"[Dominicus Maria de] Novara was Copernicus' friend and teacher during the six years of his stay in Italy, and among the important facts which we know about him is this, that he was a free critic of the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, partly because of some observations which did not agree closely enough with deductions from it, but more especially because he was thoroughly caught in this Platonic-Pythagorean current and felt that the whole cumbrous system violated the postulate that the astronomical universe is an orderly mathematical harmony."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Footnote: Dorothy Stimson, The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe (1917) p. 25.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Metaphysical_Foundations_of_Modern_Physical_Science
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science; A Historical and Critical Essay (1924) was written by the American philosopher Edwin Arthur Burtt as his doctoral thesis. This work has had a significant influence upon the history and philosophy of science, as discussed by Floris Cohen in his The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry and by Diane Davis Villemaire in her E.A. Burtt, Historian and Philosopher: A Study of the Author of The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Phys
145 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science →
Related Quotes
"How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about our world ! And it is all so novel, too. The cosmo…"
"Philosophers never succeed in getting quite outside the ideas of their time so as to look at them objectively-this wo…"
"The central place of epistemology in modern philosophy is no accident... Knowledge was not a problem for the ruling p…"
"It may very well be that the truly constructive ideas of modern philosophy are not cosmological ideas at all, but suc…"
"In the last analysis it is the ultimate picture which an age forms of the nature of its world that is its most fundam…"
"All of us tend easily to be caught in the point of view of our age and to accept unquestioningly its main presupposit…"
"For the dominant trend in medieval thought, man occupied a more significant and determinative place in the universe t…"
"For the Middle Ages man was in every sense the centre of the universe. The whole world of nature was believed to be t…"
"This view underlay medieval physics. The entire world of nature was held not only to exist for man's sake, but to be …"
"An intensive study of the classic English thinkers early taught me that no one could hope to appreciate the motives u…"