Philosophy

Featured exhibit items for philosophy.

Exhibit Items

1	The Divine Plato Plato, (1491) In his dialog entitled The Timaeus, Plato taught that the cosmos is constructed from regular geometrical figures known as the Pythagorean solids. Wherever one finds an emphasis upon mathematical demonstrations in science, one may credit Plato and the Pythagoreans.
1	Ecstatic Journey through the Heavens Kircher, Athanasius (1660) Six chief world systems were debated in Galileo’s world: • Ptolemaic: All planets revolve around the central Earth. Geocentric. • Platonic: Like the Ptolemaic, except switches the positions of Venus and Mercury. Geocentric. • Cappellan or Egyptian: Venus and Mercury revolve around the Sun.
2	Works in Greek, vol. 1 Aristotle, (1495-1498) In a work entitled “On the Universe,” Aristotle argued that a 5th element, called ether or the quintessence, composes the celestial spheres that naturally rotate in place above the region where the four lower elements mix together beneath the Moon.
2	The Philosopher of China Confucius, (1687) Confucius lived in the early 5th century BCE, roughly contemporary with the Pythagoreans and Presocratic natural philosophers. Confucius taught: “Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself,” an early version of the Golden Rule.
2	On Animals Aristotle, (1476) This is the first publication of Aristotle’s biological works. While Plato emphasized astronomy as the ennobling science, Aristotle insisted that biology, including the study of even the lowliest organisms, is beautiful to one who understands natural causes.
8	On Meteorology Descartes, René (1637) This essay on meteorology contains Descartes’ explanation of the optics of the rainbow and his law of refraction. Descartes’ ambitious aim was to produce a new body of writings that would completely displace the Aristotelian corpus.
13	On the Body, 1662 Descartes, René (1662) The body in mechanical philosophy: Descartes applied the mechanical philosophy to every field of natural knowledge, including cosmology, meteorology, the Earth, astronomy and, in this book, the human body.
13	The New Almagest, part 2 Riccioli, Giambattista (1651) The frontispiece of Riccioli’s treatise depicts not two, but three major systems of the world. The Ptolemaic system rests discarded (lower right corner) because of the phases of Venus and Mercury (upper left corner). All-seeing Argus looks on, holding a telescope.
14	Principles of Philosophy Déscartes, René (1644) In Descartes’ cosmology, each star lies at the center of a “vortex,” or gigantic pool of circulating fluid. Stars and vortices are mortal, passing into and out of existence.
19	On the Proper Motion of Fixed Stars Bessel, Wilhelm Scientific theories may be accepted on the basis of a weighing of many complex factors rather than a single determinative observation or crucial experiment. From antiquity, Copernicanism had been rejected due to a failure to observe stellar parallax.