Realism and Instrumentalism in Sixteenth Century Astronomy: A Reappraisal

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"Early Modern Thought Online" (EMTO) is a database offering access to about 13.500 digitized source texts from early modern philosophy and related disciplines like history of science and history of theology provided by libraries in Europe and overseas. In the present stage of its development, EMTO presents mainly links to external resources. This blog intends to show how to profit from concepts and methods of the digital humanities. It will give practical advice on how to use digitised sources. We will present digital collections relevant to our field, and discuss their relevance for early modern philosophy and history of ideas. But we want to do philosophy as well: present ongoing research related to sources present in EMTO. We hope that this blog, as well as EMTO as a whole, will be a helpful tool and provide a lively forum for discussion. EMTO is on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

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February 1, 2012

From the abstract:

We question the claim, common since Duhem, that sixteenth century astronomy, and especially the Wittenberg interpretation of Copernicus, was instrumentalistic rather than realistic. We identify a previously unrecognized Wittenberg astronomer, Edo Hildericus (Hilderich von Varel), who presents a detailed exposition of Copernicus’s cosmology that is incompatible with instrumentalism. Quotations from other sixteenth century astronomers show that
knowledge of the real conaguration of the heavens was unattainable practically, rather than in principle.

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(Notes: 6)