By Steven J. Dick
It is a attention-grabbing background of the controversy over the query of extraterrestrial lifestyles from Classical Greece to the mid-eighteenth century. utilizing many basic and secondary assets, this booklet analyses why such nice thinkers as Aristotle, Aquinas, Ockham, Galileo, Kepler, Huygens, and Kant notion the talk over the plurality of worlds a topic for critical dialogue. the writer exhibits how conflicting arguments from technological know-how, philosophy, and theology steadily converged to an analogous opinion - that clever lifestyles needs to fill the universe.
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29 Plutarch had refuted "by weighty arguments" the contention that the spots on the moon were not real, but an illusion caused by human eyesight. Kepler confirmed Plutarch's view by an experiment in which he used the camera obscura to form an image of the moon on paper; the image contained dark spots no matter how he moved the paper. This proved to Kepler's satisfaction that the spots were real and not a product of eyesight. Moreover, other observations of the moon and its eclipses, together with a series of simple calculations, proved to Kepler that the apparent mountains seen on the moon during a partial lunar eclipse were not shadows projected from the Earth's mountains, but uneven and "tortuous" surface features of the moon itself.
20 The source of Gassendi's concern developed directly out of specific passages in Diogenes Laertius's account of Epicurus, which had first been printed in r 53 3. The first extensive work that Gassendi published on atomism, the Animadversions in decimum librum Diogenes Lacrtius [Observations on the Tenth Book of Diogenes Laertius), r 649, was an extended philological and philosophical commentary on this account of Diogenes, with its translation from the Greek to Latin. Gassendi's commentary on the Epicurean doctrine of infinite worlds reflected a clear decision at this stage: it was one of the atomist principles that would have to be sacrificed t9 the demands of theology.
Not only had the pros and cons of the Aristotelian arguments been repeatedly and fully exploited but also the Aristotelian cosmos itself- the very object of the classical debate - was at this time crumbling under the assault on Aristotelian principles. 3 In the wake of the scientific revolution, the discussion of a plurality of kosmoi was a relic of an abandoned system. Even before Gassendi had begun the revival of atomism with its concept of infinite kosmoi, however, others had dissociated the concept of other worlds from the fate of the cosmos.