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Darrera modificació: 2011-04-06
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Grant, Edward, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, xxiii + 816 pp.
- Resum
- Medieval cosmology was a fusion of pagan Greek ideas and biblical descriptions of the world, especially the creation account in Genesis. Because cosmology was based on discussions of the relevant works of Aristotle, primary responsibility for its study fell to scholastic theologians and natural philosophers in the universities of western Europe from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. The present work describes the extraordinary range of themes, ideas, and arguments that constituted scholastic cosmology for approximately five hundred years from around 1200 to 1700. Primary emphasis is placed on the world as a whole, what might lie beyond it, and the celestial region, which extended from the Moon to the outermost convex surface of the cosmos. During the late Middle Ages (ca. 1200-1500), Aristotelian cosmology met little opposition or challenge. By the time rival interpretations appeared in the sixteenth century - for example, Platonism, atomism, Stoicism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and especially Copernicanism - Aristotelian cosmology was firmly entrenched. By the seventeenth century, however, Copernican heliocentric cosmology and the geoheliocentric variant of it, proposed by Tycho Brahe, offered significant alternatives and thereby challenged medieval Aristotelian cosmology as never before. How scholastic natural philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries responded to the new interpretations is an important aspect of this study.
Contents:
* Introduction: scope, sources, and social context
* 1. Pierre Duhem, Medieval cosmology and the scope of the present day
* 2. The sources of cosmology in the late Middle Ages
* 3. The social and institutional matrix of scholastic cosmology
-- Part I. The Cosmos as a Whole and What, if Anything, Lies Beyond:
* 4. Is the world eternal, without beginning or end?
* 5. The creation of the world
* 6. The finitude, shape, and place of the world
* 7. The perfection of the world
* 8. The possibility of other worlds
* 9. Extracosmic void space
-- Part II. The Celestial Region:
* 10. The incorruptibility of the celestial region
* 11. Celestial perfection
* 12. On celestial matter: can it exist in a changeless state?
* 13. The mobile celestial orbs: concentrics, eccentrics, and epicycles
* 14. Are the heavens composed of hard orbs or a fluid substance?
* 15. The immobile orb of the cosmos: the empyrean heaven
* 16. Celestial light
* 17. The properties and qualities of celestial bodies, and the dimensions of the world
* 18. On celestial motions and their causes
* 19. The influence of the celestial region on the terrestrial
* 20. The earth and its cosmic relations: size, centrality, shape, and immobility
* Conclusion: Five centuries of scholastic cosmology
* Appendices
- Matèries
- Cosmologia
Astronomia i astrologia
- Notes
- Reimpr. 1996.
- URL
- http://books.google.com/books?id=TSc4AAAAIAAJ
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