For the majority of scholars, natural history before the eighteenth century has remained terra incognita. As a discipline that did not experience any remarkable paradigmatic shifts, or so the story goes, it lacked tile features of a properly "revolutionary" science, and therefore it was relegated to the backwaters of ma W standard accounts of premodern science. Scott Arran's Cognitive Foundations of Natural History is an ambitious and broad-ran~ng attempt to reevaluate natural history before DarwGn from the perspective of its anthropology. Beginning with Aristotle and concluding ~4th Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, and Larnarck, Atran charts the course of natural history from a perceptual enterprise, grounded in commonsense taxonomies, folkbiology, and local knowledge, to a global, nonphenomenal investigation of the nature of living species.
The study is divided into four parts. The first section establishes the premise of folktaxonomy, drawing on historical examples as well as contemporary anthropoIogical studies of classification. The second argues that Aristotelian criteria for comprehending living kinds gave "ontological primacy to what is psychologically basic" (p. 98). This included the use of analogy as a comparative technique, the positioning of man as a morphological reference point for the animal kingdom, and the devaluation of less "man-like" kinds, such as invertebrates. Atran gives primacy to "commonsense" analysis as the core of the Aristotelian program, describing Aristotle as a folknaturalist whose significant contribution was "to extend the familiar to the unfamiliar" (p. 120).