Concept
Copernican Revolution
Overview
Copernican Revolution is a phrase with different meanings in different contexts. In astronomy, the phrase refers to the transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism. For Christianity and Western culture, it may instead refer to the dismantling of the human-centric medieval cosmology and its cultural consequences. In physical cosmology, the phrase may be used to refer to the emergence and formalization of the Copernican principle that humans are not privileged observers of the universe. Within the philosophy of science, the Copernican Revolution is the first historic example of a paradigm shift in science. Finally, the phrase is sometimes used by English speakers as a metaphor for any radical intellectual upheaval that fundamentally reorders or reshapes our understanding of the world.
The Copernican Revolution is named for the Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who in the 16th century proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Driven by a desire for a more perfect (i.e. circular) description of the cosmos than the prevailing Ptolemaic model — which posited that the Sun circled a stationary Earth — Copernicus instead advanced a heliostatic model where a stationary Sun was located near, though not precisely at, the center of the heavens.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
That ‘to be true’ _means_ to be thought in a certain way is, therefore, certainly false. Yet this assertion plays the most essential part in Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ of philosophy, and renders worthless the whole mass of modern literature, to which that revolution has given rise, and which is called Epistemology. Kant held that what was unified in a certain manner by the synthetic activity of thought was _ipso…
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
States what Copernican Revolution is; names Copernican Revolution.
A transcendental principle is one by means of which is represented, _a priori_, the universal condition under which alone things can be in general Objects of our cognition. On the other hand, a principle is called metaphysical if it represents the _a priori_ condition under which alone Objects, whose concept must be empirically given, can be further determined _a priori_. Thus the principle of the cognition of…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Copernican Revolution is; the author is tied to Copernican Revolution in the knowledge graph.
In this way, an ethically inspired system of metaphysics grew up, whose anthropocentrism was apparently warranted by the geocentrism of astronomy. When Copernicus swept away the astronomical basis of this system of thought, it had grown so familiar, and had associated itself so intimately with men's aspirations, that it survived with scarcely diminished force--survived even Kant's "Copernican revolution," and is…
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Names Copernican Revolution.
Philosophers who discussed Copernican Revolution
Related ideas
- De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
- Giordano Bruno
- Deferent and epicycle
- Immanuel Kant
- Almagest
- Herbert Butterfield
- Jacques Lacan
- William Gilbert (physicist)
- Transcendence (philosophy)
- Victor Cousin
- History and philosophy of science
- Sidereus Nuncius
- Cosmology
- Moon
- Western culture
- Alexandre Koyré
- Ptolemy
- Heliocentrism
- Paradigm shift
- Renaissance
- Thomas Kuhn
- Roman Jakobson
- Pythagoreanism
- Galileo Galilei