"We have... in Kepler's work, a second great event in the development of the metaphysics of modern science. Aristotelianism had won out in the long preceding period of human thought because it seemed to make intelligible and rational the world of commonsense experience. Kepler early realized that the admission of validity to the Copernican world-scheme involved a radically different cosmology, a cosmology which could rest upon the revived Neo-Platonism for its general background, would find its historical justification in the remarkable developments in the sciences of mathematics and astronomy, and which could lay bare a marvellous significance and a new beauty in the observed events of the natural cosmos by regarding them as exemplifications of simple, underlying numerical relations."
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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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