine himself accounts for the structure in just this way. In retr. he distinguishes the first ten books and the last twelve as the main textual units. The first ten respond to “two groundless opinions that are opposed to the Christian religion.” The first five reply to “those who would have it that human success depends on what they regard as the essential observance of the many gods whom they customarily worship”; the next five books rebut those who argue that the observance they make to the multitude of gods by sacrificing brings profit to life after death.” Augustine adds, lest it be objected that he would then have done nothing but refute the opinions of others without asserting any of his own, the last twelve books accomplish this goal: “in the twelve books that come later, the first four contain an account of the rise of the two cities, the City of God and the city of this world, the second four expound their growth or progress, and the third and final four their appointed ends.” Thus the first “half” leads with response and refutation, and the second half with constructive theology. As Augustine also observes, however, this distinction is not absolute: “Nonetheless, where necessary I both maintain our own standpoint in the first ten books, and reject the opposing views in the later twelve” (retr. 2.69; see also, ep. 1A*.1).

This chapter reviews the complex evidence for differing conceptions of the locus of cognitive and affective faculties that have been entertained, as reported in modern ethnography and in the evidence for ancient societies such as Greece and China. The contrast between physicality and interiority that Descola uses to draw up a taxonomy of ontological regimes is subject to qualifications insofar as mind–body dualism is only one of a number of schemata that are to be found across cultures.

In the first ten books of ciu. Dei, Augustine makes his case for Christian beatitude against the worldly glory of pagan Rome. Book 11 is a pivot. There he tells us – and now “we” seem to be his Christian and not his pagan readership – that we know best of the City of God, that eternal thing that peregrinates through time, from the witness of sacred writings, Psalms especially (87:3, 48:1–2, 48:8, 46:4–5), and from the inspiring love of the city’s founder. Most of us, most of the time, mix self-interest into that love and obscure for ourselves the beauty of the beloved. The moral is not that love must be selfless or worse, self-loathing, but that sacrificial love, sensing what is holy, practices humility. The great mediator between heaven and earth, the Son of God, takes up a human life, his own, without ceasing to be God. His is the original act of humility – think of it also as first love – that speaks consistently through the Scriptures and renders them authoritative (ciu. Dei 11.3). While sin makes it impossible for a mind used to the dark to endure the relentless illumination of pure divinity (incommutabile lumen; ciu. Dei 11:2), Augustine reminds us that we have, by way of mediation, a text to interpret and a spirit of humility to bring to the reading.

In ciu. Dei 6 and 7, Augustine turns from addressing arguments that Rome’s traditional pagan cult is requisite for the this-worldly prosperity of the city and its empire, to the prospects of these rituals conducing to personal well-being after death. Books 6 and 7 form a bridge between Augustine’s history of pre-Christian Rome in all its glory and its misery, and his consideration of philosophic or natural theology, especially accounts offered by the Platonic school, and the place it makes for traditional pagan worship. The main material from which this bridge is made, according to leading pagan intellectuals like Marcus Terentius Varro, is the traditional Roman civil religion. Varro variously presents Rome’s traditional civil religion as framed by its founders for political utility on the one hand, and philosophic pedagogy on the other. Civil theology and its rites thus understood bind mythic pagan deities and popular views of their intervention on behalf of Rome to a naturalistic, pantheist account of God or the gods as the world itself or its soul. As Augustine interprets Varro, the latter lends his learned, public-spirited support to the civil cult, even while directing thoughtful readers beyond it to philosophic or natural theology. Varro is thus an indispensable interlocutor for Augustine in completing the political-historical-religious inquiry of ciu. Dei 1–5, and in preparing for the engagement with Platonic natural theology in Books 8–10.

The complaint that the rise of Christianity had caused a series of calamities due to the neglect of the traditional polytheistic cults had already been combated by the early Latin apologists. In cataloguing catastrophes that had befallen Rome before the advent of Christ, Augustine moves on well-trodden ground, though the traditional complaint apparently had gained new force after the sack of Rome in AD 410. Accordingly, this chapter explores how Augustine adapts a traditional theme to his own apologetic purposes. It shows how he employs rhetorical pathos in order to deconstruct the idealizing view of early Roman history that had been canonized by the literary tradition and kept exerting influence on educated persons – both pagan and Christian – in his days. While he sometimes solicits an emotional response in order to reverse the traditional evaluation of a well-known event (ciu. Dei 3.14 on the Horatians and Curiatians), he is also prepared to exploit the traditional pathetic representation of the Civil Wars, available in authors like Lucan or Florus, to make his own point. His reading of Roman history as an almost uninterrupted series of civil wars reveals the distinction – conceded to the pagan adversaries in the opening chapter – between moral and external evils as artificial and marks the Roman Empire as an avatar of the ciuitas terrena, which is inevitably divided within itself. The chapters on Numa Pompilius briefly touch upon the systematically important issues of the relevance of peace for happiness and the relation of religion and philosophy and help to anchor Book 3 in the overall argument of the ciu. Dei as a whole.

This chapter investigates the problems posed by the difficulties of translation across different natural languages and conceptual systems. While there is no totally neutral vocabulary in which this can be effected, this does not mean that mutual understanding is quite beyond reach, although that will depend on allowing for the revisability of some of the initial preconceptions in play. Comparing divergent schemata is indeed an important means of expanding the horizons of the history of science.