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review essay 345 BOOK REVIEWS Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds. The Moral Authority of Nature (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004), pp. 519+ vii $ 65.00 ISBN 0 226 13680 9 (cloth); $ 26.00 ISBN 0 226 13681 7 (paper). This volume of essays manages to accomplish what a single journal essay or even a larger monograph by a single author could unlikely have done. It brings together under an intriguing and creative theme a remarkably vast range of times and contexts, with discussions full of conceptual subtlety and historical erudition and insight. First, the unifying theme. Commonsense might command readers to dismiss the title as either an oxymoron and the theme a catchy red herring, casting a long shadow over the book’s contents. But before judging the book by its cover, one might try to understand it. The oxymoron is obvious: science and culture are often understood in terms of the distinction between nature and culture; to the former belong at best the metaphorical ‘authority’ of the laws of nature; to the latter belong the essentially human domain of values and conventions and their respective sorts of authority, among them, moral author- ity. They are meant
Early Science and Medicine – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 2006
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