The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order

August 17, 2016 @ 6:52 pm

The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order

Robert S. Westman

Language: English

Pages: 704

ISBN: 0520254813

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus publicly defended his hypothesis that the earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the center of a finite universe. But why did Copernicus make this bold proposal? And why did it matter? The Copernican Question reframes this pivotal moment in the history of science, centering the story on a conflict over the credibility of astrology that erupted in Italy just as Copernicus arrived in 1496. Copernicus engendered enormous resistance when he sought to protect astrology by reconstituting its astronomical foundations. Robert S. Westman shows that efforts to answer the astrological skeptics became a crucial unifying theme of the early modern scientific movement. His interpretation of this "long sixteenth century," from the 1490s to the 1610s, offers a new framework for understanding the great transformations in natural philosophy in the century that followed.

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according to the philosophers one simple body ought to have one motion), and moreover that the sun stands at the center of the world and lacks any motion. All of which [assertions] conflict with the common teaching of the philosophers and astronomers and also seem to contradict what the Scriptures teach.151 So Copernicus now stood refuted, rejected on the basis of (by now) traditional physical arguments and on the authority of the very philosophers whom Clavius had previously attacked. The

had very close ties to Kepler, a fellow Swabian, even though he had converted to Catholicism in 1592. Kepler dedicated to Wacker his little treatise on the snowflake (1611). As will be seen in the final chapter, Wacker occupies an important place in Kepler’s Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo. In addition, Wacker had good friends among the Wrocław intellectual circle of Andreas Dudith, Nikolaus Rhediger, and Jacob Monau during the period when Wittich was in circulation.113 And finally, Wacker was a

RerumNaturalium&Divinarum sive de rebus Coelestibus. . . Eclipsium Solis & Lunae Annis Iam Aliquot Uisarum usque ad Postrema Huius Anni MD XXXX Descriptiones per Philippvm Melanchthonem & Alios. Basel: Robert Winter. Buoninsegni, Tommaso. 1581. Hieron. Savonarolœ . . . opus eximium adversus divinatricem astronomiam in confirmationem confutationis ejusdem astronomicœ prœdictionis J. Pici Mirandulœ Comitis, ex Italico in Latinum translatum, interprete . . . T. Boninsignio, . . . ab eodem scholiis,

Preface by Meric Casaubon. London: D. Maxwell. ———. 1851. Autobiographical Tracts of Dr. John Dee. Ed. James Crossley London: Chetham Society. ———. 1968a [1577]. General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Art of Navigation. [London: John Day.] Amsterdam: Da Capo. ———. 1968b [1842]. The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee and the Catalogue of His Library of Manuscripts. Ed. James O. Halliwell. [London: Camden Society.] Repr. New York: AMS Press. ———. 1975. The Mathematicall Preface to the

305–6, 569n137; Descartes on, 498, 512; Kepler on, 316, 335, 512, 569n30; literature of, 250–58, 251; Maestlin and, 224, 252, 254–57, 261–64, 280, 316, 335, 342, 393, 419, 449, 561n16; Newton, 512; prognostication and, 251, 252–53, 255, 258, 512, 536n76, 538n149, 569n137; Regiomontanus, 241, 270; Roeslin, 224, 253, 254–57, 256, 342; Rothmann, 291, 305; Timpler’s physics textbooks omitting, 422; Tycho, 238, 253–54, 288–89, 293, 305, 393, 559n138; year 1475, 241; year 1531, 536n76; year 1532, 232,

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