Abstract
“Geocentrism” refers to a cosmological and planetary theory, in which the Earth occupies the central position of the world system. In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, geocentrism was the most common cosmological view, although some astronomers and philosophical schools embraced alternative visions about worldly order. During the Renaissance, debates following Nicolaus Copernicus’s proposal of a heliocentric planetary theory prompted a reexamination of traditional geocentric (and geostatic) arguments (see “Copernicanism” and “Astronomy”). This also led to their reworking and expansion. Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s arguments were attentively reconsidered. Many scholars deemed them conclusive and therefore stuck to terrestrial centrality even after parallax computation (in the 1580s, especially Tycho Brahe) and telescopic evidence (after 1610, especially Galileo Galilei) demonstrated the impossibility of geocentric paths for Mars and the inferior planets. Geo-heliocentrism thus emerged as the only viable solution. It was a planetary theory according to which all or some of the planets rotate around the Sun, while the Sun remained Earth centered along with the Moon and the fixed stars. The Inquisition prohibition of Copernican astronomy in 1616 gave new impetus to geocentrism, in its geoheliocentric form, among Catholics.
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References
Primary Literature
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Secondary Literature
On Ancient cosmological models, see Michel-Pierre Lerner, Le monde des sphères (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2008) and Otto Neugebauer, A history of ancient mathematical astronomy (Berlin: Springer, 1975).
On Aristotle’s geocentric arguments, see Pietro-Daniel Omodeo and Irina Tupikova, Aristotle and Ptolemy on geocentrism: diverging argumentative strategies and epistemologies (Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2012), Preprint 422.
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On ancient and medieval cosmological views alternative to geocentrism, see Giovanni Virginio Schiaperelli, I precursori di Copernico nell’antichità (Milano: U. Hoepli, 1873), Thomas Little Heath, Aristarchus of Samos, the Ancient Copernicus: a History of Greek Astronomy to Aristarchus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), D’Alverny, Marie-Thérèse: “Survivances du ‘système d’Héraclide’ au Moyen Age,” in Semaine de Synthèse, Avant, avec, après Copernic (Paris: Blanchard, 1975), pp. 39–50 and Bruce S. Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens: Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
The Wittenberg School of astronomy has been studied by Robert S. Westman, “The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory,” Isis 66 (1975): pp. 163–93 and idem, “Three Responses to the Copernican Theory: Johannes Praetorius, Tycho Brahe and Michael Maestlin,” in The Copernican Achievement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) pp. 285–345); Owen Gingerich, “Erasmus Reinhold and the Dissemination of Copernican Theory,” in The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler (New York: American Inst. of Physics, 1993), pp. 221–251, and idem, “Reinhold, Erasmus,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography 11 (1975): pp. 365–367; and Walter Thüringer, “Paul Eber (1511–1569): Meanchthons Physik und seine Stellung zu Copernicus,” in Melanchthon in seinen Schülern, ed. Heinz Scheible (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), pp. 285–321. Reinhold manuscript commentary of Copernicus has been published in Nicolaus Copernicus, Gesamtausgabe, vol. VIII/1, Receptio Copernicana (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), pp. 189–358. On Puecer and Dasypodius, see Peter Barker, “The Hypotyposes orbium coelestium (Strasbourg, 1568),” in Nouveau ciel nouvelle terre: La révolution copernicienne dans l’Allemagne de la Réforme (1530–1630), ed. Miguel Angel Granada and Edouard Mehl (Paris: Les Belles Lettre, 2009), pp. 85–108.
For Wittich, cfr. Owen Gingerich and Robert S. Westman, “The Wittich Connection: Conflict and Priority in Late Sixteenth-Century Cosmology,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 78/7 (1988). On the controversies over the priority of the geo-heliocentric system, see Nicholas Jardine, The Birth of the History and Philosophy of Science: Kepler’s A Defence of Tycho against Ursus with Essays on its Provenance and Significance (Cambridge: UP, 1984); Edward Rosen, Three Imperial Mathematicians: Kepler Trapped between Tycho Brahe and Ursus (New York: Abaris Books, 1986); Miguel Angel Granada, El debate cosmológico en 1588: Bruno, Brahe, Rothmann, Ursus, Röslin (Naples: Bibiopolis, 1996); and Nicholas Jardine and Alain Segonds, La guerre des astronomes: La querelle au sujet de l’origine du système géo-héliocentrique à la fin du XVIe siècle (Paris, 2008), 2. vol. On the triangulation Brahe-Liddel-Craig, see Adam Mosley, “Tycho Brahe and John Craig: The Dynamic of a Dispute,” in Tycho Brahe and Prague: Crossroads of European Science, ed. John Robert et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsch, 2002), pp. 70–83 and Pietro Daniel Omodeo, “L’iter europeo del matematico e medico scozzese Duncan Liddel,” (Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2013), Preprint 438 (2013).
On the reasons for the Jesuit adhesion to geoheliocentrism, see “L’entrée de Tycho Brahe chez les jésuites ou le chant du cygne de Clavius,” in Luce Giard, Les jésuites à la Renaissance: Système éducative et production du savoir (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), pp. 145–186.
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Omodeo, P.D. (2015). Geocentrism. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_67-1
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