André Goddu.

Copernicus and the Aristotelian Tradition: Education, Reading, and Philosophy in

Copernicus's Path to Heliocentrism.
Copernicus and the Aristotelian Tradition: Education, Reading, and Philosophy in Copernicus's
Path to Heliocentrism by André Goddu
Review by: Patrick J. Boner
Isis, Vol. 103, No. 3 (September 2012), pp. 574-575
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668975 .
Accessed: 24/01/2013 05:33

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Isis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 05:33:42 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
574 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 103 : 3 (2012)
important early modern natural history treatise,
in this case Pierre Belon’s La nature et diversité
des poissons. Glardon’s scientific edition is sig-
nificant thanks to its comparative and systematic
study of this, the first version of Belon’s treatise
on fishes, initially written in Latin (De aquatili-
bus Libri duo [1553]) and then published in the
vernacular two years later. Readers of this crit-
ical edition are now able to understand the
choices Belon made when composing his work,
thanks to Glardon’s comparison with the ichthy-
ological treatise written by his former master,
then rival, Guillaume Rondelet, whose Libri de
piscibus marinis (1554 –1555) was also trans-
lated into French (1558). Glardon’s meticulous
study provides the reader with a more precise
understanding of the use of the vernacular in the
writings of naturalists during the first half of the
sixteenth century. In Belon’s case, it appears
that he produced neither an exact copy nor a
translation of his treatise but, more precisely, an
adaptation. The reduction in erudite citations
and references to the classical canon indicate
that his Nature et diversité des poissons was
aimed at a less learned public composed of “cu-
rious” readers who belonged to the middle ranks
of the court and to the cultivated bourgeois
class.
As well as making this ichthyological treatise
newly accessible, Glardon provides in his intro-
duction to Belon’s study an invaluable synthesis
of the scientific, philosophical, and linguistic
issues in natural history. Glardon’s lengthy in-
troduction (383 pages!) allows for the recon-
struction of Belon’s choices in regard to those of
his contemporaries: Conrad Gesner, Rondelet,
and Edward Wotton for the description of ani-
mals, but also Leonhart Fuchs and Pietro An-
drea Mattioli for the botanical corpus. Though
the approach here is not exhaustive (certain natu-
ralists, such as Amato Lusitano and S. Champier,
are rarely mentioned), it has the merit of making
evident the richness of natural history in the six-
teenth century, as shown by its own logic, the
intensity of its reflections, and its sometimes con-
tradictory choices, which Glardon takes care to
analyze in a synchronic manner. This path leads
the author to avoid the erroneous positivist re-
ductionism that would see the natural history of
the sixteenth century as but a step— or, worse, a
delay—leading up to the methodology of Lin-
naeus (something of which Glardon reminds the
reader perhaps too often). Following in the foot-
steps of Nancy Siraisi, J. Céard, Andrea Carlino,
and Brian Oglivie, Glardon evokes the challeng-
ing legacy of Aristotelian nomenclature and of
Dioscorides’ thesaurus. Glardon’s mastery of
this corpus leads him to provide fruitful analyses
This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 05:33:42 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
of the issue of language (the competition and
complementariness of classic and vernacular
names and labels) but also, in a more original
way, of the style chosen in these treatises, which
often make use of poetic procedures and refer-
ences. Far from reducing itself to a linguistic
reflection on the science of animals, Glardon’s
synthesis allows us a better understanding of the
role of naturalists as the interpreters of Nature.
In effect, the complexity of their hermeneutical
ambition is made evident in the unstable com-
promise they establish between Aristotelian tax-
onomy and language, on the one hand, and the
empirical description of unknown or difficultly
concordant species, on the other (see Glardon’s
very convincing pages on the observation and
criteria of “notae”). But, more profoundly, the
rationality and the unity of their system of
thought are well explained by Glardon: as he
shows, the scientific project of sixteenth-century
naturalists becomes coherent through their will
to inscribe their cartography of species in the
larger plan of a Nature commanded by divine
law. The extensiveness of these analyses, cou-
pled with a valuable bibliography, make Glar-
don’s study a very important and useful resource
for historians of science. We can only hope that
this work will soon be translated into English so
that it might reach the wider audience it so
richly deserves.
GRÉGOIRE HOLTZ
André Goddu. Copernicus and the Aristotelian
Tradition: Education, Reading, and Philosophy
in Copernicus’s Path to Heliocentrism. (His-
tory of Science and Medicine Library, 15; Me-
dieval and Early Modern Science, 12.) xxvii ⫹
545 pp., illus., bibl., index. Leiden/Boston: Brill,
2010. $191 (cloth).
Copernicus could never prove his hypothesis.
While genuine demonstration demanded a fully
certain premise, Copernicus began by assuming
the motion of the earth. Reversing the relation
between mathematics and natural philosophy,
he gave priority to archetypal principles that
subordinated “natural-philosophical hypotheses
to astronomical considerations” (p. 317). Thus,
his argument for the harmony of the heliocentric
hypothesis, described as his “most important
logical move” (p. 427), was dialectical in nature
and depended on the greater probability of ar-
chitectonic principles. According to this pre-
ferred pattern of reasoning, Copernicus would
never satisfy Aristotle’s standard of scientific
demonstration. Yet despite his clash with scho-
lastic authority, Copernicus did not claim any
 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 103 : 3 (2012)
further removal from the Aristotelian tradition
than his critical contemporaries. This book gives
witness to a wide range of authors who reinter-
preted Aristotle according to their own princi-
ples. These were scholars who sought “to adopt
Aristotelian views where they agreed and adapt
his views when they did not” (p. 326). Their
practice of appropriation is shown to reflect a
form of philosophy that fell squarely within the
context of critical revision that characterizes the
period. André Goddu gives us good reason to
reevaluate Copernicus’s philosophical forma-
tion and how he deployed Aristotelian doctrine
in favor of his dramatic theory.
While mathematics first led Copernicus to
propose his hypothesis, it is philosophy that
takes center stage in this important study.
Backed by a wealth of new material culled from
primary sources as well as Polish scholarship,
the author begins with a broad survey of the
education Copernicus received at the University
of Cracow (1491–1495). Goddu inquires after
the “intellectual habits” the young Copernicus
cultivated as he crafted his own “tools of think-
ing and writing and techniques of expression
and argumentation” (p. 24). Early in his path to
discovery, Copernicus drew on the logical foun-
dations of this learning to read astronomical
authors critically. Later, these skills would serve
him as he prepared to present a theory that ran
counter to common sense as well as philosoph-
ical and theological authority. We are told that
while Copernicus may have been stimulated to
stray from Ptolemy at Cracow, he sensed “that
the questions provoked by his teachers would
not be answered there” (p. 166). And so he set
out for Bologna in 1496 to explore them further
while strengthening his command of scholastic
argumentation through the study of law. The
result was a philosophical vision that embraced a
variety of influences. When he finally arrived at
the heliocentric hypothesis, Copernicus achieved
“a drastic adaptation of Aristotelianism” (p. 403)
that relied on a number of rival sources that had
only recently become available. Goddu guides us
through these authors and the opinions that may
have factored in the philosophical formulation of
the famous theory. At the heart of the hypothesis,
however, Copernicus is said to have “revealed
his Aristotelianism most conspicuously” by ac-
cepting the axiom of uniform circular motion
and focusing on the order of the celestial spheres
as the central task of astronomy (p. 401). His
conclusion that only the heliocentric hypothesis
could elicit the structure and commensurability of
the cosmos was also a dialectical argument whose
“rhetorically persuasive humanistic style” still
bore the stamp of scholastic training (p. 299). Co-
This content downloaded on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 05:33:42 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
575
pernicus, at every step of the way, made sense of
Aristotle in the same eclectic spirit that held sway
among other scholars.
Did Copernicus borrow from Arabic authors,
adopting their mathematical models and further-
ing their physical conception of astronomy?
Goddu claims that Copernicus could have relied
entirely on sources he encountered in his home
country. He is equally skeptical about the claim
that Copernicus actively opposed Alessandro
Achillini (1463–1512), “the second Aristotle,”
who taught anatomy and philosophy at the Uni-
versity of Bologna and published a scathing
attack on Ptolemaic astronomy in 1498. Accord-
ing to Goddu, “there is no indication” that Co-
pernicus ever took the concentric models of
Achillini seriously (p. 240). Goddu goes on to
suggest that Copernicus never actually accepted
the reality of his own models. Were they math-
ematical solutions that he simply saw as more
probable than those of his predecessors? Cer-
tainly no one was more aware of his own failure
to satisfy the standard of scientific demonstra-
tion, and Copernicus could not decide on every
solution. When it came to the apparent motion
of the sun, for example, Copernicus accepted the
equivalence of an eccentric and an epicycle,
admitting that “it is not easy to decide which
[one] exists in the heavens” (p. 364). In the end,
Goddu claims that Copernicus was neither a
realist nor an instrumentalist, but a critically
minded scholar “who adopted a principle of
priority that ordered and distinguished several
types and levels of hypotheses” (p. xxv). While
he accepted uniform circular motion as a funda-
mental cosmological axiom, geometrical hy-
potheses such as an eccentric or an epicycle
possessed “a more provisional character” (p.
369).
In an epilogue on the reception of the Coper-
nican theory, Goddu shows that at least one
early reader, Michael Mästlin (1550 –1631), ex-
plicitly noted the dialectical nature of the theory
as it was presented “from whole to part” (p.
426). We can safely agree on the basis of Co-
pernicus and the Aristotelian Tradition that vir-
tually every early modern scholar was equally
familiar with this principle. It is a testament to
the author’s analysis that the presentation of the
theory—as well as the path to it—reflects a
particular pattern of logic and reason that was
prevalent during the period. Historians of phi-
losophy and science now have a fascinating
window onto the eclectic world of learning that
witnessed a carefully reasoned revolution.
PATRICK J. BONER