The web of knowledge
A Roman world
Knowing nature in the Roman context
Overview
Nature, gods, and governance
Divinity and divination
Roman virtues
Nature and the legitimation of the republic
A Ciceronian contradiction?
Knowledge of nature and virtuous action
Fabulae versus learned observation
Conclusion
Law in nature, nature in law
Laws of nature
Natural laws
Human and divine governance
Is a "law of nature" even possible in antiquity?
Divinity, redux
Conclusion
Epistemology and judicial rhetoric
Theory-ladenness and observation
Observations as models
Observational selectivity
Examination of witnesses
The natural authority of morals
Declamation and certainty
The embeddedness of seeing
Doubts about vision
Mechanisms of seeing in antiquity
The eyes as organs
Not every black box is a camera obscura
Epistemologies of seeing
The centrality of experience
The trouble with taxa
Knowledge claims and context-dependence
Unproblematic facticity
Problems with experience
The lab section of the chapter
The question of worlds
Epilogue
The long reach of ontology
Kinds of justification for prediction
Predictability and determinism
Physical solutions to determinism
The cascading effect
Dreams of a final theory
Explaining the cosmos
Orbs, souls, laws
Numbers in nature
Harmony and empiricism
Conclusion
Of miracles and mistaken theories
History as a problem for realism
Quantum magnum pi?
Can we avoid the problems history poses?
First strategy: we have something they didn't
Second strategy: the curate's egg
Other ways out
Worlds given, worlds made
What's in a world?
Kuhn's world
What good is relativism?
Coherence
Truth and meaning
Realism, coherence, and history.