Abstract
After initial comments on the state of research and his research plan, Marcin Karas in an introductory chapter considers Copernicus’ national and social identity. The five chapters that follow treat the predecessors of heliocentrism, with sections on cosmology in Copernicus’ time and Copernicus’ inspirations; the philosophy of nature and methodology of science; cosmology; the problem of Earth’s motions; and the heliocentric universe. The author concludes with a summary and further reflections and a bibliography of sources with lists of fundamental references and auxiliary studies. An index of names and a subject-matter index are followed by three appendices, on the cosmology of the Venerable Bede, on the heavens in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, and on the history of science and philosophy in the Baroque era, each providing perspective on Copernicus’ philosophical views.
The book does not include a summary in another language, but there is a paragraph from the conclusion that can serve that purpose: In scholarly and popular literature the figure of Copernicus is associated with many alternative theses. He is treated either as Polish or as German. As a scholar who wrote only in Latin and Polish, or only in Latin and German. His theory belongs to the Middle Ages or to the Renaissance. His philosophy is naturalistic, physical, and materialistic or Platonic, Pythagorean, and spiritual. He is the faithful son of the Church or a precursor of secularism and atheism. He supported the Polish monarch or the masses of Varmia. His work On Revolutions was the foundation of modern culture or no one read it at all. He was a recluse, exception, and loner, or an active participant in many scientific debates, assemblies, meetings, and consultations. Copernican heliocentrism is a true picture of the world or an already outdated stage of astronomical development. The model of the Copernican universe was simple or very complicated. Copernicus’s world is finite and spherical or infinite and open. It is based on Aristotle and Ptolemy or on Plato (as well as Hicetas, Ecphantus, and Philolaus). He was a scholastic Aristotelian or Renaissance Platonist. There are many more similar pairs, we considered them all in the course of our analysis. (p. 143)
This summary of Karas’ methodology exposes his reliance primarily on secondary sources, not on the details of Copernicus’ sources, education, and reading. Thus, Karas does not give us an original interpretation of Copernicus in historical context but rather an interpretation in the context of Copernican historiography. Although Karas quotes Copernicus’ Latin texts extensively (from Revolutions I and Commentariolus) and situates him within scholasticism, his analysis does not take full advantage of Copernicus’ Cracow context. This is why I have entitled this review “Copernicus from 30,000 feet.” Karas’ attempt to provide a specific medieval influence, e.g., his comments on impetus theory (pp. 46–7, 100, and 108), misfires.
Impetus theory was developed as an alternative to Aristotle’s account of projectile or forced motion. Copernicus rejected its application to natural, circular motion. He recognized clearly (Revolutions I, 4) that a force, whether extrinsic or intrinsic, would cause a non-uniform motion. He used the concept of impetus (I, 8) in the generic sense of vis, force or power, to account for linear accelerated motions that eventually reach an end. (See the 2015 French edition of De revolutionibus, vol. 3, n. 4, pp. 103–4.)
When Karas does cite Copernicus’ teachers, he relies mostly on secondary sources and does not explain thoroughly how a teacher’s doctrine influenced him. The most conspicuous example is the evidence of Copernicus’ acquaintance with discussions at Cracow dealing with the evaluation of conditional arguments, arguments that informed Copernicus’ critique regarding the relevance of hypotheses. Karas’ neglect of authors Copernicus read impoverishes his understanding of how Ficino’s translation of Plato’s works also contributed to Copernicus’ treatment and evaluation of hypotheses, and how his analysis led him to the postulates enunciated in the Commentariolus. Most disappointing of all is Karas’ recognition of Copernicus’ arguments based on part/whole relations (p. 65) without apparently understanding how he applied them to his critique of Aristotle’s arguments supporting geocentrism. This was a strategy explicitly cited later by Michael Mästlin as more probable and defensible than the Aristotelian perspective on whether we can make a decision about Earth’s place in the cosmos by beginning with observations made from the part (Earth) or by starting with a vision of the whole, which provides the principles and criteria for locating the part, Earth.
The resolution of dichotomies generated by historians is an important task. Surely the critique should lead, however, to the examination of Copernicus’ immediate context, from which we can identify the influences that helped him to form habits of mind that led him to his discovery and to the arguments in its defence. Karas’ study is based, then, on distant considerations that leave us with vague generalizations about medieval scholasticism, Renaissance inspirations, commonly known sources, and Copernicus’ innovations. Karas’ neglect of studies by Dilwyn Knox, in particular, deprived him of magisterial examples of a close reading of Copernicus’ sources. 1
Instead, Karas’ account amounts to a polemic against early modern historians who perpetuated prejudices against the Middle Ages (143–144). One of his more recent targets is M. Vesel’s Copernicus: Platonist Astronomer-Philosopher (Frankfurt aM, 2014). It is true that Vesel is woefully ignorant of the scholastic, Aristotelian context of Copernicus’ education at Cracow, a point that Karas emphasizes in what amounts to a running commentary in his footnotes against Vesel’s obsession with an exclusively Platonic reading of Copernicus’ ideas. In short, Karas’ study is largely a critique of historians and historiography, in which Copernicus’ new image of the world serves as an example rather than as the principal goal of his book. The appendices attached after the bibliography, amounting to nearly one-third of the book, seem to confirm my impression.
Karas’ principal contributions to our appreciation for Copernicus’ philosophical views consist in his quotations of Copernicus’ texts in Latin with Karas’ commentary, passages that reveal clearly the extent to which Copernicus was steeped in the concepts of medieval scholasticism as represented by Cracow masters in the last decade of the fifteenth century. That is an important contribution, one that we can hope Karas will deepen by closer acquaintance with the sources available in the Jagiellonian Library.