Michael R. Dove

“Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. . . . All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history. . . . How was the Classical age able to define this realm of ‘natural history,’ the proofs and even the unity of which now appear to us so distant, and as though already blurred?”1 In short, when we look back from the vantage point of contemporary academia, we can have only a “blurred” vision of those fields that have vanished. Foucault is describing an ontological shift: captive as we are to our own ontologies, anything else appears as but a blur. This blur, this strangeness, Foucault suggests, is worthy of our attention.”
― Michael R. Dove, Hearsay Is Not Excluded: A History of Natural History

“Ancient meteorology covered a much broader field than its modern counterpart.” The difference from the modern era lies in lumping versus splitting areas of historic inquiry, including what today would be seen as culture versus nature: it is a much more holistic vision. Thus, Roger French writes, “The people whom scientific historians see as practising science in the more or less distant past . . . called it philosophy and strove rather to stress the unity of knowledge than the separateness of its parts. Part of it was concerned with the natural world, but this part was not marked off from the others by any strict boundaries.”6”
― Michael R. Dove, Hearsay Is Not Excluded: A History of Natural History