Westman On Kuhn's Copernican Revolution 1994

Two Cultures or One?
: A Second Look at Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution

Author(s): Robert S. Westman
Source: Isis, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Mar., 1994), pp. 79-115
Published by: University of Chicago Press on behalf of History of Science Society
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A SECOND LOOK
Two Cultures or One?
A Second Look at Kuhn's The Copernican

Revolution
By Robert S. Westman*
T HOMAS KUHN'S The Copernican Revolution deserves to be regarded as one of

the best of that small group of longue dure'e histories that mark postwar histo-
riography of science. In many respects, it is probably the single most influential
one.1 Tightly written and brilliantly argued, it is responsible, together with The Struc-
ture of Scientific Revolutions, for the continued popularity of the metaphor of rev-
olution in science among scholars and students alike. Yet, surprisingly, while many
aspects of the story conceived in Kuhn's original account have been debated, re-
searched, and considerably revised, his overall understanding of a scientific revo-
lution initiated by Copernicus has received no detailed scrutiny. The same may be
said of the deployment of the Copernican episode in Structure. Finally, a critical
appreciationis in order not least because Kuhn's story is so compact and his language
at times metaphorical.2
* Department of History and Science Studies Program, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla,
California 92093-0104.
I gratefully acknowledge valuable comments and encouragement on earlier versions of this essay from
Roger Ariew, Peter Barker, Constance Blackwell, Michael A. Dennis, Amos Funkenstein, Luce Giard,
David W. Jacobs, Ludmilla Jordanova, Ronald L. Numbers, Michael Shank, Debora L. Silverman, Liba
Chaia Taub, and Eric Van Young.
' A work of comparable importance is Richard H. Popkin's classic The History of Scepticism from
Erasmus to Descartes (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1960); rev. ed. entitled The History of Scepticism from
Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1979). For an excellent treatment
of postwar history of the history of science see H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historio-
graphical Inquiry (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, forthcoming).
2 In particular, verbs like "convert," "convince," "improve," "fit" (p. 217), and adjectives such
as "fruitful," "plausible," "cumbersome," "strict [Copernicanism]" (p. 210), "clearly superior" (p.
219), "successful" (p. 225), "inevitable" (p. 229), "important [astronomer]" (p. 227), often lack the
kind of historical specificity needed to evaluate their exact meaning and descriptive accuracy: see Thomas
S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought
(Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1957) (hereafter cited in text). Early commentators speculated
on the politics of Kuhn's stylistic ambiguity in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions-from its "pro-
pagandistic potentialities" (Paul Feyerabend, "Consolations for the Specialist," in Criticism and the
Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave [Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 19701,
pp. 197-230, on p. 199) to its obscurity for the average "superficial reader" (Margaret Masterman,
"The Nature of a Paradigm," ibid., pp. 59-90, on p. 61).
Isis, 1994, 85: 79-115

? 1994 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0021 -1753/94/8401-0001$01.00
79
80 A SECOND LOOK AT KUHN'S THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION
Ne extra hanic B3iSiothe am effrtur. Ex obedicntia.
Frontispieceto GiovanniBattistaRiccioli(1598-1671), Almagestumnovum (Bologna:Ex

typographiahaeredis VictorijBenatij, 1651). Top. God himself arranges all by "Number,Measure,
and Weight"(Wisdom, 11): Numerus.Mensura.Pondus. Upper left. Dies diei eructatverbum:
"Fromday to day, He brings forththe Word"as the sun shines amidst its circumsolarplanets-
Mercury,Venus, and Mars-thus exciting us to praise the Lord.Upper right.Nox nocti indicat
scientiam: "Fromnight to night, He discloses knowledge"of celestial novelties-Satum's anses,
Jupiter'smoons, the craters of Earth'smoon and comets-that keep astronomersfromsleeping
or dreamingabout the past while neglecting new observations.Lowerleft. Videbo Caelos tuos
opera digitorumtuorum:"Ishall behold your heavens and the worksof your fingers,"says Argus,
the man of a hundredeyes-some eyes placed before and some behind-who bends his knee
reverentially,bringinghis knee-eye to the telescope that admits the sun's rays and points his
index finger towardthe three creative, divine fingers. Lowerright.Non Inclinabiturin Saeculum
Saeculi: "God'sWorksshall not change throughoutall etemity."The VirginAstraea, holdingthe
scales of Justice, shows that Riccioli'sworldsystem outweighs the Copemican and that Ptolemy's
system no longer merits being weighed. A chastened Ptolemy rests on his old
ROBERT S. WESTMAN 81
I shall begin by examining the overall characterof Kuhn's Copernican Revolution,

first offering a modestly contextual explication of its philosophical narrative and
comparing it with the way in which the Copernican issue shows up in Structure.3
Next, I shall look more closely and critically at how Kuhn constitutes his scientific
revolution as a version of the "two cultures" problem: an encounter between an
internal, technical specialty and a cluster of external disciplines. Along the way I
shall follow a juxtapositional strategy, commenting critically on Kuhn's interpreta-
tion of particular episodes as well as providing alternative interpretations that sub-
sequent historical scholarship has brought to light. Finally, I shall offer a historicist's
perspective on Kuhn's story while noting the reemergence of the two-cultures ques-
tion within the historicist enterprise.
I. WHAT KIND OF REVOLUTION WAS IT?
The Copernican Revolution (1957) (hereafter CR) evolved from lectures that Kuhn
delivered to the HarvardUniversity "Principles of Physical Science" course (Natural
Sciences 4) in the early 1950s. "Nat Sci 4" included "The Copernican Revolution"
as one of its major themes; hence Kuhn's book expressed the curricular philosophy
of a particularhistoriographicalmoment, effectively teaching the technical rudiments
of early astronomy while weaving a coherent account of conceptual change into an
engaging historical narrative about a scientific revolution. Imbued with liberal op-
timism, the book was recommended to its readership as a contribution to the "two
cultures" problem (without naming C. P. Snow) by no less an authority than James
Conant-president of Harvard, founder of the "HarvardCase Histories in Experi-
mental Science," a leading proponent of reform in the teaching of science in the
nation's high school curriculum, advocate of federal scientific patronage, and prom-
inent cold war liberal.4 Were it not for the appearance of The Structure of Scientific
shield whilefirmlygrasping the heraldicshield of Riccioli'spatron,the House of Grimaldi.Erigordum

Corrigor.'I am raised that I may be corrected,"he utters. Even ancient knowledge is subject to
improvement.And later, Ricciolicites ChristopherClavius,the founderof the great Jesuit astronom-
ical traditionat the CollegioRomano. "Here,at the end of [Clavius's]life, upon consideringthe new
celestial phenomena detected by Galileowiththe Belgianlookingglass and disclosed in the Sidereal
Messenger, the old man exclaims: 'Letthe astronomersconsider how the celestial orbs ought to be
arrangedso that these phaenomena may be saved'" (p. xviii). The emblem's balance of classical
symbolism and Christianbaroque stylizationechoes the theme of Reason, guided by Divine and
Angelic illumination,weighingand balancing the evidence of the corporealsenses. At the bottom,
however, is a reminderto readers of this particularcopy, given to the Jesuits by PierreDanielHuet:
Ne extra hanc Bibliothecamefferatur.Ex obedientia.Out of obedience, let not the book be removed
from this library.(Courtesyof the Departmentof Special Collections,Barchas Collection,Stanford
UniversityLibraries.)
3 Cf. Kuhn's foreword to Paul Hoyningen-Huene's recent and very valuable explication: "No one,
myself included, speaks with as much authority about the nature and development of my ideas. As a
philosopher, Hoyningen is concerned not so much with the development of ideas as with the ideas
developed." Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philos-
ophy of Science, trans. Alexander T. Levine (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1993), p. xi. In view of
this "authorized" reading, it is of interest that Hoyningen-Huene almost entirely excludes the Copernican
episode.
4 Immediately after the war Conant inaugurated Natural Sciences 4: "On Understanding Science."
See James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age
(New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 409-411. Thanks to Owen Gingerich for providing information on Nat
Sci 4.
Revolutions (hereafter SSR) just five years later, CR would still be remembered as
an important contribution to the pedagogy of science history, although almost cer-
tainly it would not have achieved the broad impact of SSR.
But SSR did appear. As a result, its categories and well-known thesis of revolution
as a profound rupture of community-based meanings, standards, and practices dis-
tinctly overshadowed the strictly conceptualist revolutionary idiom in CR. "Para-
digms," said Kuhn in SSR, "determine large areas of experience at the same time":
old concepts, explanations, meanings, and instrumental practices are destroyed; new
explanatory possibilities, new hints or guides for research, are opened.5 What is at
stake is the overturning of a whole way of scientific life, not the abstract and tran-
scendental deliberations of some scientific jury using a calculus of relative problem-
solving capabilities.6 SSR, indeed, became a kind of unacknowledged hermeneutic
for reading CR. This interpretivereframing may be attributedpartly to Kuhn himself,
for he frequently, although selectively, cited his earlier work on Copernicus in order
to exemplify many of SSR's most importantclaims. In SSR, for example, Kuhn cites
the Copernican case to illustrate the breakdown of normal technical puzzle-solving
activity (pp. 68-69), to argue that what Copernicus saw as serious "counter-in-
stances" Ptolemaic astronomers had seen as normal "puzzles" (p. 79), to claim that
actors conceal in their normative language (perhaps even from themselves) the actual
holistic transformations of vision that occur in scientific revolutions.
At the critical moment in SSR, however, when Kuhn argues for the radical, trans-
formative character of "seeing" that occurs in the aftermath of a revolution, he pro-
duces a fictive speech delivered at an undetermined moment by a "convert," rather
than the specific utterance of a historical agent:
Looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not say, "I used to see a sat-
ellite." That locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaic system had once been
correct. Instead, a convert to the new astronomy says, "I once took the moon to be (or
saw the moon as) a planet, but I was mistaken." That sort of statement does recur in
the aftermath of scientific revolutions. (SSR, p. 115)
When philosophers challenged Kuhn's famous notion of incommensurability in the

1960s and 1970s, the historicity of the general claim was not called into question.7
5 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 2nd ed. (Chicago/London: Univ.
Chicago Press, 1970), p. 129 (hereafter cited in text).
6 In quite different ways, attempts were made to show that the Kuhnian narrative could be rewritten
in a rationalist idiom: see Imre Lakatos and Elie Zahar, "Why Did Copernicus' Research Program
Supersede Ptolemy's?" in The Copernican Achievement, ed. Robert S. Westman (Berkeley/Los An-
geles: Univ. California Press, 1975), pp. 354-383; and Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (Berke-
ley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1978).
7 See esp. the important papers in Lakatos and Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowl-
edge (cit. n. 2); and Gary Gutting, ed., Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of
Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science (Notre Dame, Ind./London: Univ. Notre Dame Press, 1980).
Historical viability was, however, very much at stake. Throughout the sixteenth century the dominant
"reading" of De revolutionibus was that forged by Lutheran astrologer-mathematicians at the University
of Wittenberg-a partial acceptance of elements of Copernicus's theory, an ignoring of its discipline-
upsetting physical theses. This picture conflicts with the incommensurable paradigms suggested by Kuhn
in SSR, although it was not inconsistent with one passage in CR (p. 186) that should have been noted
in my article: Robert S. Westman, "The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation
of the Copernican Theory," Isis, 1975, 66:165-193; see also an earlier version, with debate: "The
Wittenberg Interpretationof the Copernican Theory," in The Nature of Scientific Discovery, ed. Owen
Gingerich (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975), pp. 393-429. The Wittenberg inter-
pretation was also at odds with another expression of Kuhnian incommensurability-Planck's genera-
ROBERTS. WESTMAN 83
Similarly, when Kuhn again used a temporally nonspecific language of generality to

equate shifts of vision with shifts of meaning, philosophical ears tuned to theories
of perception did not call for agents' utterances. "The Copernicans who denied its
traditional title 'planet' to the sun were not only learning what 'planet' meant or
what the sun was. Instead, they were changing the meaning of 'planet' so that it
could continue to make useful distinctions in a world where all celestial bodies, not
just the sun, were seen differently from the way they had been seen before" (SSR,
pp. 128-129).
In CR Kuhn speaks of "conceptual schemes," a term already entrenched by Conant
in his "HarvardCase Histories" series.8 Conceptual schemes include "phenomena"
(observed facts of nature), "concepts" that summarize or economically organize cha-
otic observations into easily remembered, patterned representations, and "explana-
tions." He regards theories and concepts as essentially instruments of classification
that are said never to reflect a deeper reality. Scientific facts appear to exist inde-
pendently of concepts. Theories can organize facts, but they do not inevitably de-
termine the character of observation. Thus in a revolution there is no change in the
epistemological status of earlier observed phenomena: they are simply reorganized
using different concepts. A very few conceptual representations-such as Kepler's
laws of planetary motion and Newton's universal law of attraction-become integral
parts of the new universe created by the Copernican Revolution and enjoy unusual,
but not permanent, survival value since they undergo subsequent modification (CR,
p. 219). But because theories and observations-the logical part of the conceptual
scheme-are merely instrumentalities, they cannot alone account for why scientists
commit themselves to conceptual schemes as guides to research. Metaphysical be-
liefs or psychological convictions about the reality of conceptual schemes-beliefs
that Kuhn regards as external to the "logical" part of the conceptual scheme-play
a significant role in securing commitment and guiding future research. At the end
of his book Kuhn summarizes the Copernican Revolution in these terms:
thoughthe achievementsof Copernicusand Newton are permanent,the concepts that

made those achievements possible are not. Only the list of explicable phenomena grows;
there is no similar cumulative process for the explanations themselves. As science pro-
gresses, its concepts are repeatedly destroyed and replaced, and today Newtonian con-
cepts seem no exception. Like Aristotelianism before it, Newtonianism at last evolved-
this time withinphysics-problems and researchtechniqueswhich could not be recon-
ciled with the world view that produced them. (CR, p. 265)
Kuhn's Copernican Revolution, then, is mostly about what he regards as changes

in the "internal scientific specialty." The revolution ends only when those new con-
cepts and techniques successfully transform neighboring technical sciences as well
as nonscientific knowledge domains (CR, p. 230). When the conceptual schemes of
astronomy, physics, optics, political philosophy, and theology became part of a com-
tional hypothesis: see Westman, "Three Responses to the Copernican Theory: Johannes Praetorius, Ty-
cho Brahe, and Michael Maestlin," in Copernican Achievement, ed. Westman, pp. 285-345. Cf. Michael
Heidelberger, "Some Intertheoretic Relations between Ptolemean and Copernican Astronomy," Er-
kenntnis, 1976, 10:323-336; rpt. in Paradigms and Revolutions, ed. Gutting, pp. 271-283.
8 James Bryant Conant, ed., Robert Boyle's Experiments in Pneumatics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 4-9; and Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 44, 79.
mon, unified conceptual fabric, the revolution came to a conclusion. If the Coper-
nican Revolution brought a certain unity to the eighteenth-century conceptual fabric,
CR represented essentially a new way of teaching introductory science to Harvard
undergraduates.More broadly, it exemplified just the approachthat President Conant
believed was needed "to enable the scientific tradition to take its place alongside the
literary tradition in the [post-World War II] culture of the United States" (CR, p.
xviii).
CR's coherence-of-the-sciences thesis may have called it to the attention of Otto
Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris, editors of the "Unity of the Sciences"
series. If so, it is a great irony that SSR, the book eventually published in that series,
profoundly undermined the vision that the project was supposed to expound. For by
the time that he published SSR in the early 1960s, Kuhn had shifted to a more radical
notion of revolution. He had developed a more nuanced, discontinuist vocabulary
of scientific change and had now situated the modernist, conceptually progressive-
one is almost tempted to say "bourgeois"-features of science in the paradigm-
governed, puzzle-solving domain of Normal Science. Paradigms brought together
the "great"texts used to write conceptual history in the traditionof Alexandre Koyre,
Pierre Duhem, and E. A. Burtt-the sort of historiographical ideal embodied in
CR-with the everyday practices embodied in instruments and local meanings of
Ludwik Fleck's socially constituted "thought collective." Paradigm-governed sci-
ence was cumulative, and its existence was, in the words of the computer scientist
Margaret Masterman, "crashingly obvious."9 Revolutions, on the other hand, rup-
tured an entire form of life-including concepts, instrumentation, methods, tech-
niques, explanations, and the meanings of facts. In the "postscript" to the second
edition (SSR, pp. 184-186), Kuhn situated the guarantee of continuity across par-
adigms at the level of the shared values of science-values, like simplicity and pre-
cision, that guide the evaluation of theories.
CR's overall image of science, by contrast, resembles the positivist and pragmatist
conventionalism of Henri Bergson, Henri Poincare, and Ernst Mach and, especially,
some of the more conventionalist passages in Pierre Duhem's The Aim and Structure
of Physical Theory (1906): "A physical theory," wrote Duhem, "is not an expla-
nation; it is a system of mathematical propositions whose aim is to represent as
simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a whole group of experimental
laws."'1 Recent scholarship, to be sure, has perceptively contextualized Duhem's
"whiff of realism," those passages where he speaks of artificial classifications ap-
proaching more and more to the natural order of things. Several interpreters have
shown important ways in which apparent incompatibilities in Duhem's position can
be reconciled: that scientific theories both summarize empirical laws and, at the same
time, converge on the reality or "naturalclassifications" underlying them." The im-
9 Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and
Robert K. Merton, trans. Fred Bradley and Trenn, foreword by Thomas Kuhn (Chicago/London: Univ.
Chicago Press, 1979). See also Robert S. Cohen and Thomas Schnelle, eds., Cognition and Fact: Ma-
terials on Ludwik Fleck (Dordrecht/Boston: Reidel, 1986). Masterman's remark, which referred to Nor-
mal Science, appears in an early, important appreciation of Kuhn: "Nature of a Paradigm" (cit. n. 2),
p. 61. Tellingly, she also remarks: "There is no need to keep on invoking history here" (p. 60).
10 Pierre Duhem, La theorie physique, son objet et sa structure (Paris: Chevalier & Riviere, 1906),
trans. by P. Wiener as The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1954), p. ix.
'" As Roberto Maiocchi remarks, "Duhem's text has always been considered one of the most brilliant
and vital-perhaps the most vital-of the conventionalist movement, the skeptical, philosophical answer
plications for the history of physical theory are profound. When a theory is called
into question and must be modified or transformed,
the purely representative part enters nearly whole in the new theory, bringing to it the
inheritance of all the valuable possessions of the old theory, whereas the explanatory
part falls out in order to give way to another explanation.
Thus, by virtue of a continuous tradition, each theory passes on to the one that follows
it a share of the natural classification it was able to construct, as in certain ancient games
each runner handed on the lighted torch to the courier ahead of him, and this continuous
tradition assures a perpetuity of life and progress for science. 12
In CR there is an important place for tradition: concepts, laws, and observations

carry unchanged over long periods of time. However, Kuhn studiously resists talk
of "correspondence," "truth," or "reflection of a real order" of the sort to be found
in Duhem's more realist moments.'3 Continuity is assured, as we shall see, by an
increasing integration of representations amongst disciplines. On the other hand, in
SSR it is as if the Olympic runners of the succeeding paradigm no longer see the
torches or understandthe behavior of the runnersin the preceding paradigm. Science-
textbook historiography protects the image of science as cumulation, but it hides the
revolutionary discontinuity. Kuhn's new sort of revolutionary moment in SSR had
about it an antimodernist ring: scientists now decided-without fully reasoned jus-
tification-to change their beliefs and commitments because of an irreversible per-
ceptual shift much like a conversion experience.'4 In SSR continuity is assured not
at the level of theories and laws but in scientists' adherence to a transcendental do-
main of "permanentvalues."
II. THE AUTONOMY OF SCIENCE AND A POSITIVE ROLE FOR THE EXTERNAL
There is an issue here not without relevance to the present historiographical moment:
both Kuhn and Duhem were preoccupied with the autonomy of science in relation
to other fields of knowledge. Their philosophical positions, however, were framed
within substantially different political spaces. Duhem, a Catholic and sometime sym-
pathizer with Charles Maurras's right-wing Action Fran?aise, was struggling to craft
a position within a highly polarized atmosphere: the scientistic and positivistic anti-
Catholicism of the Third Republic, where faith and science were to be maintained
as separate realms; and, on the other hand, the church's neo-scholastic antimodern-
ism, which prescribed "motives of credibility," rational grounds for accepting faith
to the difficulties of classical science": "Pierre Duhem's The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory: A
Book against Conventionalism," Synthese, 1990, 83:385-400, on p. 385. See also the valuable papers
and commentaries of Richard Burian, "Maiocchi on Duhem, Howard on Duhem and Einstein: Histo-
riographical Comments," ibid., pp. 401-408; Andrew Lugg, "Pierre Duhem's Conception of Natural
Classification," ibid., pp. 409-420; and Ernan McMullin, "Duhem's Middle Way," ibid., pp. 421-
430.
12 Duhem, Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Wiener (cit. n. 10), pp. 32-33.
13 Ibid., pp. 28-29.
14 Kuhn explicitly rejects the analogy with gestalt shifts on the grounds that there is no possibility for
the back-and-forth shifting of perception when the same lines are seen now as a duck, then as a rabbit.
The image that Kuhn wants to emphasize is, rather, based upon a hypothetical Copernican convert (SSR,
1970 paperback ed., p. 155).
and church authority.'5 Furthermore,if Duhem championed medieval Paris, he wrote

from Bordeaux as an academic exile. Kuhn, on the other hand, wrote in the heady
years of postwar American scientific ascendancy. World War II had been a "phys-
icists' war."16 Kuhn was a Harvard physicist. Logical positivism was the reigning
orthodoxy in philosophy; in sociology the ruling concepts were consensus and "end
of ideology" (read: "end of communism"). As someone with "internal" expertise,
Kuhn was called upon to make the powerful, muscle-flexing expertise of science
palatable to a new lay audience, soon to fill large lecture halls in that great creation
of the cold war era: the public research university.
In any case, Kuhn was rather more sanguine and relaxed about a role for beliefs
external to the core of a technical scientific specialty. Duhem had regarded scientists'
attraction to metaphysical explanations almost as a necessary evil, grounded in fad-
dish and irrational attachments to realist ontologies. Kuhn, on the other hand, wel-
comed aboard Snow's "otherculture":psychology and metaphysics as well as history
of ideas. He emphasized that external beliefs perform a valuable heuristic function
that shapes and secures commitment. In fact, Kuhn's narrative, at least up to his
discussion of Kepler, thrives on the notion that the "external" constantly opens new
spaces of conceptual possibility. Many scientists, he says, believe that their pictures
really represent the world, and this belief is heuristically fruitful in "predicting and
exploring the unknown" (CR, p. 40) or providing "frameworks for the organization
of knowledge" (p. 41). The Aristotelian and Ptolemaic two-sphere universe, for
example, satisfied a range of observations; but it also satisfied "the psychological
craving for at homeness" (p. 38). It provided a kind of cognitive security resonant
with the explanations of motion, causality, and time articulatedby the young children
in Jean Piaget's genetic studies of mental development. Such primal cognitions evoked
logically unjustified belief in the spheres' reality. Commitment to the conceptual
scheme then opened the possibility for its extension as a physical theory.
In writing about later historical phases of his Copernican Revolution Kuhn appeals
sometimes to an external "climate of opinion," sometimes to the internal character-
istics of Copernicus's theory itself.'7 He drops the reservoir of universal childhood
cognitions as external explanans, and more standard historical categories take over.
Latin medieval scholasticism, for example, is said to have created a climate of Ar-
istotelian criticism that opened the way to new conceptual possibilities. Impetus dy-
namics spurred the hypothetical possibility of the earth's diurnal motion and partial
unification of the celestial and terrestrialrealms (Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan) and
'5 R. N. D. Martin reads Duhem as an antiauthoritarian"negative apologeticist" who denied to sci-

ence the capacity both to undermine and to sustain Catholic ecclesiastical authority: Pierre Duhem:
Philosophy and History in the Work of a Believing Physicist (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991), pp. 35-
77.
16 The term is from Daniel Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern
America (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 302. World War I was a chemists' war.
17 To construct the external heuristic, Kuhn drew heavily on sources whose conclusions were widely
accepted at the time that he was writing: e.g., Duhem's Systeme du monde, 10 vols. (Paris: Hermann,
1913-1959); Herbert Butterfield's The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (London: Bell, 1950);
Lynn Thorndike's History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1923-
1958); E. A. Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday Anchor, 1924; rev. ed., 1932); and A. C. Crombie's Augustine to Galileo (London: Falcon,
1952) (obviously, some volumes of the multivolume works were not yet published in 1957). Kuhn's
readings of these works are always concise and well tempered and, at times, provocative. More inclined
to follow Koyre and Burtt than Duhem's moments of extreme precursoritis, Kuhn typically resorts to
parsimonious phrasing and a deft, almost teasing, use of qualification.
played a role in the evolution of Newtonian dynamics. In the seventeenth century,

"Copernicanism . . . allowed a new freedom to cosmological thought . . . that would
surely have horrified both Copernicus and Kepler" (p. 232).
The Renaissance heuristic is, at times, quite sketchy. Geographical explorations,
for example, showed that "Ptolemy could be wrong" (p. 125). Efforts at calendar
reform revealed "inadequacies in existing techniques for astronomical computation"
(p. 126). The recovery of classical texts helped the predecessors of Copernicus to
see that "it was time for a change" (p. 127). Humanism, although extra-academic,
"literary," and "otherworldly," recovered and propagated a fruitful "mathematical
strain" in Neoplatonism (p. 128). Noticeably absent from this list, however, is the
transformative effect of the printing press in creating a flood of heavenly literature
in which Copernicus's work was but a part.18
Another major function for the external, nonscientific elements was to provide the
conceptual conditions that motivated Copernicus's innovation. Although Kuhn ad-
mits that "it is often hard to tell whether any given Neoplatonic attitude is posterior
or antecedent to the invention of his [Copernicus's] new astronomy," he strongly
suggests that the bearer of these important conditions was Copernicus's "friend and
teacher,"DomenicoMariade Novara(1454-1504) (p. 129). In fact, there is simply
no evidence that Domenico "was among the first to criticize the Ptolemaic planetary
theory on Neoplatonic grounds"; at most, there are some critical, quite un-Neopla-
tonic remarks that he makes about Ptolemy's Geography as the prelude to an as-
trological forecast for Bologna in 1489.19 The prominent role of Neoplatonism as
metaphysical background in CR is probably due to the historiographically influential
status of E. A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, a
neo-Kantian work that had also attracted Alexandre Koyre.20 Yet Kuhn followed
Burtt too uncritically in reading a vague Florentine influence on Copernicus through
18 See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1978). As I show in my forthcoming study of the Copernican question, the rapid
spread of print significantly shaped the formation of what I have called a "culture of prognostication,"
ca. 1470-1540.
'9 Interested readers can follow a chain of references and somewhat fanciful elaborations about Do-
menico Maria as Copernicus's "teacher and friend" from CR, p. 129; to Burtt, Metaphysical Foun-
dations of Modern Physical Science (cit. n. 17), pp. 54-55; to Dorothy Stimson, "The Gradual Ac-
ceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Univ., 1917), p. 25; and
finally to Leopold Prowe, Nicolaus Copernicus, 3 vols. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1883-
1884), Vol. 1, p. 240 and note. Prowe cites an excerpt from the 1489 prognostication contained within
two late sixteenth-century sources: William Gilbert, De magnete (London: Petrus Short, 1600), trans.
P. Fleury Motellay (1893; New York: Dover, 1958), Bk. 6, Ch. 2, pp. 315-316; and Giovanni Antonio
Magini, Tabulae secundorum mobilium coelestium (1585), pp. 29-30. Magini, an astronomer and as-
trologer at the University of Bologna a century after Domenico Maria, is probably the only one to have
laid eyes on the 1489 forecast. Nothing in the cited passage supports the constructions of Stimson, Burtt,
or Kuhn. Copernicus's disciple, Georg Joachim Rheticus, offers a more reliable characterization of the
relationship between Copernicus and Domenico: "My teacher made observations with the utmost care
at Bologna, where he was not so much the pupil as the assistant and witness of observations of the
learned Dominicus Maria" ("Cum D.Doctor meus Bononiae, non tam discipulus, quam adiutor, & testis
obseruationum doctissimi Viri Dominici Marie"). Georg Joachim Rheticus, Narratio prima (1540, 1541;
Basel: H. Petreius, 1566), fol. 197; trans. Edward Rosen (New York: Dover, 1939), p. 111.
20 For cogent critique and appreciation of Burtt see Gary Hatfield, "Metaphysics and the New Sci-
ence," in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 93-166; and Lorraine Daston, "History of Science in
an Elegiac Mode: E. A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science Revisited," Isis,
1991, 82:522-531. For Burtt's influence on Koyre see Pietro Redondi, ed., De la mystique d la science:
Cours, confe'rences et documents, 1922-1962 (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
1986).
Domenico Maria and in suggesting that Kepler was a Novara-type Neoplatonist who
"preferredCopernicus' proposal" for reasons having to do with "mathematicalmagic
and sun worship" (CR, pp. 131-132).21 Claims of this sort enabled Kuhn to construct
an external "climate of opinion that would breed Copernicus' innovation" and the
"conceptual stage setting for the Copernican Revolution." More importantly, they
enabled him to mount a powerful and characteristic gesture of generalization: "In-
novations in a science need not be responses to novelties within that science at all"
(p. 132). In SSR such remarks will emerge from the shadows to constitute the fore-
ground.
III. THE CONCEPTUAL SCHEME OF ASTRONOMY: INSIDE/OUTSIDE
For reasons that are entirely understandable, given the state of 1950s historiography
and the pedagogical frame within which CR arose, Kuhn assumed a fairly unprob-
lematic-one might even say presentist-view of scientific disciplinarity. Astron-
omy figures in his account as a science; at times he refers to it as a "specialty." In
fact, Kuhn treats astronomy as a science in his own terms rather than according to
the explicit categories that his actors used.22 Kuhn devotes little or no attention to
the standardsof proof and rationality explicitly articulatedby his actors; for the most
part, criteria of theory appraisal are assigned to the external (metaphysical or psy-
chological) background.23Conceptual schemes, not actors' meanings, constitute the
underlying and informing explanatory framework of the book. In short, the narrative
is historical, but not historicist.
The conceptual scheme includes a series of technical problems composed of geo-
metrical models and observations that are agreed upon by scientists but that exist
apart from networks of social relations. In the course of the narrative the various
historical figures meet up with and solve the "problemof the planets." The resolution
21 But there were a multitude of factors; see Robert S. Westman, "Kepler's Theory of Hypothesis
and the Realist Dilemma," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1972, 3:233-264.
22 In "Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science," in The
Essential Tension (1976; Chicago/London: Univ. Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 31-65, Kuhn makes an
important and suggestive step in the direction of a historical view of disciplinary classifications. In SSR
he produced the generalized "disciplinary matrix." But a historicized notion would require attention to
at least the following complex of interrelated considerations: agents' theories of classification; disci-
plinary categories used to announce published productions; knowledge categories employed in public
polemics and private correspondence; and salary, rank, and institutional location. For a first attempt to
interpret disciplinary boundaries in terms of dynamic social roles see Robert S. Westman, "The As-
tronomer's Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study," History of Science, 1980, 18:105-
147. On theories of classification see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from
the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 299-
327; James Weisheipl, "Classification of the Sciences in Medieval Thought," Medieval Studies, 1965,
27:54-70; Weisheipl, "The Nature, Scope, and Classification of the Sciences," in Science in the Middle
Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 461-482; Steven J. Livesey,
"Metabasis: The Interrelationshipof the Sciences in Antiquity and the Middle Ages" (Ph.D. diss., Univ.
California, Los Angeles, 1982); Livesey, Theology and Science in the Fourteenth Century (Leiden/New
York: Brill, 1989); Christe McMenomy, "The Discipline of Astronomy in the Middle Ages" (Ph.D.
diss., Univ. California, Los Angeles, 1984); William A. Wallace, Galileo and His Sources (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 99-148; W. Roy Laird, "The Scope of Renaissance Me-
chanics," Osiris, 2nd ser., 1986, 2:43-68; and Roger Ariew, "Christopher Clavius and the Classifi-
cation of the Sciences," Synthese, 1990, 83:293-300.
23 In SSR a domain of permanent values remains constant, while paradigmatic standards change. See
Gerald Doppelt's reading of Kuhn, which emphasizes radical shifts of standards: "The Philosophical
Requirementsfor an Adequate Conception of Scientific Rationality," Philosophy of Science, 1988, 55:104-
133.
of this problem within the discipline of astronomy provides the scientific core of
Kuhn's revolution; the effect that this technical resolution has on neighboring dis-
ciplines is what makes it, like the Quantum Mechanical Revolution, a revolution in
the broad sense.24
Noticeably missing from CR is the SSR notion of community-based science, with
its radical view of the socially constituted scientific fact that Kuhn appropriatedfrom
Ludwik Fleck and transformed to his own purposes.25 Yet, even in pre-SSR terms,
Kuhn's view of astronomy is problematic. Astrology is effectively excluded from
astronomy. Astrologers, like humanists, poets, theologians, and Neoplatonist phi-
losophers, are relegated to an undifferentiated realm "outside" of astronomy; social
roles are disjunctively constituted into "astronomers" and "nonastronomers,'""sci-
entists" and "nonscientists." Thus while "nonscientific" philosophers, such as Nich-
olas of Cusa, were thought to open conceptual possibilities for "scientists" like
Kepler, Kuhn never grapples with the meaning of astrology for his major actors. Yet
there is good evidence to suggest that Copernicus's theoretical problematic arose
initially from a matrix of astrological and astronomical issues. A residue even re-
mains in the title of his major work, perhaps recalling the Liber de revolutionibus
et nativitatibusof the twelfth-centuryJewish astrologerAbrahamibn Ezra (d. 1167).26
Although Kuhn makes some quite sensible and uncontroversial observations about
astrology as providing "the principal motive for wrestling with the problem of the
planets" (CR, p. 94), this remark is forgotten in the course of the narrative-or, at
least, it has no further intellectual or social function. Given Kuhn's willingness to
assign a positive valence to all kinds of external considerations, this seems an odd
exclusion. Indeed, it is one of the major weaknesses of the entire story, since the
same conceptual scheme that contained the concepts for calculating planetary posi-
tion also included the premise that the planets influence terrestrial events. Put dif-
ferently: Kuhn made Ptolemy's Almagest the focus of the "two-sphere universe"
while ignoring his Tetrabiblos.27
This strange absence of astrology requires some explanation. One possibility is
that much of the literature on which Kuhn was relying-with the notable exception
of Lynn Thorndike's writings-excluded astrology from its purview. Ironically,
however, it was to astrology (and Thorndike) that Kuhn turned in his famous debate
with the philosopher Karl Popper in 1968. On that occasion Kuhn dismissed Popper's
falsifiability conditions for situating astrology on the other side of Science. Kuhn
argued that, pace "Sir Karl," the history of astrology demonstrated the lack of a
puzzle-solving tradition and that for this (Kuhnian) reason it deserved to be classified
24 The parallel with Bohr, Planck, and Einstein comes at the beginning of the final chapter, where
Kuhn informs us that "adjustments in other fields of thought" are typical of "most large-scale upheavals
in scientific thought" (CR, p. 229).
25 Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (cit. n. 9); and Steven Shapin's review of this
book in Science, 1980, 207:1065-1066.

26
Abraham ibn Ezra, Liber de revolutionibus et nativitatibus (Venice, 1507). Evidence for this claim
is developed in my forthcoming study on the Copernican question; see also Westman, "Copernicus and
the Prognosticators: The Bologna Period, 1496-1500," Universitas, Dec. 1993, 5:1-5. For excellent
presentations of Kepler's astrology see Judith Field, "A LutheranAstrologer: Johannes Kepler," Archive
for History of Exact Sciences, 1984, 31:189-272; and Gerard Simon, Kepler astronome astrologue
(Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
27 In fact, Kuhn fuses Ptolemy's and Aristotle's justifications for the "two-sphere universe"; yet the
differences between Ptolemy and Aristotle are significant: see Liba Chaia Taub, Ptolemy's Universe:
The Natural Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy's Astronomy (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court,
1993).
as a nonscientific "craft."28Nonscientific, perhaps; but why not fruitful, like Neo-

platonism, in opening up new conceptual possibilities?
IV. CRISIS, AESTHETICS, AND THE BREAK WITH TRADITION
In the deftly written Chapter 5, Kuhn finally arrives at the question of Copernicus's
innovation itself. He approaches it from two directions: from the perspective of the
inherited tradition, and from the standpoint of what happened later. "Revolution" in
the latter sense is what others did with Copernicus's book (and might not have done
had he not written it). From the first point of view, however, Copernicus did not
set out to start a revolution: it was an unintended by-product of an attempt to "reform
the techniques employed in computing planetary positions" (CR, p. 137). The initial
idea arose, in other words, from technical considerations internal to the astronomical
tradition. Here Kuhn faced two difficulties, one strategic, the other concerning Co-
pernicus's motives. If Copernicus's achievement was essentially difficult and tech-
nical, then how could one describe it to an "external" audience of the 1950s? How
could one reach the "nonastronomers"and "lit types" in Nat Sci 4 without scaring
them off?29Herbert Butterfield and E. A. Burtt had avoided this problem altogether;
and Koyre, writing for an elite Parisian intellectual community, did not need to con-
front it squarely in his Galilean Studies. Kuhn's solution was new and pedagogically
important. He restricted himself to book 1 of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.
He provided long passages from the 1947 translation by John Dobson and Selig
Brodetsky and glossed them with well-conceived, elementary technical diagrams and
appendixes. However, Kuhn then attributedto Copernicus himself the rhetorical in-
tention of directing book 1 to "those without astronomical training" (p. 145). It did
not occur to Kuhn that Copernicus was simply following the Ptolemaic organization
of setting down first principles.30
In 1973 Noel M. Swerdlow suggested a quite different construction of the pre-
Copernican tradition and Copernicus's relation to it. Swerdlow advanced the exciting
hypothesis that Copernicus's problematic could be found already in the first "pos-
tulate" of the Commentariolus, the little handwritten work that contained Coperni-
cus's first statement of heliocentric theory. Put succintly: according to Swerdlow,
Copernicus believed that the celestial spheres were rigid, impenetrable bodies re-
quired to rotate uniformly about their diametral axes; hence the equant, with its non-
diametral, off-center axis, was physically objectionable, and planetary theory must
28 Thomas Kuhn, "Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?" in Criticism and the Growth of
Knowledge, ed. Lakatos and Musgrave (cit. n. 2), pp. 6-10. This classification of astrology as a craft
may account for its exclusion from both the "mathematical" and "experimental" sciences; see Kuhn,
"Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions" (cit. n. 22).
29 Kuhn reports a revealing incident at Princeton, where he discussed CR at a first-year graduate
seminar, led by a colleague, on different approaches to history: "Though not a text, the book was written
so that it could be used in college courses on science for the nonscientist . . . the role of science in
intellectual history cannot be understood without the science. How many students grasped that point I
cannot be sure, but my colleague did not. Midway through a lively discussion, he interjected, 'But, of
course, I skipped the technical parts.' Since he is a busy man, the omission may not be surprising. But
what is suggested by his willingness, unsolicited, to make it public?" Thomas Kuhn, "History and the
History of Science," in Essential Tension (cit. n. 22), pp. 127-161, on p. 157. Cf. Steven Shapin,
"Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as Seen through the Externalism-
Internalism Debate," Hist. Sci., 1992, 30:333-369, esp. pp. 358-360.
30 See Jean Dietz Moss, Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science in the Copernican Controversy
(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 46-63.
find alternative mechanisms to accommodate this physical principle. Already

Nasir ad-Din at-Tu-si (1201-1274) at Margaha and Ibn ash-Shatir (1236-1311) at
Damascus had developed epicyclic mechanisms that could produce harmonic motion
along a straight line or great arc of a sphere. And Swerdlow suggested that the
similarities with Copernicus's devices were too close to be coincidental. If, more-
over, in studying book 12.1-2 of Regiomontanus's Epitome of the Almagest (1496),
Copernicus had arrived at a geoheliocentric construction, much like the later one of
Tycho Brahe; then Copernicus's alleged belief in the impenetrability of the spheres
might well have compelled him to move to some form of heliocentrism. In the dis-
cussions that followed Swerdlow's fruitful conjecture, much of the focus turned on
just what Copernicus really did hold about the nature of the orbs and spheres.31
Whether Copernicus's reordering of the universe in fact began with the problem of
the orbs is still an open question, but some version of Swerdlow's reconstruction is
still a strong candidate.
In both CR and SSR Kuhn uses the preface to De revolutionibus as the key text
for describing Copernicus's problematic. In SSR the preface provides an instance of
a "crisis state" in science ("monstrous," "diffuse," and "inaccurate")(SSR, pp. 68-
69); in CR, however, Kuhn acknowledges that for some fifteen hundred years "the
astronomical tradition had not previously seemed monstrous" (CR, p. 139).32 If not,
then the crisis must have been "in the eye of the beholder," a "monster" constructed
by Copernicus himself but evidently not there for his contemporaries. Was there,
then, really a crisis? And could Burtt's Florentine Neoplatonism serve adequately as
the motivating resource?33Kuhn leaned toward an answer that was both psycholog-
ical and metaphysical: the solution to the crisis lay in Copernicus's unique aesthetic
sensibility-"an eye so absorbed with geometrical harmony that he could adhere to
his heresy for its harmony alone, even when it had failed to solve the problem that
had led him to it" (CR, p. 184). Kuhn's answer at once sharpened the Burtt/Koyre
tradition and, at the same time, legitimated the importance of the "other culture" of
nonscientific readers whom he was trying to reach.
In certain respects CR's presentation of Copernicus was both its most successful
and its most controversial part. I count myself among those nonscientifically trained
readers who were reached by this section of the book as much as by its Piagetian
account of Aristotle's physics. Certainly it was a major influence in causing me to
3' Noel M. Swerdlow, "The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus's Planetary Theory: A Trans-
lation of the Commentariolus with Commentary," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,
1973, 117:423-512; Edward Rosen, "Copernicus's Spheres and Epicycles," Archives Internationales
d'Histoire des Sciences, 1975, 25:82-92; Swerdlow, "PSEUDODOXIA COPERNICANA: or, Enqui-
ries into Very Many Received Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths, Mostly Concerning Spheres,"
ibid., 1976, 26:108-158; Rosen, "Reply," ibid., pp. 301-304; Westman, "Astronomer's Role" (cit.
n. 22); Eric Aiton, "Celestial Spheres and Circles," Hist. Sci., 1981, 19:75-114; Nicholas Jardine,
"The Significance of the Copernican Orbs," Journal for the History of Astronomy, 1982, 13:168-194;
and Swerdlow and 0. Neugebauer, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus's De revolutionibus (Studies
in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, 10), 2 parts, Pt. 1 (New York/Berlin: Springer-
Verlag, 1984), pp. 54-58.
32 See, further, CR, pp. 136-144; Owen Gingerich, "'Crisis' versus Aesthetic in the Copernican
Revolution," in The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler (1975; New York: American Institute
of Physics, 1993), pp. 193-204; and Bernard Goldstein, "The Blasphemy of Alfonso X: History or
Myth?" in Revolution and Continuity: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Early Modern Science,
ed. Peter Barker and Roger Ariew (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. America Press, 1991), pp. 143-
156.
33 Hatfield, "Metaphysics and the New Science" (cit. n. 20), pp. 93-94.
believe that there was even a chance to enter a field that presented such a forbiddingly
hard-nosed, technical image-or so it seemed, at least, to a "soft" historian.34When
I first picked up CR in 1963, as a graduate student studying Russian and modern
European history at the University of Michigan, it excited my interest because it was
the first humanized account of science that I had ever encountered. Though I had
barely survived Sputnik-era high school physics, CR offered a new opportunity to
make science part of my intellectual life. History of science presented the image of
an androgynous field at a time when science was regularly associated with winning
(the war), staying safe (from bombs), and being a nerd. The secret alliances forged
in the postwar period between universities and military/scientific laboratories were
not yet respectable, let alone safe, topics of historical investigation.35 History of
science in the 1950s, in certain respects, became a way for a small group of phys-
icists, including Wolfgang Pauli, Gerald Holton, and Kuhn, to humanize the tough
image of physics.36 However, when C. P. Snow spoke at my college graduation in
1963 a tiny, bald-headed don standing on the fifty-yard line of the University of
Michigan football stadium-I could barely hear him, let alone "the two cultures."37
The reaction to Kuhn's account from philosophers of science was not particularly
sympathetic. In SSR Kuhn used the "soft, " external, Copernican aesthetic to motivate
shifts from one paradigm to another. This account immediately evoked fears of pen-
34 My first teacher, David C. Lindberg, assured me that if I stuck to the period before Newton, I
would not need to worry about differential equations. I learned later that Piaget was also very significant
in forming Kuhn's appreciation of the history of science: "I vividly remember how that influence [of
Piaget] figured in my first meeting with Alexandre Koyre, the man who, more than any other historian,
has been my maitre. I said to him that it was Piaget's children from whom I had learned to understand
Aristotle's physics. His response-that it was Aristotle's physics that had taught him to understand
Piaget's children-only confirmed my impression of the importance of what I had learned." Thomas
Kuhn, "Concepts of Cause in the Development of Physics," in Essential Tension (cit. n. 22), pp. 21-
30, on pp. 21-22.
35 At the very time that Kuhn and Conant were teaching the virtues of a new history of science that
showed the wedding of the arts and science in the Copernican Revolution, a new, hidden, political culture
of science, driven by perceived threats to the national security, was already well formed. See esp. Paul
Forman, "Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as a Basis for Physical Research in the United
States, 1940-1960," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1987, 18:149-229; David Noble, Forces
of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Knopf, 1984); Walter A. Mc-
Dougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic, 1985);
and Michael Aaron Dennis, "A Change of State: The Political Cultures of Technical Practice at the
M.I.T. Instrumentation Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins University" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins
Univ., 1990).
36 Wolfgang Pauli, one of the great figures of the Quantum Mechanical Revolution, experienced the
feminine in his dreams. The psychologist Carl Jung interpreted one of these dreams as hermaphroditic.
Pauli's dream suggests how conscious binary pairs or oppositions-such as irrational/rational, history/
science, external/internal-may show up in unconscious dreamwork as "complementarities," parts of
the self kept apart in conscious life yet seeking integration at another level. Pauli's famous study of
Kepler and Robert Fludd, "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler,"
in C. G. Jung and W. Pauli, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), pp. 147-240, was an important resource for Gerald Holton, "Johannes
Kepler's Universe: Its Physics and Metaphysics," American Journal of Physics, 1956, 24:340-351,
whose article Kuhn, in turn, made use of in CR. I have analyzed the relationship between Jung and
Pauli in Robert S. Westman, "Nature, Art, and Psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler-Fludd Polemic,"
in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1984), pp. 177-229.
37 In 1978, by chance, I found myself sitting opposite Snow at a dinner in Churchill College, Cam-
bridge. After getting over my surprise, and after a generous sip of wine, I told him of our "encounter"
in Ann Arbor fifteen years earlier. After a moment's thought, he replied graciously: "Oh yes . . . I did
five graduations in America that year."
etration of the "irrational"in a philosophical community where "hard facts," "crit-

icism," and "value neutrality" were inviolable resources. Imre Lakatos and Elie Za-
har tried to recapture the Copernican episode by rationally reconstructing it in the
domain of objective science. Their aim was to show that, right from the start, there
was a Copernican "research program"-a series of theories-that actually domi-
nated the Ptolemaic program for "objective" reasons, quite apart from what per-
suaded any particular historical individual to accept it. Apart from Lakatos-Zahar's
fictional reading of the Copernican question, it remained unnoticed that their con-
ception of the problem was based entirely on evidence to be found in CR!38
Not surprisingly, the Lakatos-Zahar "scifi" story did not win any public converts
among historians. In fact, one trend of scholarship since at least the late 1970s has
been to resituate historical explanation on the side of the actors' categories and mean-
ings that Lakatos and Zahar rejected. What, for example, did it mean to be an "as-
tronomer" or an "author of heavenly literature" in the early modem period? What
were the available genres within which this literature of the heavens was produced?
What were the categories of heavenly representation, the notions of "theory," "prac-
tice," and "discipline," deployed by such authors? What resources of demonstration
and persuasion were used to make claims "stick"? How were standards of demon-
stration made authoritative not only within local contexts but across cultural do-
mains? And in what ways did the Copernicans appropriatethe literary and political
resources of religious controversy? This brand of historicism takes little for granted
in its quest for situated meanings. Without supposing any fixed notion of "science,"
it assigns a central role to local audiences and to the structuresof power within which
authors established relationships to patrons.
Recently, I have tried to reexamine the meaning of Copernicus's preface in such
historicist terms.39Viewed in this way, Kuhn's aesthetic appears not so much as a
vague, general metaphysic but as a quite specific classical trope of the body widely
applied during Copernicus's lifetime as a metaphor for literary, artistic, moral, and
political coherence. Copernicus, then, locates both his planetary theory and his stan-
dard of demonstration within a discourse of order and disorder. His hope, as I have
suggested elsewhere, was that the Reform party in Rome might connect reform of
abuse within the church with reform of disorder in planetary theory. That it failed
to do so may be attributed in no small part to the belief in high church circles that
the new theory would upset both scriptural authority and the academic hierarchy of
the disciplines. Nonetheless, for all that, the church did not react to De revolution-
ibus in any official way until 1616.
V. RECEPTION AND THE DEMARCATION PROBLEM
In Kuhn's account, however, the dominant imagery of reception is warfare: De re-

volutionibus-"an almost ideal weapon"; the "final victory"-"achieved by infil-
tration"(CR, p. 185); Galileo's trial- "the peak of the battle against Copernicanism"
38 Lakatos and Zahar, "Why Did Copernicus' Research Program Supersede Ptolemy's?" (cit. n. 6);
for an importantphilosophical critique of Lakatos and Zahar see Neil Thomason, "Could Lakatos, Even
with Zahar's Criterion for Novel Fact, Evaluate the Copernican Research Programme?" British Journal
for the Philosophy of Science, 1992, 43:161-200.
39 Robert S. Westman, "Proof, Poetics, and Patronage: Copernicus's Preface to De revolutionibus,"
in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Lindberg and Westman (cit. n. 20), pp. 167-205.
(CR, p. 199). There are perhaps echoes here of Andrew Dickson White's History
of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1897) and Pierre Duhem's
"Physics of a Believer" (1905) or even revitalized Darwinist discussions in the late
1950s.40 But if the nineteenth-century struggle over the autonomy of science was
principally with religion-be it the conservative Christians who fought White's new,
secular Cornell University or the 1907 papal encyclical against "modernism" with
which Duhem had to contend-by the early twentieth century new categories were
beginning to replace religion in relation to science: the irrational, the social, the
unconscious.
Already in 1919 Karl Popper had sought to demarcate science from what he saw
as new forms of the irrational: astrology, psychoanalysis, and (Austro-)Marxism.4'
Kuhn drew the demarcation differently: the battle over the new theory will occur
between those inside and those outside the space of technical astronomical expertise.
Opposition came from "outsiders": theologians such as Martin Luther, John Calvin,
and Philipp Melanchthon; the political philosopher Jean Bodin; the poets Guillaume
Du Bartas and John Donne. Within the specialty, on the other hand, the narrative
portrays gradual conversions and eventual-indeed, inevitable-triumph in the work
of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. The revolution ends when the new, more compre-
hensive, more economical and fruitful way of organizing scientific knowledge in-
tegrates elements of nonscientific knowledge-effectively uniting the specialists and
the nonspecialists in an interdependent conceptual scheme. Although Kuhn fre-
quently refers to observations, "bad data," "increased accuracy," and so forth, he
is careful not to state that his revolution ends when a conceptual scheme finally
"corresponds to the facts" or, simply, "is true."
How and when was the specialty group won over to the new conceptual scheme?
Kuhn's answer, distributed over the final two chapters of the book, locates the crit-
ical turning point-quite plausibly, I think-with Kepler (ca. 1596-1630). Whether
Kepler's commitment to Copernican theory can meaningfully be called a "con-
version" is another matter. In fact, although the notion of conversion is an im-
portant corollary of the incommensurability thesis in SSR, it is simply not well
developed in CR. For example, in the case of Tycho Brahe, the aesthetic harmo-
nies that were so persuasive to Copernicus were not "sufficiently strong evidence to
counterbalance the difficulties inherent in the earth's motion" (CR, p. 201). Why
were these aesthetic harmonies persuasive to Kepler (whose "faith in [them]
never wavered after his student days" [p. 209]) and to Georg Joachim Rheticus, the
first and only disciple of Copernicus for thirty years, but not to Brahe and "most
technically proficient non-Copernican astronomers of the day" (p. 205)? Indeed,
how did Kepler's teacher Michael Maestlin (1550-1631) "convert" Kepler to the
new theory? How was Maestlin himself "converted"? And what of the English Pur-
40
Andrew Dickson White was president of Cornell University. In the first edition, entitled The War-
fare of Science (New York: Appleton, 1876), he states his thesis: "In all modern history, interference
with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may
have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and to science-and invariably. And, on the
other hand, all untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its
stages may have seemed, for the time, to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good of religion and
of science" (p. 8). On the "warfare thesis" see the editors' introduction to David C. Lindberg and
Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity
and Science (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1986), pp. 1-18.
4' Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1976), pp.
3 1-36.
itan prognosticator Thomas Digges (ca. 1546-1595), whose cosmological woodcut

of an "infinite" Copernican universe graced the first edition of CR? Or Giordano
Bruno's putatively "revitalized" infinite "atomistic" universe? Kuhn produces no
conversion stories for any of these figures. Instead, he circumnavigates the diffi-
culty by falling back on a more general, less controversial, claim: Copernicus's
work changed "the field"; it helped to open up new problems and cast doubt on
the Ptolemaic alternative, even if it failed to win over most technically proficient
conservative astronomers.
Space does not permit us to redress such large and important lacunae here. None-
theless, a short list of general observations will serve to highlight some major areas
of difficulty.
First, many of the principal agents mentioned in CR had, in fact, a metalevel
understanding of their productions: self-conscious epistemologies, standards of
appraisal and theoretical adequacy. This is most especially true of Kepler, but im-
portant remarks of a metamethodological nature can also be found in Copernicus,
Maestlin, Rheticus, Digges, and Bruno, and still more strikingly developed no-
tions appear among the seventeenth-century Copernicans.42Furthermore, although
Kuhn writes his narrative as a history of conventionalist schemes, most of the
agents depicted themselves not as "problem solvers" but as uncovering the divine
plan. They were, in this sense, not merely "realists" but what I would call sacral
realists.
Second, the terms "Copernicanism"and "converts to . ." are misleading because
they suggest a degree of unanimity and homogeneity among public adherents to Co-
pernicus's theory that is not warranted. The differences between the "Copernicans"
Kepler and Bruno, for example, were greater than those between the Kepler and
"non-Copernican"Tycho Brahe. And, further, many who could not accept the reality
of a moving earth still used Copernican planetary theory and possessed a remarkably
intimate working knowledge of it.43
Third, Kuhn's exclusion of theology, scriptural exegesis, alchemy, and astrology
from the conceptual scheme deprived that scheme of important explanatory re-
sources. For many Copernicans and non-Copernicans, divine power, planetary order,
and planetary influence were significantly associated. Furthermore, there were her-
42 On the importance of historicizing metaphysics see Hatfield, "Metaphysics and the New Science"
(cit. n. 20); and Eman McMullin, "Conceptions of Science in the Scientific Revolution," in Reap-
praisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Lindberg and Westman (cit. n. 20), pp. 27-92. Besides other
articles already referenced, my dissertation and a number of my articles written in the 1970s take up
the Kuhnian problem of "conversion" in quite specific terms: "Kepler's Theory of Hypothesis and the
'Realist Dilemma' " (cit. n. 21); "The Comet and the Cosmos: Kepler, Maestlin, and the Copemican
Hypothesis," Studia Copernicana V: Colloquia Copernicana I (Warsaw: Ossolineum, 1972), pp. 7-30;
"Michael Mastlin's Adoption of the Copernican Hypothesis," Studia Copernicana XIV: Colloquia Co-
pernicana IV (Warsaw: Ossolineum, 1975), pp. 53-63; and "Magical Reform and Astronomical Re-
form: The Yates Thesis Reconsidered," in Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution, ed. Robert S.
Westman and James E. McGuire (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1977), pp.
1-91. More recently see Nicholas Jardine, The Birth of History and Philosophy of Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984); Judith Field, Kepler's Geometric Cosmology (Chicago: Univ. Chicago
Press, 1988); Ernan McMullin, "Giordano Bruno at Oxford," Isis, 1986, 77:85-94; and McMullin,
"Bruno and Copernicus," ibid., 1987, 78:55-74.
4 Besides Westman, "Wittenberg Interpretation" (cit. n. 7), see Owen Gingerich and Robert S. West-
man, The Wittich Connection: Priority and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Cosmology (Transactions of
the American Philosophical Society, 78) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988); and Gin-
gerich and Jerzy Dobrzycki, "The Master of the 1550 Epoch: Jofrancus Offusius," J. Hist. Astron.,
1993, 24:235-253.
meneutical strategies available for reconciling biblical passages with the most radical
parts of De revolutionibus.44
Fourth, if the Copernican question was in some sense a "battle," then it was a
struggle conducted among men of letters who had passed through the rituals and
procedures of academic training.45And it included many of those who were outside
the official religious ministry, yet regarded naturalphilosophy as a kind of theology
by other means-"secular theologians," to use the felicitous phrase of Amos Fun-
kenstein. The major texts of the Copernicans and their opponents were, for the most
part, highly learned treatises that presupposed competence in academic disciplines,
standardsof demonstration, and rhetorical practices.46With few exceptions, the ma-
jority of these texts were written in Latin.47 When Galileo's vernacular Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) was banned by the church, the
dispatches from Rome implementing the decree were sent principally to the Latin-
reading universities. And although Galileo himself sent numerous copies of his
"philosophical comedy" to friends and prospective patrons outside the universities,
his Protestant supporters in the Low Countries published a Latin translation in Am-
sterdam just three years later.48
Fifth, most of the men who openly espoused and reshaped Copernican positions
were university trained, yet they were also beneficiaries, in one way or another, of
courtly patronage.49Much is known about their beliefs. Less is understood about the
4 Robert S. Westman, "The Copernicans and the Churches," in God and Nature, ed. Lindberg and
Numbers (cit. n. 40), pp. 89-93.
45 But the early modem universities did not yet have the peculiar Romantic and bureaucratic ideology
of "originality" that would emerge in the late eighteenth-century German philology seminars. See Wil-
liam Clark, "From the Medieval Universitas Scholarium to the German Research University: A Socio-
genesis of the Germanic Academic" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. California, Los Angeles, 1986); Clark, "On
the Dialectical Origins of the Research Seminar," Hist. Sci., 1989, 27:111-154; Clark, "On the Ironic
Specimen of the Doctor of Philosophy," Science in Context, 1992, 5:97-137; and Clark, "The Scientific
Revolution in the German Nations," in The Scientific Revolution in National Context, ed. Roy Porter
and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 90-114. For important appreciations
of recent scholarship on the universities see John Gascoigne, "A Reappraisal of the Role of the Uni-
versities in the Scientific Revolution," in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Lindberg and
Westman (cit. n. 20), pp. 207-260; David Lux, "Societies, Circles, Academies, and Organizations: A
Historiographic Essay on Seventeenth-Century Science," in Revolution and Continuity, ed. Barker and
Ariew (cit. n. 32), pp. 23-43; and Mordechai Feingold, "Tradition versus Novelty: Universities and
Scientific Societies in the Early Modern Period," ibid., pp. 45-59.
46 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (cit. n. 22), pp. 3-9. On the rhetoric of the
Copernican question see Moss, Novelties in the Heavens (cit. n. 30); and Maurice Finocchiaro, Galileo
and the Art of Reasoning. Rhetorical Foundations of Logic and Scientific Method (Dordrecht: Reidel,
1980).
47 Besides Galileo's works, the main exceptions are Thomas Digges, A Perfit Description of the Cae-
lestiall Orbes According to the Most Aunciente Doctrine of the Pythagoreans, Latelye Reuiued by Co-
pernicus and by Geometrical Demonstrations Approued (London, 1576); Giordano Bruno, La cena de
le ceneri (London, 1584); Paolo Antonio Foscarini, Lettera sopra l'opinione de'Pittagorici e del Co-
pernico . . . (Naples, 1615); John Wilkins, The Discovery of a World in the Moone or, A Discourse
Tending to Prove that 'tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World in that Planet (London,
1638); Thomas Streete, Astronomia Carolina: A New Theory of the Celestial Motions (London, 1661);
Robert Hooke, An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations (London, 1674); and
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes (Paris, 1686).
48 R. S. Westman, "The Reception of Galileo's Dialogue: A Partial World Census of Extant Copies,"
in Novitd celesti e crisi del sapere, ed. Paolo Galluzzi (Florence: Barbera, 1984), pp. 329-371.
49 See Westman, "Astronomer's Role" (cit. n. 22); Westman, "Reception of Galileo's Dialogue";
Westman, "Copernicans and the Churches" (cit. n. 44); Westman, "Proof, Poetics, and Patronage"
(cit. n. 39); Gingerich and Westman, Wittich Connection (cit. n. 43); and Bruce Moran, "Christoph
Rothmann, the Copernican Theory, and Institutional and Technical Influences on the Criticism of Ar-
istotelian Cosmology," Sixteenth Century Journal, 1982, 13:85-108.
kind of intellectual space and self-representations such early modern "scientific" men
of letters created within the structures of court culture.
This observation leads, in turn, to new sorts of questions: What was the status of
academic authority at court? What freedom existed to hold heterodox philosophical
views (libertas philosophandi)? Similarly, what kind of freedom was allowed to
teach new opinions within the disciplinary hierarchy of the universities (libertas do-
cendi)? Three important sixteenth-century Copernicans, for example, remained con-
nected with universities for much of their lives: Rheticus (Wittenberg, Leipzig),
Maestlin (Heidelberg, Tubingen), and Diego de Zuiniga (Salamanca). By the time
that the academic mathematician Galileo began to express private opinions about
Copernicus's theory in 1597, the latter was seen (correctly) as a German, Protestant
phenomenon. Galileo later said as much in his preface to the Dialogue.50
VI. THE "TWO CULTURES" IN THE RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE

COPERNICAN QUESTION
Between 1957 and 1962, as we have seen, Kuhn quietly dropped Duhemian long-
term, conceptual continuism in -favor of revolutionary epistemological and social
rupture. Attention focused on the radical core of Kuhn's proposal: linguistic non-
translatabilitybetween paradigms and its correlates. Movement between old and new
paradigms occurred via all kinds of extraparadigmaticconsiderations: "techniques of
persuasion," generational replacement, political and religious-style conversions. In
the great debate that followed, many philosophers simply ignored the untold "con-
version" episodes in SSR's footnote apparatus. Only a very few students of the Co-
pernican question tried to reinterpret the overarching sweep of the longue dure'e.51
Most historians, on the other hand, left the "CopernicanRevolution" as a convenient
periodizing trope and turned their attention to specialized studies.52
More recently, the disjunction between paradigms has reappeared in a new guise:
as gaps in social status between lower and higher academic disciplines and the iden-
50
"I propose in the present work," wrote Galileo, "to show to foreign nations that as much is under-
stood of this matter in Italy, and particularly in Rome, as transalpine diligence can ever have imagined":
Galileo Galilei, "To the Discerning Reader," in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,
trans. Stillman Drake (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1967), p. 5.
5' Most notably Alexandre Koyre, La revolution astronomique (Paris: Hermann, 1961), trans. by
R. E. W. Maddison as The Astronomical Revolution: Copernicus-Kepler-Borelli (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1973); of no less importance is Hans Blumenberg's Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt
(Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1975), trans. by Robert M. Wallace as The Genesis of the Copernican World
(Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 1987), a greatly expanded version of his Die kopernikanische
Wende (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1965), which explicitly denies a two-cultures approach to the "Copernican
reform" and instead regards both Copernicus and the "modern age" as having emerged from a broad,
but systematic and mutually interactive, confluence of religious, philosophical, literary, scientific, and
metaphorical considerations. Recently, Fernand Hallyn has argued that even the pair metaphor/science
is too restrictive and that the move from Copernicus to Kepler can be written about using a robust cargo
of tropes, such as metonymy, synecdoche, oxymoron, anagogy, and irony: La structure poetique du
monde: Copernic, Kepler (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987), trans. by Donald M. Leslie as The Poetic
Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (New York: Zone, 1990).
52 This trend was true of early modern studies of science in general; see Robert S. Westman and David
C. Lindberg, eds., "Introduction," in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (cit. n. 20), pp. xvii-
xxvii. See also Westman, ed., Copernican Achievement (cit. n. 6); Owen Gingerich, The Great Co-
pernicus Chase and Other Adventures in Astronomical History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1992); Studia Copernicana, 22 vols. to date (Warsaw: PAN, 1970-); Curtis A. Wilson, Astronomyfrom
Kepler to Newton (London: Variorum Reprints, 1989); and Albert Van Helden, Measuring the Universe:
Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1975).
tities of their practitioners. Culturalincommensurabilities replace linguistic ones. The

governing frame of reference is court patronage, around which all satellite interpre-
tations revolve. Not surprisingly, the sole route to epistemic legitimation for prac-
titioners of the putatively "lower class" discipline of mathematics occurs via the
cultural machinery of the court patronage system. Both patrons and clients are caught
in structures that tie their hands into knots of mutual obligation. In place of Kuhn's
interparadigmaticstrategies that made philosophers wince in the 1960s one is offered
a veritable boutique of (early modern/postmodern?) strategies for personal advance-
ment: self-fashioning, gift giving, approval seeking, aggressive distortion, purpose-
ful miscommunication,rigid shuttingout of anomalies, deliberatenoncitation, arbitrary
changes of received rules to preserve the (anxious) coherence of "socioprofessional"
species, and so forth.53
Kuhn's revolutionary structures and Snow's two cultures have thus resurfaced in
a new form. "Persons educated with the greatest intensity we know," wrote Snow,
"can no longer communicate with each other on the plane of their major intellectual
concern. . . . In the conditions of our age, or any age which we can foresee, Re-
naissance man is not possible."54 It is now suggested that the communication barrier
already existed in the Renaissance! Court patrons are said to have regarded natural
philosophy ("Copernicanism," the telescope) as entertainment and sport but to have
had no interest in its internal substance or methods. Upwardly mobile court "sci-
entists,'" according to this view, were image makers who cynically regarded their
intellectual productions as mere instrumentalities that could be exchanged for high
social status.5 Just as Kuhn had left untold the conversion stories of CR, now once
again the difficult middle ground is left entirely out of account: the massive gray
zone of the early modem universities; the role of "academic reformers" like John
Dee, Henry Savile, Andreas Dudith, Ignatius Loyola, ChristopherClavius, and many
others who tried to improve the status of mathematics in the curriculum in the late
sixteenth century56;the extensive correspondence networks and relations between the
5 See esp. Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1993). Biagioli's ex-
planatory strategy in this book, as well as in a series of earlier articles, is ultimately bipolar and re-
ductionist; his rhetoric of prescription (for explanations grounded in social status and patronage) and
admonition (for explanations grounded in internal logic) resonates with Renaissance epideictic strategies
of praise and blame. E.g., "Galileo's Copernicanism should be perceived as an explanandum rather
than assumed as an explanans": Biagioli, "Galileo's System of Patronage," Hist. Sci., 1990, 28:1-62,
on p. 44 (italics added); see also Biagioli, "The Anthropology of Incommensurability," Stud. Hist.
Phil. Sci., 1990, 21:183-209. Besides Kuhn and Feyerabend, important resources for this position are
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. Chicago
Press, 1980); and Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 1-15.
54 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures: And a Second Look (1959; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1969), pp. 60-61. Snow, however, was looking for policy solutions: "We can do something. The chief
means open to us is education-education mainly in primary and secondary schools, but also in colleges
and universities."
55 Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier (cit. n. 53), Ch. 1; and Biagioli, "Galileo's System of Patronage" (cit.
n. 53). Biagioli dramatizes his claims by sprinkling his text with allusions that evoke Hollywood "star-
making" machinery: "Brokers were like talent-scouts looking for potentially upwardly mobile clients
in which to invest their connections" (ibid., p. 9); "Successful careers were those of clients who could
tune their production to [patronage] cycles" (p. 17); "Patrons did not have any specific interest in ending
a dispute if it kept offering a good spectacle. Disputes were instances of courtly games" (p. 30).
56 Mathematics and mixed mathematics enjoyed a continual, if differentiated, improvement in epis-
temological and academic status from 1550 onward-first through the Melanchthonian reforms, then
the Jesuit Ratio studiorum and the Savilian Chair at Oxford. See, e.g., Jardine, Birth of History and
Philosophy of Science (cit. n. 42); Peter Dear, "Jesuit Mathematical Science and the Reconstitution of
new natural philosophers and quite learned court advisors, such as Descartes and
Constantijn Huygens, Kepler and Herwart von Hohenberg, not to mention Ismael
Boulliau and Prince Leopold of Tuscany.s7
Importantparts of this middle ground have already been charted and constitute an
important element of ongoing discussions of the Copernican question.58 Students of
early modern universities, Aristotelianism, and logic have shown that Galileo's fic-
tional Peripatetic Simplicio seriously caricatures the extraordinaryresiliency of six-
teenth- and seventeenth-century academic Aristotelian thought-notwithstanding the
philosopher Cremonini's infamous unwillingness to look through the telescope.59
Furthermore,it is now well understoodthat the "new learning"-including, of course,
the Copernican matter-was more widely disseminated within the sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century universities than was once thought. Moreover, surprising to
moderns, the quite diverse Aristotles constructed by the Renaissance had consider-
able conceptual resources for accommodating the most conflicting tendencies-a
situation that lasted well through the seventeenth century.60 By the same token,
many new system builders profited from a sustained tradition of critical, intrauni-
versity debates about logic and method even as they rejected key parts of Aristotelian
natural philosophy.61 Moreover, princes often retained court astrologers or physi-
Experience in the Early Seventeenth Century," Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 1987, 18:133-175; Mordechai
Feingold, The Mathematicians' Apprenticeship (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984); and Fein-
gold, "Isaac Barrow: Divine, Scholar, Mathematician," in Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac
Barrow, ed. Feingold (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 1-104.
57 According to Robert Hatch, the Collection Boulliau contains over ninety letters and drafts between
Boulliau and Leopold; in 1649 Boulliau declined a professorship at the University of Pisa offered him
by Leopold's brother, Ferdinand II; see Robert A. Hatch, The Collection Boulliau (BN,FF. 13019-
13059): An Inventory (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1982), p. xxxix.
58 See esp. William H. Donahue, The Dissolution of the Celestial Spheres, 1595-1650 (New York:
Arno, 1981); and Donahue, "The Solid Planetary Spheres in Post-Copernican Natural Philosophy," in
Copernican Achievement, ed. Westman (cit. n. 6), pp. 244-275. An initial framework for making sense
of this problem is in Westman, "Astronomer's Role" (cit. n. 22), pp. 127-133.
59 See, e.g., Charles Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
1983); Gabrielle Baroncini, "L'insegnamento della filosofia naturalenei collegi italiani dei Gesuiti (1610-
1670): Un esempio di nuovo aristotelismo," in La "Ratio Studiorum": Modelli culturali e pratiche
educative dei Gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento, ed. G. P. Brizzi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981), pp. 163-
215; and Brian Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1992).
' Luce Giard, "Histoire de l'universite et histoire du savoir: Padoue (XIVe-XVIe siecle) (I-III),"
Revue de Synthese, 1983, 110(104):139-169, 1984, 115(105):259-298, 1985, 120(106):419-442; Charles
Schmitt, "Galilei and the Seventeenth-Century Text-book Tradition," in Novitd celesti, ed. Galluzzi
(cit. n. 48), pp. 217-228; L. W. B. Brockliss, "Philosophy Teaching in France, 1600-1740," History
of Universities, 1981, 1:131-168; Brockliss, "Aristotle, Descartes, and the New Science: Natural Phi-
losophy at the University of Paris, 1600-1740," Annals of Science, 1981, 38:33-69; Edward Grant,
"Aristotelianism and the Longevity of the Medieval World View," Hist. Sci., 1978, 16:93-106; Roger
Ariew, "The Phases of Venus before 1610," Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 1987, 18:81-92; Ariew, "Theory
of Comets at Paris during the Seventeenth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1992, 53:355-
372; Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein, "The Role of Comets in the Copernican Revolution,"
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 1988, 19:299-319; Peter Dear, Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools (Ithaca,
N.Y./London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988); and Gascoigne, "Reappraisal of the Role of the Universi-
ties" (cit. n. 45).
61 See William A. Wallace, Galileo and His Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Gal-
ileo's Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), p. 227 ff.; Nicholas Jardine, "Episte-
mology of the Sciences," in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles Schmitt,
Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 685-
712; Neil Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1960); and
Heikki Mikkeli, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism: Jacopo Zabarella on the Nature
of Arts and Sciences (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1992).
cians who held simultaneous positions at the patron's university. Courtly/pro-

fessorial advice and learning about the heavens was valued not merely because it
could enhance a ruler's image but because princes believed that possessing such
knowledge could enable them rationally to avert maleficent combinations of plan-
etary influences.62 Also, many court advisors came from the universities or contin-
ued their association with them. A few princes actively produced natural knowledge
or even participated in academic disputations.63Ruling elites and early modem in-
tellectuals thus collaborated in the dialectical production of new sorts of cultural
spaces for natural knowledge.64 The lettered men patronized by the most powerful
European courts succeeded in constructing a natural philosophical culture in which
their new vocabularies were assimilated, their concerns endorsed and glossed,
their practices tolerated or celebrated-even if rulers did not specifically endorse
this or that theory.
Displaying the right confessional loyalty, however, was a serious matter-more
consequential and constraining than loyalty to one of the arts disciplines-and
no simple question of "warfare" between scientists and theologians. Between
roughly 1550 and 1650, early modem intellectual productions concerned with
the natural world had to contend, to one degree or another, with the central
concerns of an increasingly confessionalized Christian Europe that was fragment-
ed along religious fault lines. While some literati promoted projects of religious
toleration, many were involved in the process of creating confessional uniformity.
One explanation lies in the process of early modern state building described by
Heinz Schilling. Territorial states used ecclesiastical institutions, including schools
and universities, as a basis for social integration, for producing voluntary obe-
dience and acceptance of the hierarchy of social classes. Baroque princes from
the time of the Reformation began to monopolize the churches; the prince became
defensor fidei. Sacralization of the ruler then preceded and assisted subsequent
"monopolization of military force and taxation." Many political theorists sub-
scribed to the axiom Religio vinculum societatis (Religion is the bond [or chain]
of society).65
62 This is, of course, a vast subject; but for an excellent start see Grazia Biondi, "Minima astrologica:
Gli astrologi e la guida della vita quotidiana," Schifanoia, 1986, 2:41-48.

63
The landgraves of Hessen-Kassel, Wilhelm IV (1532-1592) and Moritz (1572-1632), offer an
important illustration of these tendencies; see Bruce Moran's excellent The Alchemical World of the
German Court: Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle of Moritz of Hessen (1572-
1632) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991). According to Henry Peacham, "He [Moritz] is so uni-
versal a scholar that, coming, as he doth often to his university of Marburg, what questions soever he
meeteth with set up, as the manner is in the German and our universities, he will extempore dispute an
hour or two, even in boots and spurs, upon them with their best professors. I pass over his rare skill in
chirurgery, he being generally accounted the best bonesetter in the country": The Compleat Gentleman,
ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 111-112; quoted in Moran, Al-
chemical World of the German Court, p. 12; see also Moran, "Princes, Machines, and the Valuation
of Precision in the Sixteenth Century,'" Sudhoffs Archiv, 1977, 61:209-228. Another interesting example
is Paul Fabracius; see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science,
and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 136-150.
4 This process began already in the fifteenth century with humanist intellectuals and the Medici. See
Arthur Field, The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
1988), pp. 10-51.
65 Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung: Eine Fallstudie uiber das Verhdltnis von
religiosem und socialem Wandel in der Fruihneuzeit am beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Quellen und
Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte, 48) (Gutersloh: Mohn, 1981); and Schilling, "The Refor-
mation and the Rise of the Early Modern State," in Luther and the Modern State in Germany, ed. James
Tracy (Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 7) (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal, 1986),
pp. 21-30.
Whatever their social positions, therefore, "scientific intellectuals" of this period

could not avoid encounter with concerns like the defense of divine authority and-
providence, the maintenance of scriptural authority and prophetic wisdom, antici-
pations of salvation or signs of the apocalypse, and demonic threats. When the scholar-
king James I asked in his Daemonologie (1597) "by what naturalcauses they [magic,
sorcery and witchcraft] may be," he did so because he respected the devil's powers
as a natural magician and he wished to have a reliable demarcation criterion for
distinguishing demonic from nondemonic effects.66 His main interest in this matter,
however, was not court entertainment but burning witches and hounding Puritans.
In this environment, it is interesting that some intellectuals managed to carve out
moderate confessional positions-ranging from the politiques in France to the Phi-
lippists at Wittenberg and Prague, the Latitudinariansin England, and the Family of
Love.67 Kepler was acutely conscious of the issue of philosophical freedom.68 Not
surprisingly, when court patrons engaged in serious controversy-as they actually
did-more often than not it concerned matters of academic, political, and religious
authority. This was certainly true in Galileo's early relations with the Tuscan court.
When the grand-ducal family gathered for that memorable breakfast at court in
December 1613, some three years after Galileo's arrival and ten months after Jupiter
and his "four stars" appeared in a carnival performance in Florence, it became the
occasion for a weighty debate sparked by Christina of Lorraine, the grand duke's
mother and also a woman of some considerable intelligence and learning. (She even-
tually assumed control of the court in 1621.)69
It was the grand duchess herself who questioned the existence of the Medicean
planets ("They had better be real and not deceptions of the instrument"), raised
queries about the circumjovial motions, and used the authority of Holy Scripture to
argue against the Earth's motion. It was the "conservative" academic philosopher
Cosimo Boscaglia who "admittedas true all the celestial novelties you [i.e., Galileo]
have discovered, but he said that the earth's motion was incredible and could not
happen, especially since Holy Scripture was clearly contrary to this claim."70 The
66
See Stuart Clark, "The Scientific Status of Demonology," in Occult and Scientific Mentalities, ed.
Vickers (cit. n. 36), pp. 351-374; quotation from p. 363.
67
An interesting characteristic of the confessional loyalties of the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-
century Prague imperial astronomers-Paul Fabricius, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler-is that they were
all moderate Philippists. See DaCosta Kaufmann, Mastery of Nature (cit. n. 63), p. 145; and Westman,
"Wittenberg Interpretation" (cit. n. 7), p. 170.
68 See Kepler's remark to Quietanus: "Quin imo dabitur mihi intelligendum, renunciandum mihi pro-
fessioni Astronomica ea, postquam jam fere consenui in hujus dogmatis doctrina, nemine tamdiu con-
tradicente; tandemque renunciandum ipsi provinciae Austriae, si in ea non sit futurus locus libertati
philosophicae." Johannes Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, 21 vols. to date (Munich: C. H. Beck'sche Ver-
lag, 1937-), Vol. 17, no. 846, p. 364.
69 Also present were the young grand duke, Cosimo II; his uncle Antonio (a clergyman with catholic
scientific interests, including Paracelsian philosophy); the archduchess Maria Maddalena of Austria; Pa-
olo Giordano Orsini, a relative of the ducal family; Cosimo Boscaglia, special professor of philosophy
at the grand duke's university in Pisa; and Benedetto Castelli, a Benedictine and professor of mathematics
at the same university.
70 Galileo Galilei, Opere, ed. Antonio Favaro, 20 vols. (Florence: Barbera, 1890-1909), Vol. 11,
pp. 605-606; an English translation is readily available in Maurice Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A
Documentary History (Los Angeles/Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1989), pp. 47-48. Neither Bos-
caglia's opinion nor the fact that he offered advice on a question of learning was, of course, unusual.
Prior to Galileo's arrival at the court, Christina addressed him as "Lettore di Matematica nello Studio
de Padova" and received from him quite specific astrological-medical advice regarding the illness of
her husband, Ferdinand I, who died shortly thereafter: Galileo, Opere, Vol. 10, no. 204, pp. 226-227.
Clearly, she valued his competence as an astrological advisor and as a reasonably good emblem maker;
what she was not prepared for were his liberal views on scriptural exegesis.
grand duke's sometime mathematics tutor, now his "chief philosopher and mathe-
matician," took the episode seriously enough to pen an eloquent letter to the grand
duchess about scriptural and natural authority.71
Libertas philosophandi at court. This brief but telling episode opens a window
onto its strategic epistemic possibilities and dangers: men who counseled princes had
to walk a fine line between saying what the prince wanted to hear and making pre-
dictions that were seen to be reliable. "Reliability" was not in any way a fixed notion;
it varied with audience. But even so, courtly deception (sprezzatura) and sycophancy
could not forever cover the reality of evil behavior.72 It was a common theme, a
topos amongst the emblematists of the age: princes should not tolerate too much
adulation; too much flattery can undermine the prince and the flatterer himself. For
example, in HadrianusJunius's Emblemata (1565) we find: "The Flatterer is a threat
to public health" ("Adulator Saluti Reip. Grauis"). A popular image was the sick
lion who eats the flattering monkey: "As the lion, tormented by the savage power
of a hidden sickness/Feels better immediately after devouring a monkey/So the king
who ejects flatterers and base sycophants from his palace/Rids his kingdom of a
grievous poison."73 What possibilities were available, under these circumstances, to
court philosophers and mathematicians?
One solution was to write aphoristically, in the style of the medieval Joachimite
or biblical prophecies. This tactic especially suited the late fifteenth- and early six-
teenth-centurygenre of verse prophecies that was especially popular in Italy.74It was
somewhat less useful to the army of prognosticators who needed to make quite spe-
cific annual predictions about princes and the fates of their territories.7 Such fore-
casters relied for their own protection on the formula Astra inclinant, sed non cogunt
(The stars dispose, but they do not compel). In other words, the stars "underdeter-
71 Galileo mirrors back his disciple Castelli's account and thereby confirms the relatively open char-
acter of the dispute: "What greater fortune can you wish than to see their Highnesses themselves enjoying
discussing with you, putting forth doubts, listening to your solutions, and finally remaining satisfied
with your answers?" Galileo Galilei to Benedetto Castelli, 21 Dec. 1613, trans. in Finocchiaro, Galileo
Affair, p. 49. That the court was not a modem scientific institute does not preclude it from being a space
within which certain ideas were debated, approved, or rejected.
72 Sydney Anglo has perceptively observed, "It is impossible . . . for Machiavelli's prince to seem
righteous while being wicked. Sooner or later the deception would be apparent, and, once revealed, he
could never deceive anyone again. Similarly, once the courtier's sprezzatura is recognized as a device,
how could it ever again convince?" Sydney Anglo, "The Courtier: The Renaissance and Changing
Ideals," in The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage, and Royalty, 1400-1800, ed. A. G. Dickens
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), p. 44. It mattered whether astrologers gave accurate political ad-
vice, and even Machiavelli's political theory was grounded in the view that the heavens influenced
human behavior; see Anthony Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale
Univ. Press, 1992).
73 Hadrianus Junius, Emblemata (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1565), p. 28; quoted and translated
in Peggy Mufioz Simonds, "Freedom of Speech and the Emblem Tradition," in Acta Conventus Neo-
Latini Sanctandreani, ed. I. D. McFarlane (Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Neo-Latin
Studies) (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1986), pp. 605-616, on p.
608.
74 See Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1969); and Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia
G. Cochrane (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990).
75 Paola Zambelli, "Fine del mondo o inizio della propaganda? Astrologia, filosofia della storia e
propaganda politico-religiosa nel dibattito sulla congiunzione del 1524," in Scienze, credenze occulte,
livelli di cultura, ed. Zambelli (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1982), pp. 291-368; Robin Bruce Barnes,
Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the German Reformation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1988); Patrick Curry, Astrology in Early Modern England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1989); and Robert S. Westman, "The Culture of Prognostication, 1470-1540," in my forthcom-
ing study of the Copernican question.
mine" man's fate; the astrologer can only conjecture about which planetary influ-
ences cause specific effects.
Galileo undoubtedly understood what resources were available to him. In the Sid-
ereus nuncius he managed to blend different voices: as a prospective client, he pro-
claimed the "divine necessity" of his relationship to the grand duke; as an astron-
omer, he claimed that Jupiter's "planets" really do circle that body while Jupiter
itself encircles the Sun. However, he registered for his interpretationof Jupiter and
the Medici (four circumjovial planets = four Medici brothers) only the astrologer's
conventional claim of "probability";unlike many sixteenth-century prognosticators,
he did not go so far as to claim for his discoveries the mantle of scripturalprophecy.76
In the Letter to the Grand Duchess, however, he would go much further: astronomy
is capable of "necessary demonstrations," and these serve as a reliable basis for
interpreting the true meaning of certain passages of Scripture. The new role that
Galileo begins to create, then, may be seen as part of a broad, post-Tridentine move-
ment aimed at liberalizing standards of exegetical authority at both court and uni-
versity.77And it is precisely here that Galileo would discover that neither his patrons
nor his enemies were "above" nor disjunctively dissociated from controversy.78
76 For the barriera of 17 Feb. 1613 see Mario Biagioli, "Galileo the Emblem Maker," Isis, 1990,
81:230-258, on pp. 249-250 (Galileo, Courtier [cit. n. 53], pp. 103-157). Biagioli depicts Galileo as
a Medici propagandist who knew and could bend to his own purposes the complex artistic/mythological
codes of the Medici dynasty-indeed, that he used this knowledge in crafting the dedication to the
Sidereus nuncius. The alleged connections between Jupiter and Cosimo I, however, are at best tenuous
and at worst nonexistent. Saturn, not Jupiter, was Cosimo I's special planet, as Giorgio Vasari himself
states ("Dico che essendo Saturno pianeta del duca Cosimo": Ragionamenti, in Le opere di Giorgio
Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, Vol. 8 [Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1906], p. 46), and the all-important
ascendant sign of his horoscope was Capricorn. Not surprisingly, Saturn and Capricorn are the crucial
images in mid-sixteenth-century Medicean imagery; see Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in
Medicean Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), p. 3 ff. Jupiter, mythological offspring
of Ops and Saturn, was at best an intermediary in the paintings of the Jupiter Room; the planet Jupiter
does not figure prominently in Cosimo's horoscope. Even if Galileo knew Vasari's interpretationof the
Jupiter Room, he surely does not refer to it in his dedication. That Galileo did cast numerous horo-
scopes-including that of Cosimo II-has been well established in the literature and is in keeping with
his encomiastic dedication in the Sidereus nuncius: see Gulielmo Righini, "L'oroscopo galileiano di
Cosimo II de'Medici," Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 1976, 1:29-36;
and Germana Ernst, "Aspetti dell'astrologia e della profezia in Galileo e Campanella," in Novita celesti,
ed. Galluzzi (cit. n. 48), pp. 255-266, esp. pp. 263-265. Even for Cosimo II, however, the planet
Jupiter sits in the midheaven and does not rule Cosimo II's ascendant sign, although it "illuminates the
eastern angle." Under the circumstances, Galileo cautiously followed the standard procedure of astrol-
ogers when he acknowledged that his interpretations connecting Jupiter and Cosimo II were based upon
"probable arguments" ("Verum, quid ego probabilibus utor argumentationibus"; Galileo, Opere, ed.
Favaro [cit. n. 70], Vol. 3, p. 56, lines 31-32). Cf. Richard S. Westfall, "Science and Patronage:
Galileo and the Telescope," Isis, 1985, 76:11-30.
77 On the context of Galileo's new role see Westman, "Copernicans and the Churches" (cit. n. 44).
78 Using the gift-giving, exchange model of Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu, Biagioli suggests that
Galileo's patrons had little interest in intellectual productions except insofar as they could function as
"sport" or "spectacle," i.e., as emblems or displays of their power: Galileo, Courtier (cit. n. 53), esp.
Ch. 1; "Galileo the Emblem Maker" (cit. n. 76), pp. 253-254; and "Galileo's System of Patronage"
(cit. n. 53), pp. 28-45. Cf. CR, p. 225: "After 1609 men who knew only a smattering of astronomy
could look through a telescope and see for themselves that the universe did not conform to the naive
precepts of common sense, and during the seventeenth century they did look. The telescope became a
popular toy." Unlike Kuhn's undergraduates in Nat Sci 4, Biagioli's patrons simply had no interest in
the "internal" elements of natural philosophy; they showed no concern to read beyond the celebratory
prefaces, nor did they apparently care to involve themselves in debating the conditions of proof. This
interpretation is difficult to square with, among other things, the quite serious philosophical exchanges
between Galileo and some members of court. Cf. Galileo to Antonio de'Medici, in Opere, ed. Favaro
(cit. n. 70), Vol. 10, no. 207, pp. 228-234; see also Paolo Galluzzi, "Motivi paracelsiani nella Toscana
di Cosimo II e di Don Antonio dei Medici: Alchimi, medicina 'chimica' e riforma del sapere," in
Scienze, credenze occulte, ed. Zambelli (cit. n. 75), pp. 31-62.
In other words, while courtly settings freed Copernicans like Galileo and Kepler
from certain constraints of the academic hierarchy of knowledge-notably, the ne-
cessitas docendi (the necessity to teach) and, for the mathematicians, the prohibitio
philosophandi (prohibition against philosophizing)-they also reproduced some of
its tensions. Both church and court looked to the university to produce and maintain
a stable corpus of teachings. The very word doctrina, as Luce Giard has observed,
retains its religious roots in the phrases "doctrinal truth" and "truths of faith." At
the same time, the medieval university had long accommodated spaces within which
critical and skeptical tendencies flourished. And in certain unusual environments of
political toleration-such as sixteenth-century Padua-even Jews were permitted to
obtain diplomas in arts and medicine or medicine and philosophy-but not in law
or theology. Not only Galileo and Kepler but also Copernicus, Descartes, and Hobbes
shaped their own systems within a struggle with academic discursive practices and
proof standards.79And when Pope Urban VIII voiced his injunction about the limits
of astronomical knowledge to Galileo, he spoke with the authority of both church
and university.80 These were genuine struggles over the authority to control the con-
ditions of belief. Baldassare Castiglione's dissimulating "ideal courtier" could teach
the ars placendi (the arts of pleasing)-premeditated nonchalance, gift giving, and
deception-but he could not teach the ars philosophandi.
VII. THE ASCENDANCY OF KEPLER: INEVITABILITY? INCOMMENSURABILITY?

SELECTIVE APPROPRIATION?
In CR's narrative structure, Kepler plays the decisively revolutionary role. And yet,
curiously, after Kepler Kuhn's story is not only internalist but also strangely inev-
itabilist. The external culture ceases to affect the logical component of the conceptual
scheme.
Kepler solved the problem of the planets. Ultimately his version of Copernicus' proposal
would almost certainly have converted all astronomers to Copernicanism, particularly
after 1627 when Kepler issued the Rudolphine Tables, derived from his new theory and
clearly superior to all the astronomical tables in use before. The story of the astronomical
components of the Copernican Revolution might therefore end with the gradual accep-
tance of Kepler's work because that work contains all the elements required to make the
Revolution in astronomy endure. (CR, p. 219; italics added)
Notice, first, that "conversion" here is surely not the notion deployed in the later
religious, political, and psychological sense familiar from SSR. Kuhn's suggestion
7 Giard, "Histoire de l'universite (I)" (cit. n. 60), p. 166. See also Robert S. Westman, "Proof,
Poetics, and Patronage" (cit. n. 39).
80 I suspect that Urban was particularly anxious about any hint of determinism, not least because of
his quite palpable fears of disease-bearing eclipses. Just as God could have made the heavens otherwise,
so humans could take steps to avert dangerous astral influences: in 1628 Tomasso Campanella joined
him in a sealed room and advised him on specific countermeasures (burning herbs, lighting two candles
and five torches to represent the seven planets, playing Jovial and Venereal music, etc.); in 1631, the
year before the publication of Galileo's Dialogue, Urban issued a bull, Contra astrologos iudiciarios,
that condemned astrological predictions of the deaths of princes and, especially, popes; see D. P. Walker,
Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958), pp. 205-
212. This episode shows again that patrons need not have been quite so socially distant from their clients
as might be thought; further, the patron might draw on academic standards of knowledge in order to
make judgments about the reasonableness and reliability of a client's advice.
is rather that reason and well-grounded empirical laws were the considerations that
motivated change of belief. There is no talk of "earth" or "planet" taking on new,
let alone incommensurable, meanings. Second, Kuhn argues that, for quite internal
reasons, Kepler's "version of Copernicus's proposal" (hereafter "V2")was inevitably
more persuasive than both geocentrism, in all of its varieties, and the original prop-
ositions of Copernicus (hereafter "V1l').*8 Kepler's contemporaries, in other words,
were drawn by the superior predictive capacity of the Rudolphine Tables and the
new planetary theory from which those tables were derived rather than by the ex-
ternal Neoplatonism that had initially attracted Kepler himself to Vl. Newton, for
example, was finally able to derive the law of universal gravitation from Kepler's
empirically based laws but evidently had no use for Kepler's theology. Third, while
V2 carried forward the core of V1 (Earth's motions), V2essentially constituted a new
conceptual scheme because it dismantled the foundations of all previous planetary
theory.
This leads to a further, interesting conclusion: for reasons not addressed by Kuhn,
Galileo never formed a commitment to Kepler's V2. Nor did Galileo's telescopic
observations of 1610 produce inevitable converts. The telescope, in Kuhn's account,
became an "effective weapon," "a popular toy," but one that only went so far as to
"propagandize" and "popularize" V1 while helping to "mop up" the Ptolemaic op-
position. Galileo effectively helped to convert men to a conceptual scheme that Kep-
ler, in large part, rejected (CR, p. 225). Here again, the term "Copernicanism"does
not do much to illuminate these differences.
Turn now to the strange notion of inevitability. Even on its own terms, it is dif-
ficult to understand what Kuhn has in mind when he argues for the "inevitable."
Before Newton's Principia (1687), it is far from evident that Kepler's "laws"-so-
called only much later logically entail, separately or jointly, a threefold terrestrial
motion. If anything, the logic is quite the reverse: Kepler derives elliptical orbits,
the area rule, and the period-distance relation on the assumption of the Sun as ref-
erence point, together with several other premises. Copernicus himself makes just
this sort of logical move when, having been "granted the freedom to imagine . . .
some motion of the earth," he derives a new ordering or symmetria amongst the
planets.82In fact, Kepler's starting point for his quest to secure a different grounding
for the Copernican ordering is the view that Copernicus's first premise was not self-
evident.83
To add to these logical considerations, the use made of Kepler's elliptical hy-
pothesis shows the same kind of selective appropriationthat can be found already
in the assimilation of Copernicus's planetary models in the sixteenth century. Not
everyone who accepted Keplerian ellipses in the seventeenth century also adopted
the terrestrialmotions, nor was anyone "converted" by the new planetary theory in
81 "Kepler's system of six ellipses," writes Kuhn, "made sun-centered astronomy work, displaying
simultaneously the economy and the fruitfulness implicit in Copernicus' innovation" (CR, pp. 212-
213). Why did this make the reception of Copernicus inevitable?
82 Westman, "Proof, Poetics, and Patronage" (cit. n. 39).
83 "Everything which Copernicus inferred a posteriori and derived from observations, on the basis of
geometrical axioms, could be derived to the satisfaction of Aristotle, if he were alive (which Rheticus
repeatedly wishes for), a priori without any evasions": Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum-
The Secret of the Universe, trans. Alistair Duncan (New York: Abaris, 1981), pp. 77-79 (the volume
shows Latin and English on facing pages).
106 A SECONDLOOKAT KUHN'S THECOPERNICAN
REVOLUTION
the SSR sense of conversion.84 The astrologer and French Royal Professor of Math-
ematics Jean-Baptiste Morin (1583-1653), for example, managed to accommodate
Keplerian ellipses in a Tychonic frame. In this he followed a strategy similar to those
mid-sixteenth-century Wittenberg astronomers who accommodated Copernicus's
equantless devices into a geostatic reference frame.85
Consider also that Kepler's work was difficult to read. Kepler himself acknowl-
edged as much. Probably more twentieth-century historians of science than seven-
teenth-century astronomers have worked through the Astronomia nova.86 Even New-
ton did not read it.87 One of the few cases where there is good evidence that an
astronomer actually changed his beliefs about V2-and did so only after struggling
for several years to make sense of Kepler-is that of the Danzig astronomer Peter
Criuger(1580-1639). In 1620 Cruigerwrote to Philipp Muller in Leipzig that Kepler's
"Work on Mars" required a man to spend not a day but an entire year to understand
it. And further:"I have carefully read through the Kepplerian Harmony of the World.
It appears that this work is as equally obscure as the Martian [book]." To Kepler he
confessed: "I like the diagram of your lunar hypothesis . . . but because I dislike
the ellipses, everything is obscure to me." In 1629, however, Cruger makes an even
more startling revelation to Muller:
For myself, so far as other less liberaloccupationsallow, I am wholly occupied with

trying to understandthe foundationsupon which the Rudolphinerules and tables are
based, and I am using for this purposethe Epitome of Astronomy previouslypublished
by Keppleras an introductionto the tables. This Epitome which previouslyI had read
so manytimes and so little understoodand so manytimes thrownaside, I now take up
again and study with rathermore success seeing that it was intendedfor use with the
tables and is itself clarified by them.... I am no longer repelled by the elliptical form
of the planetary orbits; Keppler's proofs in his Commentaries on Mars have persuaded
me.88
84
In SSR, Ch. 12, Kuhn says that in a scientific revolution "there can be no proof" and that the
issue is one of "persuasion"; further, this persuasion occurs "for all sorts of reasons and usually for
several at once" (pp. 152-153).
85
loannes Baptista Morinus, Coronis astronomiae iam afundamentis integre et exacte restitutae: Qua
respondetur ad introductionem in theatrum astronomicum, clarissimi viri CHRISTIANILONGOMON-
TANI; Hafniae in Dania Regij Mathematum Professoris (Paris: Apud Authorem, tum apud loannem
Libert, 1641), pp. 17-18. In this treatise Morin shows only the example of Mercury. On the Wittenberg
astronomers see Westman, "Melanchthon Circle" (cit. n. 7); and Gingerich and Westman, Wittich Con-
nection (cit. n. 43).
86 Johannes Kepler, Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae, in Gesammelte Werke (cit. n. 68), Vol. 7,
p. 251; for an English version see "Epitome of Copemican Astronomy: IV and V," trans. Charles
Glenn Wallis, in Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 16 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1939),
p. 845. We now have the excellent new translation of the Astronomia nova by William H. Donahue
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).
87 Newton's acquaintance with Kepler and Copernicus came first through Thomas Streete, whose work
he read in 1664: Astronomia Carolina, nova theoria motuum coelestium secundum optimas observationes
& rationi maxime consentanea fundamenta artis . . . & Appendicis loco addidit Tabulas Rudolphinas
a Joh. Baptista Morino . . . in breve & facile compendium redactas (1661; Nuremberg: Andreas Otto,
1705). See Curtis A. Wilson, "The Newtonian Achievement in Astronomy," in Planetary Astronomy
from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, Pt. A: Tycho Brahe to Newton, ed. Rene Taton and
Wilson (General History of Astronomy, 2) (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp.
233-274, on p. 235.
88 Both letters to Muller are quoted and translated in J. L. Russell, "Kepler's Laws of Planetary
Motion, 1609-1666," British Journalfor the History of Science, 1964, 2:1-24, on p. 8; see also Peter
Cruger to Johannes Kepler, 15 July 1624, in Kepler, Gesammelte Werke (cit. n. 68), Vol. 18, no. 990,
p. 191.
This passage lends some support to CR, but it hardly represents an SSR-style con-
version experience. It would seem that Cruger finally learned how to understand
elliptical theory and its relation to the data provided in the Rudolphine Tables from
Kepler's Epitome, although there is no conclusive evidence of how it might have
brought him to adopt V1.89
Constructed in the form of an academic textbook, the Epitome of Copernican As-
tronomy (1618-1621) was the single most important theoretical resource for the Co-
pernicans in the seventeenth-centuryup to the time of Newton.90 This does not mean,
of course, that Kepler's other works, as well as the seminal texts of Galileo and
Descartes, had no influence. But unlike Kepler's earlier works, the Epitome was
lucidly presented in the form of questions and answers and was explicitly aimed at
both court and university audiences. Furthermore, since Kepler was a Protestant and
the Epitome appeared just two years after the church placed De revolutionibus on
the Index ("until it may be corrected"), it immediately marked the Copernican ques-
tion as a matter associated with obedience (or disobedience) to Rome. Meanwhile,
the book clearly and effectively laid down the elements of heliocentric theory as a
"world system" (Kepler's tern was systema mundana)-not merely a group of cal-
culating mechanisms-and in a manner that invited close comparison with Ptolemaic
and Tychonic astronomy. It showed some, like Cruger, how to put elliptical theory
to work as a predictive instrument. Galileo, who probably appropriatedmaterial from
Kepler earlier in his life, may well have converted some of the Epitome's "quaes-
tiones" into the "conversaziones" of the Dialogue.9' Certainly the appearance of the
Epitome must have emboldened him. I would be equally surprised if Descartes had
not read or heard about the Epitome. Although Descartes always used the generic
"les Astronomes" in his published writings, he was in close contact with men who
89 In fact, Criiger, still a geocentrist in 1615, had studied and intensively annotated the third edition
of De revolutionibus (1617). On fol. 4, underneath Osiander's "Letter to the Reader," the Protestant
Cruger transcribed the 1616 censorship instructions of the Holy Index, a text that he took to be evidence
of the backwardness of the church; see T. Przypkowski, "Notatki astronomiczne Piotra Crugera, nauc-
zyciela Jana Heweliusza, na egzemplarzu 'De revolutionibus' MikoIaja Kopernika," Sprawozdan Pols-
kiej Akademii Umiej, 1949, 50:607-609. Cruger admired Kepler and took seriously the Epitome's in-
troduction of new physical causes into astronomy, even if he was reluctant for many years to accept a
Keplerian vision of that discipline: "While Keppler labors to demonstrate Copernicus's hypotheses with
physical reasons, he introduces remarkable speculations pertaining not so much to astronomy as to phys-
ics, such as the magnetic fibers of the planets. . . In order to defend the earth's annual motion, he
reforms almost all of philosophy and introduces a new one of his own; he also invents new astronomical
terms, such as 'focus,' 'sun-seeking and sun-fleeing fibers,' 'diacenters' [etc.] . . . These things are
pleasing, but quite obscure.. . . This being the case, not a few may be enticed by [Kepler's] speculations
to his celestial physics and to Copernican astronomy; but many also will be deterred, especially when
they have seen the publication of that other work [Christian Severin Longomontanus's Astronomia Dan-
ica (1622)] which reforms all of astronomy according to the Tychonic hypotheses [and observations]."
Criiger to Philipp Muller, 1 July 1622, in Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 18, no. 933, p. 92.
9 As Alexandre Koyre rightly observed, in the Epitome Kepler systematically joins the metaphysical
and theological arguments of the Mysterium cosmographicum and the Harmonice mundi with his new
planetary theory: Astronomical Revolution (cit. n. 51), pp. 283-284; see also Russell, "Kepler's Laws"
(cit. n. 88), p. 20.
91 Although this speculation is controversial, I am inclined to believe it. Johannes Remus Quietanus
wrote to Kepler on 23 July 1619 that Galileo wants "your Copernicus book," but it is prohibited in
Florence, and Galileo thinks that Leopold (of Austria) can easily get it for him ("Desiderat Galilaeus
habere librum tuum Copernicanum quia est prohibitus et Florentiae non haberi potest, unde petijt a
Serenissimo nostro eundem librum, se enim facile habiturum licentiam asserit": Kepler, Gesammelte
Werke [cit. n. 68], Vol. 17, no. 845, p. 362; also Galileo, Opere, ed. Favaro [cit. n. 70], Vol. 12, p.
469). Kepler replied on 4 Aug. that "all of my books are Copernican" but that he suspected the book
in question to be the Epitome ("omnes enim mei sunt copernicani . . . Suspicor igitur, de Epitoma
Astronomiae Copernicanae tibi sermonem esse": Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 17, no. 846, p. 364).
were actively engaged with, although not uniformly favorable to, Keplerian planetary
theory: Beeckman, Morin, Boulliau, Hortensius, Roberval, and Mersenne.92 Mer-
senne recommended it widely; Hobbes cites it in his commentary on Thomas White's
De mundo.93Kepler himself maintained warm contacts with the Jesuits. He sent at
least one of his books to ChristopherScheiner, and the Collegio Romano held a copy
of the Epitome in its library.94Giovanni Baptista Riccioli (1598-1671), probably the
church's most influential "astronomical" voice for almost forty years after Galileo's
trial, crafted much of his Almagestum novum as a response to the Epitome.95
It is true that Galileo's choice of the dialogical genre successfully captured the
attention of extra-academic audiences and still possesses a kind of nostalgic appeal
today, when humor and sarcasm have been banished from the scientific article.96But
Kepler's Epitome generally shaped the discursive space-or, to use Fleck's expres-
sion, contributed to a "stylized thought constraint"-within which seventeenth-cen-
tury Copernican discussions took place up to the time of Newton.97 The Epitome
was designed to conform most explicitly to the didactic teaching model of the uni-
versities.
Bruno Latour may be right when he says, "Facts and machines have no inertia of
their own; like kings or armies they cannot travel without their retinues or impedi-
menta."98Different formulations of Copemican theory, one might add, traveled from
one site to another, their credibility assisted by quite different uses of print. In the
sixteenth century groups of university-trained,astrologically motivated, Northern and
Central European annotators moved a common, printed text from university to court
to humanist circle. These hybrid manuscript-books carried in their technical glosses
the traces of early reading and study communities that eventuated in a veritable pro-
92
See, in particular, letters from Descartes to Beeckman, 22 Aug. 1634, no. 57, p. 307, and to Golius,
19 May 1635, no. 60, p. 324, in Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Corre-
spondence, Vol. 1 (Paris: Vrin, 1969). In the latter Descartes refers to Morin's Responsio pro Telluris
quiete ad Jacobi Lansbergii Apologiam pro Telluris motu (Paris, 1634); Lansberg was an ardent follower
of Kepler. The accepted view is that Descartes was simply ignorant of Kepler's planetary theory. See,
e.g., Eric Aiton, The Vortex Theory of Planetary Motion (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1972), p. 30 ff.; Aiton,
"The Cartesian Vortex Theory," in Planetary Astronomy, ed. Taton and Wilson (cit. n. 87), pp. 207-
221, esp. p. 217; William R. Shea, The Magic of Numbers and Motion: The Scientific Career of Rene'
Descartes (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publishers, 1991), p. 285; and Daniel Garber, Descartes's
Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1992), p. 349n.
9 Thomas Hobbes, Thomas White's "De Mundo" Examined, trans. Harold Whitmore Jones (London:
Bradford Univ. Press, 1976), p. 280; and Marin Mersenne, Universae geometriae mixtaeque mathe-
maticae synopsis (Paris, 1644), praefatio in Synopsim mathematicam, 11.
9 Johannes Kepler, Nova stereometria (Linz, 1615), bound with Harmonice mundi (1619) and with
the following provenances: "The author himself presented this gift to Father Scheiner when he was at
Ingolstadt. 1617. 26 October"; "Soc[ietatlis Jesu 1620" (Accademia dei Lincei, shelf no. Col. 141 =
H. 18 [n. 2]). The Epitome contains the provenance: "Ex Bibliotheca majori Coll. Rom. Societ. Jesu"
(Biblioteca Nazionale, Rome, shelf no. 201.37.A.38.39).
9 Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Almagestum novum astronomiam veterem novamque complectens (Bo-
logna, 1651; Frankfurt, 1653). Although Riccioli rejected the elliptical orbit in 1651, he used it for the
tables of his Astronomia reformata in 1665; see Curtis A. Wilson, "Predictive Astronomy in the Century
after Kepler," in Planetary Astronomy, ed. Taton and Wilson (cit. n. 87), pp. 161-206, on p. 185.
Alfredo de Oliveira Dinis has completed the first comprehensive study of Riccioli: "The Cosmology of
Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671)" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge Univ., 1989). It will soon appear in
print.
96 See Gyorgy Markus, "Why Is There No Hermeneutics of Natural Sciences? Some Preliminary
Theses," Sci. Context, 1987, 1:5-51.

97 See Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (cit. n. 9), p. 100 ff.
98 Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), p. 250.
liferation of theoretical worlds on paper.99Another resource was Tycho Brahe's pri-

vate printing press. His Astronomical Letter Book (1596) used the epistle to display
his authority on a variety of questions about the heavens associated with his inven-
tions, including the superiority of his own world system over that of Copernicus and
Ursus, Tycho's living rival.'00 In exactly the same year Kepler, then a young Lu-
theran school teacher at Graz, constructed Copernicus's theory as a revelation of
God's world plan. The university publisher Georg Gruppenbach produced Cosmo-
graphic Mystery with the close involvement of Kepler's teacher, Michael Maestlin,
who also steered it past the theological objections of the Tiubingenacademic senate.
By 1621 Kepler had stabilized the "trails" of these earlier controversies into the
Copernican Epitome.'0' Later in the seventeenth century the great natural philoso-
phies provided Copernicus's theory with diverse philosophical legitimations. By the
mid-eighteenth century it had become part of the (Christian) moral instruction and
rational entertainment of English polite society through different sorts of visualizing
aids (orreries, globes, and telescopes) and through such children's books as Tom
Telescope's The Newtonian System of Philosophy Adapted to the Capacities of Young
Gentlemen and Ladies, and Familiarized and Made Entertaining by Objects with
which They Are Intimately Acquainted (London, 1762). 102
Yet, curiously, the Epitome is missing from Kuhn's account in CR. More telling
still, it does not fit the description of the normal science textbook genre described
so beautifully in Chapter 11 of SSR. For the Epitome did not do what one would
expect of a science textbook: it did not, that is, "cook" the earlier history of as-
tronomy, nor did it repress an "incommensurable" past. Still further, it was not a
guidebook for courtiers. In fact, Kepler situated his book as the culmination of a
long sixteenth-century tradition of astronomical teaching manuals. And he took great
pains to argue that the choice amongst the three major world systems must begin
with the fact of their observational "aequipollences" or "equivalences."l103
With the appearance of its second volume in 1621 (2nd ed., 1635), the Epitome
became an instrument for introducing V1 into a restructuredacademic curriculum or,
as Kepler modestly described it, "a supplement to Aristotle's On the Heavens." Kep-
ler presented Copernicus's theory as one of "so many new and unthought-of things"
that fall within that part of celestial physics known as "speculative astronomy." In
fact, Kepler shared with Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and other seventeenth-century
system builders the ambition to establish a new sort of disciplinary hegemony within
9 See esp. Gingerich and Westman, Wittich Connection (cit. n. 43); Owen Gingerich, "Copernicus'
De revolutionibus: An Example of Renaissance Scientific Printing," in Print and Culture in the Re-
naissance, ed. Gerald Tyson and Sylvia Wagonheim (Newark: Univ. Delaware Press, 1984), pp. 55-
73; and Westman, "Three Responses to the Copernican Theory" (cit. n. 7).
100See esp. Jardine, Birth of History and Philosophy of Science (cit. n. 42). An important group of
letters is between Tycho and Christopher Rothmann, Landgrave Wilhelm IV's astronomer at the court
of Hessen-Kassel: see Tychonis Brahe Dani Opera omnia, ed. J. L. E. Dreyer, 15 vols. (Copenhagen:
Libraria Gyldendaliana, 1913-1929), Vol. 6; and Bruce Moran, "Christoph Rothmann" (cit. n. 49).
101For the notion of "conceptual trails" see Adrian Cussins, Registration Marks: Metaphors for Sub-
objectivity (London: Pomeroy Purdy Gallery, 1992), pp. 9-21. Another important image of stabilization
is Bruno Latour's conception of "black boxing": Science in Action (cit. n. 98), pp. 2, 131.
102 See James Secord, "Newton in the Nursery: Tom Telescope and the Philosophy of Tops and Balls,
1761-1838," Hist. Sci., 1985, 23:127-151; and Alice Nell Walters, "Tools of Enlightenment: The
Material Culture of Science in Eighteenth-Century England" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. California, Berkeley,
1992).
103 Kepler had already claimed to show these equivalences in the Astronomia nova; see Kepler, As-
tronomia nova, trans. Donahue (cit. n. 86), pp. 122-180.
~ ~ ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~
THE.~ GRAND . . d4
ORRERY . _ a
R sntt oftheMotio nW of t H e B s t c ed n. te
of th
T heory lnes(ono:n. 73) h orr -, ecrbd ytis auho as" tu
naturalizationof the Copernicansystem in the eighteenth century. Witnessingthe geared

movements of the gilded ivoryballs on stiff wires in the five-foot-diameter,fine ebony frame,
under a canopy of silvered celestial arcs and circles supportedby brass pillars, was supposed to
convince in a way that tables, calculations,and diagramscould not: "Those Gentlemenand
Ladies who delight in the Study of Astronomy and Geography, will, by seeing this Grand
Machine,comprehendat one View the Reason of the several Phaenomena, or Appearances, in
the Heavens, resultingfromthe various Motionsof the Bodies which compose this SolarSystem;
and willedify more froma few Lectures, than by a Year'sclose Applicationto Study"(pp. 90-
91). This kind of witnessing was also supposed to "explode" competitors, such as the Tychonic
and the semi-Tychonicsystem of Riccioli:"Ifthis System were true, 'tis possible that the Sun and
Mars wouldmeet (like two Coaches in a narrowStreet or Lane where is not room for two to
pass) the Consequence of such a Jostle, I leave to be discus'd by Astronomers"(p. 3). The
orrerywas also supposed to strengthenfaith in a rationalCreator:"Thereis no more certain Way
of comprehendingthe prodigiousBulkof the whole MundaneFabrick,and the infiniteWisdomof
its Divine Contriver,than by this Machine.Fromhence we learn to have a most Noble and
MagnificentNotion of the whole System of Nature.Now we are assured this Earthwe inhabitis
but a small and inconsiderablePart of a glorious Fabrick,since there are almost infiniteWorlds
created by a Supreme and AlmightyBeing, which are prodigiouslylarger than ours" (p. vi).
(Courtesyof Special Collections,ZinnerCollection,San Diego State University.)
the universities. Kepler is explicit in his dedication: at stake, he says, are the "rules
of the Academies" (leges Academiarum), the "honor of Academics" (honor Aca-
demicorum), and the "boundaries of Academic Philosophy" (Academicae Philoso-
phicae limites). His patron is bound to protect these boundaries, Kepler acknowl-
edges, but a wise prince, he declaims, "knows that the boundary posts of true
speculation are the same as those of the fabric of the world" and not those "set up
in the narrow minds of a few men." Kepler understands the resistance that he can
expect from the universities: "They are established in order to regulate the studies
of the pupils and are concerned not to have the rules of teaching change very often:
in such places, because it is a question of the progress of the students, it frequently
happens that the things which have to be chosen are not those which are most true
but those which are most easy."104 Later authors found that they could reconstitute
Kepler's astronomical claims while ignoring his new physics and his Platonic and
Lutheran deity.
Resistance to Kepler's "epitomized" arguments illustrates, in fact, just how elastic
were the functions of theoretical texts in this period. As in the sixteenth century,
one sees neither a pattern of inevitable adoption nor a struggle between incommen-
surable paradigms but, rather, a picture of diverse, selective, local appropriations.
Readers in courts, universities, and private academies took what they wanted and
left what they didn't like: effectively, they reconstituted Kepler's work in their own
terms. Sometimes they acknowledged with praise; sometimes they did not acknowl-
edge at all. No one felt compelled by a structure of interdependent claims to take
on or to reject all at once the entire V2. Galileo and Descartes strategically ignored
mention of the "new astronomy" in the Epitome while taking over some of its ma-
terial. Ismael Boulliau (1605-1694) found alternative, non-Keplerian orbital con-
structions while ignoring Keplerian theology and physics. Jean-Baptiste Morin re-
tained Tychonic geocentrism while incorporating the Keplerian ellipse. Giovanni
Alfonso Borelli (1609-1679) calculated the periods of the Medicean moons using
Kepler-style ellipses but cautiously endorsed a Tychonic world arrangement. English
astronomers and astrologers from Thomas Harriot onward, nearly all of them Prot-
estant, turned out to be Kepler's greatest supporters.105 And Kepler had also a strong
following in France (Pierre Herigone) and the Low Countries (Martinus Hortensius,
Phillip van Lansberge, Abraham de Graaf).
Jesuit astronomers-who play no role in Kuhn's story-would turn out to be Kep-
ler's greatest and most intelligent opponents-at the same time taking on board such
rich elements of his astronomythat they became unwitting advertisersfor his views.106
104
Kepler, Gesammelte Werke (cit. n. 68), Vol. 7, p. 253; trans. by Wallis in Great Books of the
Western World, Vol. 16 (cit. n. 86), pp. 847-848.
105
See Christine Schofield, "The Tychonic and Semi-Tychonic World Systems," in Planetary As-
tronomy, ed. Taton and Wilson (cit. n. 87), pp. 33-44, on p. 42; Russell, "Kepler's Laws" (cit. n.
88), p. 10; Koyre, Astronomical Revolution (cit. n. 51), pp. 467-527; Wilbur Applebaum, "Kepler in
England: The Reception of Keplerian Astronomy in England, 1599-1687" (Ph.D. diss., State Univ.
New York, Buffalo, 1969); and Adam Jared Apt, "The Reception of Kepler's Astronomy in England,
1596-1650" (Ph.D. diss., Oxford Univ., 1982).
106 Besides the works of Dear, Dinis, Giard, and Wallace cited earlier, see Adriano Carugo and Alistair
Crombie, "The Jesuits and Galileo's Idea of Science and Nature," Ann. Ist. Mus. Stor. Sci. Firenze,
1983, 8:1-69; Ugo Baldini, "Christoph Clavius and the Scientific Scene in Rome," in Gregorian Re-
form of the Calendar, ed. G. V. Coyne, S.J., M. A. Hoskin, and 0. Pedersen (Proceedings of the
Vatican Conference to Commemorate the 400th Anniversary, 1582-1982) (Vatican City: Specola Vat-
icana, 1983), pp. 137-169; Baldini, Legem impone subactis: Studi su filosofia e scienza dei Gesuiti in
Italia, 1540-1632 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992); Rivka Feldhay, "Knowledge and Salvation in Jesuit Cul-
By midcentury Riccioli had recoded a century's worth of theoretical discussion into

the massive tome that he called New Almagest (1651 )-a title that might better have
suited Copernicus's reconstitutionof Ptolemy a century earlier. A prolific and learned
astronomer who taught philosophy, mathematics, and theology at the Jesuits' col-
leges at Parma and Bologna, Riccioli took the view that controversies within the
"middle sciences" were "tolerable so long as they do not bring Sacred Scripture into
danger."107 Furthermore, a geocentric world system could be defended either from
above or from below, that is, either from scriptural authority or from natural reason
and physical demonstrations. To this end he produced a mountain of physical and
astronomical syllogisms so comprehensive in scope that book 9 of his tome effec-
tively constituted a Jesuit teaching manual of controversy. Riccioli chose the honored
emblem of the balance to display the "weighing" of traditional and modem cos-
mologies on the title page of his New Almagest.108But he presented no method for
weighing the accumulated cognitive weight of probables apartfrom the critical judg-
ments that he made about individual arguments.
By the time that Kuhn published CR, the pedagogical situation had changed mark-
edly: early modem teaching technologies and philosophical systems had been all but
forgotten; and in science-saturatedpostwar society, students entered classes assuming
that they did or should believe in the Copernican system even though most had no
idea on what authority that belief rested. In that world, CR's conceptualist history
helped to bridge the gap between specialist and layperson, scientist and literary in-
tellectual.
VIII. NEWTON AND THE ETHOS OF SCIENTIFIC AUTONOMY
How did the Copernican Revolution end? Kuhn represents Newton as the Supreme
Problem Solver. He offers "an economical derivation and a plausible explanation of
Kepler's Laws"; he makes VI and V2 "credible" (CR, p. 261). Newton's conceptual
scheme explains all earlier phenomena and adds to the list of what is explicable, but
the explanations themselves are no more permanent than those of Aristotle. Though
ture," Sci. Context, 1987, 1:195-213; and the articles in the special "After Merton" issue of Science
in Context, 1989, 3: Rivka Feldhay and Michael Heyd, "The Discourse of Pious Science," pp. 109-
142; Steven J. Harris, "Transposing the Merton Thesis: Apostolic Spirituality and the Establishment of
the Jesuit Scientific Tradition," pp. 29-66; William B. Ashworth, "Light of Reason, Light of Nature-
Catholic and Protestant Metaphors of Scientific Knowledge," pp. 89-108.
107 Riccioli, Almagestum novum (cit. n. 95), bk. 9, p. 291: "Certainly, if we were to concede to the
Copernicans the freedom to interpret divine letters and to make fun of ecclesiastical decrees, then very
likely this freedom could not be confined within the natural boundaries of Astronomy and Natural Phi-
losophy alone but it would be extended to other sacred teachings."
108 Of course, the "balance" was already a well-known resource of seventeenth-century philosophical
dialectic and rhetoric (think, e.g., of Galileo's Assayer) and religious controversy. After Kepler, how-
ever, the image of weighing and balancing took on a new urgency in the Copernican controversies:
Riccioli's compendium included on one side of the scale twenty arguments for the Earth's diurnal motion
and twenty-nine for the annual. These were "outweighed" by thirty-eight arguments against the daily
and annual motions and thirty-nine arguments against the annual motion alone. See Dinis, "Cosmology
of Riccioli" (cit. n. 95); Edward Grant, In Defense of the Earth's Centrality and Immobility: Scholastic
Reaction to Copernicanism in the Seventeenth Century (Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, 74) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984); and Alexandre Koyr6, A Documen-
tary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton: De motu gravium naturaliter cadentium in
hypothesi terrae motae (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45) (Philadelphia: Amer-
ican Philosophical Society, 1955).
told in conventionalist terms, Kuhn's narrative is not unlike the providential, "in-
visible hand" story canonized virtually from the time of Newton's eighteenth-century
disciples Henry Pemberton and Colin Maclaurin and continued with modifications
by physicists and philosophers of science as recently as Norwood Russell Hanson. 109
At the same time, the prominent heuristic function served by the External/Non-
scientific earlier in CR simply vanishes. Instead, Kuhn reverses the arrows of influ-
ence: Science causes changes in Society. For example, Kuhn gestures at the effect
of Newton's conceptual scheme on the U.S. Constitution (pointing to the balance of
powers), but his Sputnik-era notion of disciplinarity and achievement unwittingly
reproduces the split between the two cultures. None of Newton's complex herme-
neutical work finds a place in the closing sections of the narrative: his lengthy ex-
egeses of the Book of Daniel, prophecy, and alchemical texts, his efforts to combat
the idolatry of a three-in-one divinity.
Of course, the secondary literaturethat Kuhn had available to him hardly permitted
such a unity of diverse elements. It is an understatement to say that Newton has
become a much more complex figure over the past thirty-five years. Newton is now
seen by many historians as a Christian apologist, a natural theologian engaged in a
vast, multifaceted, but unified series of investigations seeking to restore a true re-
ligion of nature."0 According to this view, Newton's much-heralded mathematical
and physical investigations do not stand alone, nor does their importance derive sim-
ply from their later consequences for a modern scientific world view. They provided
instead a new sort of hermeneutics for understandingboth the structureand the unity
of the divine plan and the deity's active presence in his creation.
Ironically, the newly emergent, historicized image of Newton echoes the early
nineteenth-centuryVictorian moment when naturaltheology was, as John Gascoigne
writes, "one of the major forms of intellectual discourse and Newton's Natural The-
ology was one of its most venerable parts." Recent work by Simon Schaffer and
Sara Schechner Genuth, for example, understands Newton's comets as divine in-
struments, "prime transmitters of activity in the cosmos" intended to restore vege-
tative life to the stars; the proper forms of their real orbits permitted this function to
be achieved. And the important 1966 paper by J. E. McGuire and Piyo Rattansi
helped to recover the quite sectarian terms in which Newton represented his own
work: a contest between a corrupt, idolatrous religion of polytheism and astral trans-
migration and his own sacral natural philosophy, the Chaldean-Pythagorean system
of the world."'
109 "Conceptually the route from Kepler to Newton is relatively simple. A few significant emendations
will convert Kepler's system to one that is qualitatively very like Newton's, and these emendations are
direct consequences of recognizing the role in celestial physics of Descartes's conception of inertial
motion" (CR, p. 247). Cf. Curtis A. Wilson, "Newton and Some Philosophers on Kepler's 'Laws,' "
J. Hist. Ideas, 1974, 35:231-258; rpt. in Wilson, Astronomy from Kepler to Newton (cit. n. 52), no.
5.
110 J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, "Newton and the 'Pipes of Pan,' " Notes and Records of the
Royal Society of London, 1966, 21:108-143; Margaret Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revo-
lution, 1689-1720 (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1976); Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biog-
raphy of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 310-328, 344-356 (on theol-
ogy); B. J. T. Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); and James Force and Richard H. Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature,
and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology (International Archives of the History of Ideas, 129) (Dor-
drecht: Kluwer, 1990).
'11John Gascoigne, "From Bentley to the Victorians: The Rise and Fall of British Newtonian Natural
Theology," Sci. Context, 1988, 2:219-256, on p. 244; Simon Schaffer, "Newton's Comets and the
By the mid-nineteenth century, the impetus to harmonize sacred and secular learn-
ing was no longer what it had been at Restoration or even early Victorian Oxbridge.
Oxbridge underwent a gradual "declericalization"; scientific specialties and secular-
izing disciplinary societies emerged as primary units of loyalty. Disciplinary histo-
ries, written largely by practicing scientists, became important resources for legiti-
mating the autonomy of science. The image of Newton as a scientific genius who
also embodied the highest moral virtue in his life served the needs of this autonomist
ethos. At the same time, nineteenth-centuryhistorians struggled to contain the "rag-
ged edges" that did not fit this increasingly secularized Newton.112
The Newton who brought Kuhn's CR to a close communicated to the General
Studies undergraduatea nonelitest, Enlightenment sensibility. Yet CR did not go so
far as to level genius into mere "common sense intensified."1'3 For, as we have seen,
CR's Duhemian-tinged, conventionalist skepticism and pragmatism sustained the
dominant authority of science by providing an auxiliary, supporting role for other
forms of knowledge. The objective was to teach students that theirs was a funda-
mentally scientific world view that had been formed over several hundred years in
necessary concert with other areas of knowledge. And, because CR articulates a
viewpoint about science that still challenges the beliefs that beginning students bring
with them into the classroom, it continues to be a remarkablyviable and sturdy text.
For this reason I expect to assign it to my introductory class on "The Scientific
Revolution" next year-just as I have every year since 1969.
What Kuhn neglected to say in CR, however, was that postwar science no longer
gained its legitimacy in a sociopolitical order dominated by ecclesiastical universities
but from an alliance amongst secular disciplines and secret agreements between the
military, science, and bureaucratizeduniversities. Science no longer earned its au-
thority by showing its harmony with the Book of Genesis but by using radar tech-
nology to control the invisible realm across which airplanes were guided to their
targets.
Yet Kuhn's CR shaped postwar American historiography of science in a way that
Henry Guerlac's posthumously published Radar in World War II could not. As Mi-
chael Aaron Dennis has shown, Guerlac was ambivalent about whether his work
counted as genuine history of science and technology.'14 Rather than offering an
anthropology of a particularlaboratory, Kuhn theorized that science's authority arose
from its constitution as a special sort of community engaged in tacit practices, social
Transformation of Astrology," in Astrology, Science, and Society: Historical Essays, ed. Patrick Curry
(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1987), pp. 219-243, esp. pp. 239-240; Sara Schechner Genuth, "Com-
ets, Teleology, and the Relationship of Chemistry to Cosmology in Newton's Thought," Ann. Ist. Mus.
Stor. Sci. Firenze, 1985, 10:31-65; and McGuire and Rattansi, "Newton and the 'Pipes of Pan.'"
112 See Richard Yeo, "Genius, Method, and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760-1860,"
Sci. Context, 1988, 2:257-284. Cf. the recent treatment of Newton in John Hedley Brooke, Science
and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). On disciplinary
histories see Rachel Laudan, "Histories of the Sciences and Their Uses: A Review to 1913," Hist. Sci.,
1993, 31:1-34.
113 Samuel Smiles, Self Help (London, 1894); quoted in Yeo, "Genius, Method, Morality," p. 267.
114 Henry Guerlac, Radar in World War II (Los Angeles: Tomash, 1987); see Michael Aaron Dennis's
excellent "Echoes of the Past: Henry Guerlac and Radar's Historiographic Problem," paper delivered
to the Radar History Workshop, Deutsches Museum, Munich, Dec. 1992.
contracts, and agreed-upon meanings. SSR opened the way to an enormous realm of
new possibilities for writing the history of science. These histories would not be
written so much by Kuhn himself, nor always as he would have liked,"15 but by
succeeding generations of younger scholars whose immense debts to Kuhn's pro-
vocative and fruitful books are a lasting tribute to their author.
115
See Kuhn's recent lecture in which he attacks the Edinburgh Strong Program: "The Trouble with
the Historical Philosophy of Science," Robert and Maurine Rothschild Distinguished Lectures (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Department of the History of Science, Harvard Univ., 1992).

Westman On Kuhn's Copernican Revolution 1994

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Two Cultures or One?

: A Second Look at Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution

Two Cultures or One?

A Second Look at Kuhn's The Copernican

T HOMAS KUHN'S The Copernican Revolution deserves to be regarded as one of

Isis, 1994, 85: 79-115

Ne extra hanic B3iSiothe am effrtur. Ex obedicntia.

Frontispieceto GiovanniBattistaRiccioli(1598-1671), Almagestumnovum (Bologna:Ex

I shall begin by examining the overall characterof Kuhn's Copernican Revolution,

I. WHAT KIND OF REVOLUTION WAS IT?

shield whilefirmlygrasping the heraldicshield of Riccioli'spatron,the House of Grimaldi.Erigordum

When philosophers challenged Kuhn's famous notion of incommensurability in the

Similarly, when Kuhn again used a temporally nonspecific language of generality to

thoughthe achievementsof Copernicusand Newton are permanent,the concepts that

Kuhn's Copernican Revolution, then, is mostly about what he regards as changes

In CR there is an important place for tradition: concepts, laws, and observations

and church authority.'5 Furthermore,if Duhem championed medieval Paris, he wrote

'5 R. N. D. Martin reads Duhem as an antiauthoritarian"negative apologeticist" who denied to sci-

played a role in the evolution of Newtonian dynamics. In the seventeenth century,

III. THE CONCEPTUAL SCHEME OF ASTRONOMY: INSIDE/OUTSIDE

book in Science, 1980, 207:1065-1066.

as a nonscientific "craft."28Nonscientific, perhaps; but why not fruitful, like Neo-

IV. CRISIS, AESTHETICS, AND THE BREAK WITH TRADITION

find alternative mechanisms to accommodate this physical principle. Already

etration of the "irrational"in a philosophical community where "hard facts," "crit-

V. RECEPTION AND THE DEMARCATION PROBLEM

In Kuhn's account, however, the dominant imagery of reception is warfare: De re-

itan prognosticator Thomas Digges (ca. 1546-1595), whose cosmological woodcut

VI. THE "TWO CULTURES" IN THE RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE

tities of their practitioners. Culturalincommensurabilities replace linguistic ones. The

cians who held simultaneous positions at the patron's university. Courtly/pro-

Gli astrologi e la guida della vita quotidiana," Schifanoia, 1986, 2:41-48.

Whatever their social positions, therefore, "scientific intellectuals" of this period

VII. THE ASCENDANCY OF KEPLER: INEVITABILITY? INCOMMENSURABILITY?

For myself, so far as other less liberaloccupationsallow, I am wholly occupied with

Theses," Sci. Context, 1987, 1:5-51.

liferation of theoretical worlds on paper.99Another resource was Tycho Brahe's pri-

naturalizationof the Copernicansystem in the eighteenth century. Witnessingthe geared

By midcentury Riccioli had recoded a century's worth of theoretical discussion into

VIII. NEWTON AND THE ETHOS OF SCIENTIFIC AUTONOMY

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