Speaker
André Goddu
(Stonehill College, Easton MA)
Description
Most of the research on the education of Nicolaus Copernicus has been focused understandably on his astronomy and natural philosophy. Burning questions about his own statements and arguments in support of heliocentrism, however, led me to focus more on his education in logic. This paper does discuss Copernicus’s natural philosophy, trigonometry, and astronomy, but its most substantive and original part looks closely at the logic of his arguments, the sources for his views on the relation between hypotheses and consequences, and their wider philosophical implications for reasoning in natural philosophy.
