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: http://zebu.uoregon.edu/2003/ph301/hlec06.html
Дата изменения: Wed Jan 19 01:11:42 2011 Дата индексирования: Tue Oct 2 04:20:57 2012 Кодировка: Поисковые слова: comet tail |
Granted, then, that empty space extends without limit in every direction and that seeds innumerable are rushing on countless courses through an unfathomable universe . . ., it is in the highest degree unlikely that this earth and sky is the only one to have been created . . . So we must realize that there are other worlds in other parts of the universe, with races of different men and different animals. |
Class Discussion: What does the above passage mean? When do you think it was written?
And what of the following?
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There are clear indications that things that pass for solid are in fact porous. Even in rocks a trickle of water seeps through into caves, and copious drops ooze from every surface. Food percolates to every part of an animal's body. Trees grow and bring forth their fruit in season, because their food is distributed throughout their length from the tips of the roots through the trunk and along every branch. Noises pass through walls and fly into closed buildings. Freezing cold penetrates to the bones. |
Our mystery person is really quite amazing when it comes to significantly
pre-dating "modern scientific thinking".
the universe is random
Skipping forward a few centuries to Nicholas of Cusa
(1401 - 1464):
What is so profound and important about the following idea?
Reason (meaning abstractive and discursive knowledge) is the faculty which abstracts universal concepts; it never arrives at perfect unity. The knowledge of reason, moreover, is deficient because it represents reality in an improper manner, for it is only founded on individual beings. Hence it follows that concepts result from contradictory notes, for instance, unity and multiplicity, being and non-being. The principle of contradiction, the basis of Aristotelian Scholastic logic, is good within the limits of reason, but it gives us an improper knowledge of reality. |
Concerning Measurement:
you will recognize that the art of calculating lacks precision, since it presupposes that the motion of all the other planets can be measured by reference to the motion of the sun. Even the ordering of the heavens --with respect to whatever kind of place or with respect to the risings and settings of the constellations or to the elevation of a pole and to things having to do with these-- it is not precisely knowable. Since no two places agree precisely in time and setting, it is evident that judgments about the stars are, in their specificity, far from precise |
He also wrote:
"To people elsewhere, the Earth would appear to them as a noble star"
Clearly at serious odds with the dominant Ptolemaic cosmological ideas.
And further suggested:
Life, as it exists on Earth, in the form of men, animals and plants, is to be found, let us suppose, in a higher form in the solar and stellar regions. . . . Of the inhabitants then of worlds other than our own we can know less, having no standards by which to appraise them. It may be conjectured that in the Sun there exist solar beings, bright and enlightened denizens, and by nature, more spiritual than such as may inhabit the Moon - who are possibly lunatics . |
And Copernicus is now just 50 years away ...