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Sublunary Sphere
In Aristotelian physics and Greek astronomy, the sublunary sphere is the region of the geocentric cosmos The cosmos (, ) is another name for the Universe. Using the word ''cosmos'' implies viewing the universe as a complex and orderly system or entity. The cosmos, and understandings of the reasons for its existence and significance, are studied in ... below the Moon, consisting of the four classical elements: Earth (classical element), earth, Water (classical element), water, Air (classical element), air, and Fire (classical element), fire. The sublunary sphere was the realm of changing nature. Beginning with the Moon, up to the limits of the universe, everything (to classical astronomy) was permanent, regular and unchanging—the region of Aether (classical element), aether where the Naked eye planets, planets and stars are located. Only in the sublunary sphere did the powers of physics hold sway. Evolution of concept Plato and Aristotle helped to formulate the original theory ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aristotelian Physics
Aristotelian physics is the form of natural science described in the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC). In his work ''Physics'', Aristotle intended to establish general principles of change that govern all natural bodies, both living and inanimate, celestial and terrestrialincluding all motion (change with respect to place), quantitative change (change with respect to size or number), qualitative change, and substantial change (" coming to be" oming into existence, 'generation'">existence.html" ;"title="oming into existence">oming into existence, 'generation'or "passing away" [no longer existing, 'corruption']). To Aristotle, 'physics' was a broad field that included subjects that would now be called the philosophy of mind, sensory experience, memory, anatomy and biology. It constitutes the foundation of the thought underlying many of his works. Key concepts of Aristotelian physics include the structuring of the cosmos into concentric spheres, with the Ear ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Avicenna
Ibn Sina ( fa, ابن سینا; 980 – June 1037 CE), commonly known in the West as Avicenna (), was a Persian polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, philosophers, and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, and the father of early modern medicine. Sajjad H. Rizvi has called Avicenna "arguably the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era". He was a Muslim Peripatetic philosopher influenced by Greek Aristotelian philosophy. Of the 450 works he is believed to have written, around 240 have survived, including 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine. His most famous works are ''The Book of Healing'', a philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and ''The Canon of Medicine'', a medical encyclopedia which became a standard medical text at many medieval universities and remained in use as late as 1650. Besides philosophy and medicine, Avicenna's corpus includes writings on astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, psychology, I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unmoved Mover
The unmoved mover ( grc, ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, ho ou kinoúmenon kineî, that which moves without being moved) or prime mover ( la, primum movens) is a concept advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause (or first uncaused cause) or " mover" of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. In Book 12 ( grc-gre, Λ) of his ''Metaphysics'', Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: self-contemplation. He equates this concept also with the active intellect. This Aristotelian concept had its roots in cosmological speculations of the earliest Greek pre-Socratic philosophers and became highly influential and widely drawn upon in medieval philosophy and theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, elaborated on the unmoved mover in the . First philosophy Aristotle argues, in Book 8 of the ''Physics ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sphere Of Fire
Sphere of fire is the name given in Ptolemaic astronomy to the sphere intervening between, and separating, the Earth and the Moon. Traditional concept Building on Empedocles's vision of the world as a four-level cake of stacked fundamental elements - earth, water, air and fire - with fire at the top, Aristotle saw the sublunary world as surmounted by the sphere of fire. Aristotle's conception became prevalent in the Hellenic world, and was given a distance scale by Ptolemy: “taking the radius of the spherical surface of the Earth and the water as the unit, the radius of the spherical sphere which surrounds the air and fire is 33, the radius of the lunar sphere is 64....”. The Middle Ages broadly inherited the concept of the four elements of earth, water, air and fire arranged in concentric spheres about the earth as centre: as the purest of the four elements, fire - and the sphere of fire - stood highest in the ascending sequence of the ''scala naturae'', and closest to the s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Firmament
In biblical cosmology, the firmament is the vast solid dome created by God during his creation of the world to divide the primal sea into upper and lower portions so that the dry land could appear. The concept was adopted into the subsequent Classical/Medieval model of heavenly spheres, but was dropped with advances in astronomy in the 16th and 17th centuries. Today it survives as a synonym for "sky" or "heaven". Etymology In English, the word "firmament" is recorded as early as 1250, in the ''Middle English Story of Genesis and Exodus''. It later appeared in the King James Bible. The same word is found in French and German Bible translations, all from Latin '' firmamentum'' (a firm object), used in the Vulgate (4th century). This in turn is a calque of the Greek (), also meaning a solid or firm structure (Greek = rigid), which appears in the Septuagint, the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars around 200 BCE. These words all translate the Biblical Hebrew word ''rā ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Celestial Spheres
The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmology, cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus of Cnidus, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and others. In these celestial models, the diurnal motion, apparent motions of the fixed stars and classical planet, planets are accounted for by treating them as embedded in rotating spheres made of an aetherial, transparent fifth element (aether (classical element), quintessence), like jewels set in orbs. Since it was believed that the fixed stars did not change their positions relative to one another, it was argued that they must be on the surface of a single starry sphere. In modern thought, the Orbit#Planetary orbits, orbits of the planets are viewed as the paths of those planets through mostly empty space. Ancient and medieval thinkers, however, considered the celestial orbs to be thick spheres of rarefied matter nested one within the other, each one in complete contact with the spher ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. The ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' calls him "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". Born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, he attended Pembroke College, Oxford until lack of funds forced him to leave. After working as a teacher, he moved to London and began writing for ''The Gentleman's Magazine''. Early works include ''Life of Mr Richard Savage'', the poems ''London'' and ''The Vanity of Human Wishes'' and the play ''Irene''. After nine years' effort, Johnson's '' A Dictionary of the English Language'' appeared in 1755, and was acclaimed as "one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship". Later work included essays, an annotated ''The Plays of William Shakespeare'', and the apologue ''The History of R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dante
Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: ''Commedia'') and later christened by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Dante is known for establishing the use of the vernacular in literature at a time when most poetry was written in Latin, which was accessible only to the most educated readers. His ''De vulgari eloquentia'' (''On Eloquence in the Vernacular'') was one of the first scholarly defenses of the vernacular. His use of the Florentine dialect for works such as '' The New Life'' (1295) and ''Divine Comedy'' helped establish the modern-day standardized Italian language. His work set a precedent that important Italian writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio would later ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American philosopher of science whose 1962 book ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term '' paradigm shift'', which has since become an English-language idiom. Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe ( ; born Tyge Ottesen Brahe; generally called Tycho (14 December 154624 October 1601) was a Danish astronomer, known for his comprehensive astronomical observations, generally considered to be the most accurate of his time. He was known during his lifetime as an astronomer, astrologer, and alchemist. He was the last major astronomer before the invention of the telescope. An heir to several noble families, Tycho was well-educated. He took an interest in astronomy and in the creation of more accurate instruments of measurement. He worked to combine what he saw as the geometrical benefits of Copernican heliocentrism with the philosophical benefits of the Ptolemaic system, and devised the Tychonic system, his own version of a model of the universe, with the Sun orbiting the Earth, and the planets as orbiting the Sun. In ''De nova stella'' (1573), he refuted the Aristotelian belief in an unchanging celestial realm. His measurements indicated that "new stars" (''stellae ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus (; pl, Mikołaj Kopernik; gml, Niklas Koppernigk, german: Nikolaus Kopernikus; 19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier. The publication of Copernicus's model in his book ' (''On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres''), just before his death in 1543, was a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution and making a pioneering contribution to the Scientific Revolution. Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. A polyglot and polymath, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was a mathematician, astro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lucan
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (3 November 39 AD – 30 April 65 AD), better known in English as Lucan (), was a Roman poet, born in Corduba (modern-day Córdoba), in Hispania Baetica. He is regarded as one of the outstanding figures of the Imperial Latin period, known in particular for his epic ''Pharsalia''. His youth and speed of composition set him apart from other poets. Life Three brief ancient accounts allow for the reconstruction of a modest biography – the earliest attributed to Suetonius, another to an otherwise unknown Vacca, and the third anonymous and undated – along with references in Martial, Cassius Dio, Tacitus's ''Annals'', and one of Statius's ''Silvae''. Lucan was the son of Marcus Annaeus Mela and grandson of Seneca the Elder; he grew up under the tutelage of his uncle Seneca the Younger. Born into a wealthy family, he studied rhetoric at Athens and was probably provided with a philosophical and Stoic education by his uncle. His wife was Polla Argentaria, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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