| Chapter 1: | The New Astronomy |
received proper attention centuries later when Copernicus evaluated the observational data available to him in an impartial and objective manner and, mingling mathematics and aesthetics, initiated the age of the New Philosophy. As stated in the Preface, I use the term “New Philosophy” to mean the development of a critical and objective method of understanding phenomena of the physical Universe and the accumulation of facts about nature in the post-Copernican era (Coffin 65), and I let “Old” apply to these disciplines in the pre-Copernican era.
Aristotle made positive contributions in all areas he studied, but by modern consensus, his influence in physics and astronomy was inimical to the understanding of the physical World (Dampier 25–36). He believed that systematic data acquisition and experimentation were infra dignitatem, and although he considered empirical facts in the terrestrial sciences, his efforts in the cosmic sciences were ill conceived because they lacked procedures for dealing with intangibles. He was uncertain about how to deal simultaneously with observable phenomena both on Earth and in the sky, perhaps because he thought the latter ranged outward toward the divine abode of the gods and was immune to vulgar empirical inquiry. In particular, Aristotle and those who promoted the doctrine of hierarchical perfection were not concerned in the least that their ideas sprang from the presumably inerrant thinking of flawed terrestrials who resided at the supposed center of universal imperfection.
Scholars transmitted Aristotle's works via Spain and Sicily to Western Europe. The works arrived piecemeal, undergoing translations along the way, during which adherents developed ideas of their own based on material available at the time. Various schools arose whose accumulated body of thought is now known as Aristotelianism. Followers of the peripatetic philosopher accepted his cosmology uncritically, even though Aristotle himself had doubted its full validity. Some who sheltered their beliefs behind Aristotelianism were even disinclined to test his ideas lest the ideas be proven wrong. By the eleventh century, the schoolmen (or “scholastics” as they were called) had embarked on wide-ranging discussions of cosmological concepts, and by the thirteenth century, Church authorities had incorporated the basic Aristotelian World model into