While the development of a scientific community in Greece during the 19th century has received some historiographical consideration, the narratives include mostly scientific perspectives. The actual beliefs of the grand majority of the population remain unknown and undocumented. This paper is a first attempt to investigate such beliefs, based on the works of the pioneering Greek ethnographer Nikolas Polities (1852-1921), who created compilations of vernacular beliefs about the sun, the universe and ailment. These beliefs, the categories they employ and the way they are constructed will be compared with the narratives of the Greek scientists of the time.

As is the case for ‘science’, ‘religion’, and other terms that define the categories of today’s academic disciplines, there is no single term equivalent to ‘nature’ (in the sense of ‘the external world in its entirety’, to follow the definition of the online Merriam-Webster dictionary) in Chinese sources prior to the twentieth century. This negative statement does not tell us anything about China. Instead, it illustrates the fact that searching Chinese sources for concepts forged in other times and places is not a fruitful approach if we want to uncover and understand the knowledge constructed in pre-industrial China.
In this paper, we will present a few terms found in Chinese sources of the seventeenth and eighteenth century that bear a ‘family resemblance’ (as defined by Wittgenstein) to ‘nature’. At that time, some elements of the early modern European sciences had been introduced into the Chinese scholarly literature by Jesuit missionaries. By discussing what some of these terms covered, and the contexts in which they were used, we propose to show that knowledge relevant to the history of science can and did develop independently from a notion of ‘nature’. This in turn suggests that we need to retrieve actors’ categories if we want to pursue and bring together non-Eurocentric, global approaches to the knowledge and representations of their environment that human societies have constructed in the pre-industrial age.

The Chinese conception of time is based on the cycle of natural change through the seasons, and on the celestial phenomena to which the Chinese paid so much attention. “To observe the phenomena and to tell the time”, this is the fundamental way in which the Chinese ordered the universe into a harmonic cosmos. This way of thinking is reflected in，and applied to, all aspects of Chinese material and spiritual, social and political life. Farming and agriculture, healing and medicine, rituals and festivals, calendar making and astrology, all amounts to the management of time. Get time right means managing things well. The Chinese thinking and experiences are all bounded by time. It brought order to a seemingly chaotic succession of individual moments by tying them to the rhythmic eternity of the universe.