"The exactness or rigour with which the causal harmony must be verified in phenomena is the new and important feature in Kepler. Tycho had urged Kepler in a letter "to lay a solid foundation for his views by actual observation, and then by ascending from these to strive to reach the cause of things." Kepler, however, preferred to let Tycho gather the observations, for he was antecedently convinced that genuine causes must always be in the nature of underlying mathematical harmonies. ...God created the world in accordance with the principle of perfect numbers, hence the mathematical harmonies in the mind of the creator furnish the cause "why the number, the size, and the motions of the orbits are as they are and not otherwise." Causality, to repeat, becomes reinterpreted in terms of mathematical simplicity and harmony."
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Footnote: Joannis Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia, ed. Christian Frisch (1858) Vol. I, p.10
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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
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