“Against Nature”, or On How Scientific Description Becomes Ethical Prescription. Review of: Daston, L. (2019). Against Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 96 p., il.

Against Nature, a book of L. Daston, is devoted to the historical transformations of the term “nature” and its significance in the formation of moral categories from Aristotle to our days. Daston pays special attention to the period between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when “modern science” emerged. Daston clarifies the essential contents of such terms as “nature”, “normativity”, and “universal natural laws”, reconstructs the contexts underlying the introduction of these categories into scholarly discourse and finds out their significance in a situation of the growing social importance of scientific knowledge. All these let Daston trace the logic of at least three ways for the “order of nature” to transfer into “moral order” and conclude that the order of nature only had a representative function. The review contains parts of the Russian translation of Daston’s main ideas and conclusions, its critical and historiographic evaluation. Daston’s thesis about the weakness of naturalisation as discoursive strategy is contemplated in the context of the criticism of anthropocentrism, vividly illustrated by works of M. Serres, B. Latour, D. Haraway and T. Morton.