"Privative" meaning "a concept of absence" [closed]

In The Science of Discworld, Terry Pratchett uses the word "privative" in an unusual sense: a concept defined by the absence of something. Darkness is the absence of light, cold is the absence of heat, emptiness is the absence of contents, and so on. However, I haven't been able to find this sense of the word in dictionaries. Did Pratchett coin this sense of the term, or is it attested before? Have other authors used it since?

Merriam Webster defines privative in exactly the way you describe

constituting or predicating privation or absence of a quality

in fact it is the only definition it gives.

It also says that derivation is 14th century and even Terry wasn't that old!

I assume that you are thinking of 'private' or 'privately' when you say that the use of 'privative' is unusual but 'privative' is related in meaning to 'deprive' and 'privation' rather than 'private'. Both 'private' and 'privative' derive partly from the Latin 'privus' but the meanings in English diverged by at least the late Middle Ages.