[A Sip of Books] The Modern Worldview Changed by the Scientific Revolution

Some sentences encapsulate the entire content of the book itself, while others instantly reach the reader's heart and create a point of contact with the book. We introduce such meaningful sentences excerpted from the book. - Editor's note

This is the final volume of the trilogy on the birth of Western modern science written by the master Yamamoto Yoshitaka (山本義隆), who is called the next-generation Nobel laureate in Japan. It deals with the story of the revival and transformation of world perception through astronomy and geography, which developed over a century and a half in Central Europe against the backdrop of the Northern humanist movement and the Reformation from the mid-15th century to the 17th century. The focus is on tracing the full story of the astronomical reform that proceeded alongside the cultural revolution of the 16th century.

The significance of Copernicus's heliocentric theory is not merely that the worldview shifted from an Earth-centered to a Sun-centered system. If that were all, it would have been just a transformation of the coordinate system for observation and technique, a relative change. The decisive point here is that the Earth was included among the planets. In other words, the heliocentric theory fundamentally contradicted the basic framework of Aristotelian natural philosophy and cosmology up to that time?that the terrestrial and celestial worlds were composed of different kinds of matter and governed by different laws. Therefore, astronomy's assertion of the heliocentric system as the correct solar system was an event that denied the principles of philosophical natural philosophy, which was superior, by the subordinate mathematical astronomy, overturning the hierarchy of scholarship. At the same time, it posed an entirely new problem: what was the natural cause that made the Earth, previously considered heavy and inert, move? - From "Introduction"

The transition of worldview and the birth of new sciences in Western modernity began with attempts to discover and restore the geography and astronomy of ancient Ptolemy. At the same time, especially the revival of astronomy expressed by Feuerbach in "The New Theory of Planets" raised the task of bridging the previously divided philosophical cosmology and mathematical astronomy. From the beginning, the problem was how to integrate the philosophical and natural philosophical cosmology after Aristotle with mathematical and technical astronomy.

Moreover, astronomy had a peculiar character different from other medieval sciences. Originally a practical science for ephemerides and astrology, it emphasized quantitative observation using instruments and verified the correctness of theoretical predictions through them. On the one hand, this was based on observation and measurement of nature; on the other hand, it was extremely mathematical, which greatly differed from the medieval university education that focused on interpreting texts of ancient philosophers and Church Fathers. In a sense, because it had a hypothesis-testing structure, it was alien to the scholastic method of medieval universities that prioritized argumentation from principles. Also, the fact that it actually produced and operated measuring instruments transcended the medieval intellectuals' disdain for manual craftsmanship by artisans. - From "Chapter 2: Geography, Astronomy, Astrology"

Scientific Revolution and the Shift of Worldview 1 | Written by Yamamoto Yoshitaka | Translated by Kim Chan-hyun & Park Cheol-eun | Dongasia | 468 pages | 23,000 KRW

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.