[Expositions 6.2 (2012): 9]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

 

Introduction to the Roundtable: Daryn Lehoux’s “What Did the Romans 

Know? An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking.” 

 

 

Daryn Lehoux’s “What Did the Romans Know? An Inquiry Into Science and Worldmaking” 

(2012) is a slim volume, but it is in no way thin. A work in the history and philosophy of science, 

Lehoux offers a set of historical studies of select Roman scientific problems and texts (by such 

figures as Cicero, Lucretius, Ptolemy, and Galen) from the first century BCE to the second 

century CE with the aim of illuminating “the historical, intellectual, and experiential context of 

fact-making.” This focus on fact-making, on the “domains in which observation is [. . .] situated, 

understood, and processed,” is important because “that is where the world we perceive gets put 

together as a coherent whole” (Lehoux 2012, 2). Lehoux’s wager is that by studying ancient 

Roman scientific texts and even or rather especially those claims and observations that seem the 

most strange and foreign to us today – “How do we take seriously all those silly monsters, the 

dog-headed people, the spontaneous generation, the three-foot-long grasshoppers, the astrology, 

the divination?” he asks (Lehoux 2012, 14) – we can productively examine anew foundational 

questions in the history and philosophy of sciences.  

Each of the three Academic Roundtable participants – Elizabeth Hamm (Saint Mary’s 

College of California), Courtney Roby (Cornell University), and Jacqueline Feke (University of 

Chicago) – hone in on some significant feature or features of the dense terrain Lehoux maps. 

Hamm offers a critical survey of Lehoux’s various studies and the major philosophical themes 

that weave through them. Among other observations, Roby introduces the voice of Rom Harré 

into the discussion Lehoux opens in order to foreground the role of taxonomy in scientific 

model-building practices. Feke, with her own interests and expertise in the work of the 

mathematician Ptolemy in mind, examines three elements of Lehoux’s argument: his proof of the 

existence of the concept of natural law in the Roman period (centuries before its hypothesized 

genesis); his discussion of the way Ptolemy’s epistemology responds to skeptical challenges; 

and, his own response to skeptical challenges (his advocacy of a pragmatic theory of truth and a 

coherence-based epistemology). 

 

 

Work Cited 

 

Lehoux, Daryn. 2012. What Did the Romans Know? An Inquiry into Science and 

Worldmaking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.