Representing Space in the Scientific Revolution

Abstract

The novel understanding of the physical world that characterized the Scientific Revolution depended on a fundamental shift in the way its protagonists understood and described space. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, spatial phenomena were described in relation to a presupposed central point; by its end, space had become a centerless void in which phenomena could only be described by reference to arbitrary orientations. David Marshall Miller examines both the historical and philosophical aspects of this far-reaching development, including the rejection of the idea of heavenly spheres, the advent of rectilinear inertia, and the theoretical contributions of Copernicus, Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. His rich study shows clearly how the centered Aristotelian cosmos became the oriented Newtonian universe, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of the history and philosophy of science.

A coherentist conception of ad hoc hypotheses

“…20 19 Another point that was important to Copernicus was that the Ptolemaists had, with the deployment of eccentrics, departed from the Aristotelian principle of uniform motion. For a highly interesting discussion see (Miller 2014). 20 For a detailed discussion see also (Janssen 2002a).…”

Space, Imagination and the Cosmos, from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period: Introduction

“…3 Koyré 1957, viii. 4 See for example Mamiani 1979;Peterschmitt 2013;Miller 2014. For an approach that covers the period from the 12th to the 16th centuries, and a closer approximation to the aims of this book, see Suarez-Nani, Ribordy and Petagine 2017.…”