Bede

It is alleged by the mythologists that Vesalius was sent on the pilgrimage as a penance imposed by the inquisition. That article says this is not so and hence directly contradicts the myth. You will have to learn some honesty if you want to make it as a classicist as well as professional curtesy.

Best wishes

Bede

Chris Weimer

Perhaps, except that's not what either I nor my source claimed. It was merely that he was targeted by the Inquisition, except Charles V intervened on his behalf. I had never heard of that reason for going to Jerusalem.

Quite likely, I'm willing to drop all charges brought on behalf of Vesalius in favor of better ones still unanswered. And still the problem of Christianity's continual holding back of science is present today. I wonder how far we would have advanced in stem cell research if American dollars contributed to it? If I recall, it's the Buddhist S. Korea which made the trillion dollar advancement so early already. And yet, Christians aren't holding back science, they never did, and they never will. So what is one anatomical doctor in favor of another?

Chris - respectfully resigning of more political and theological biased and deceptive threads.

GakuseiDon

C'mon, that's a little hard-hearted. If the money is spent on one thing, then it can't be spent on another. If money is given to one sector, it has to come from another. So I suppose Christianity would then be responsible for the holding back of education, or of medicine, or some other field of science.

Chris, are you able to give more money to stem-cell research? If you are able but you don't, aren't you holding back the march of science?

spin

Once again, Lafcadio carries on his anti-Bruno crusade based on invective rather than reason. He certainly has a lot of resentment for Bruno, but resentment is no substitute for argument.

Doh! Nobody's trying to deny Kepler a place in the development of ideas. Lafcadio is desperately refusing to admit that Bruno was important in his own right.

Find the notion of an infinite number stars (as against a bunch of lights on the starry dome), entailing an infinite number of system analogous to our solar system and an infinite number of worlds analogous to ours anywhere before Bruno.

This of course explains where the notions of black holes and worm-holes come from. Before one make patronizing statements about Science 101, be sure one has done Astronomy 101.

And the universe has no wall at the end with stars as lights on it.

Lafcadio hasn't got any arguments. His is special pleading that Bruno should be considered differently from other people.

I can certainly see the irony in Lafcadio's remarks.

What he said and what he did seem to be two different things because he not only accepted astrology, and not just as a means of earning a living, but as a deep-seated belief that the stars and the planets influenced people's lives. He didn't like the astrologers he observed because he saw them as panderers to people's desires. He made astrological charts for himself and his family, not because he was pandering to people's desires but because he simply believed in astrology. But that is nothing astounding. People believed all sorts of weird and wonderful things at that time, because this was very early in the scientific revolution.

Well actually, Brahe did most of the observing, as Bobinius stated. Kepler got called aboard. So by the time Kelper got past his initial burst on the harmony of the spheres, he was then standing on the shoulders on his mathematics teacher, Maestlin, who was a staunch supporter of Copernicus, and Brahe, who did most of the observation. Oh and he also stood on the shoulders of Pythagoras.

And forcing it into the mould of the solids and the spheres. Or reading into it the harmony of Pythagoras.

This is simply incoherent: Bruno supported the Copernican view but Bruno didn't support science. No wonder Lafcadio doesn't make any sense on this subject. It's obvious that he has unstated views that interfere with reason.

Just more empty rhetoric. Kepler the mathematician did what he was trained to do. Bruno the philosopher did what he was trained to do. Both developed ideas about the world, Kepler with his mathematics, Bruno by his philosophy.

But Lacfadio stops where Bruno really starts to get interesting. Typical biased selectivity.

And the lack of centre certainly doesn't come from what Bruno had learnt.

Where did the idea of the infinite number of stars come from, the infinite number of stellar systems, the infinite number of worlds?

All that Lafcadio is doing is repeating ad nauseum his biases, misrepresenting Bruno and giving a rosy picture of Kepler. Kepler was a man of his time, standing on the shoulders of giants, just like Bruno. Kepler had a comfy job all his life and the peace to develop his ideas. Bruno was not so lucky, yet was able to spread the ideas of Copernicus and to develop new ideas about the universe.

While Kepler lived a relatively protected life and able to finish his life's work, Bruno spent the last eight years of his life in prisons assaulted by religious fanatics who tried to bully him into changing his ideas. You can expect the man to put his thoughts in too much order under those circumstances. Bruno was alone at the end. He had no support system like Galileo. He had no-one to fall back on, no-one to defend him. He was alone against the church which was hellbent either to turn him against himself or, if that failed, to burn him for the greater good.

Lafcadio in his slurs wants you to believe that Bruno was just a heretic, who died for his heresy. Forget the fact that Bruno was the greatest voice of his time in favour of the Copernican revolution everywhere he went throughout Europe. Lafcadio believes that despite the "fact that Bruno supported Copernican view, Bruno ... did not support science". This incoherence only speaks against Lafcadio and his unstated prejudices. Not only did Bruno support the Copernican view of the solar system, but he turned it into a model for every other star. They weren't just lights, as Digges saw them, but they were stars just like the sun with systems just like the solar system. This was not arrived at through observation, but through logic. It would take centuries before Bruno's ideas were shown through observation to be fundamentally correct.


spin

spin

While waiting for Lafcadio to pull his finger out, here is the first part of the passage I cited in Italian in post 279 of this thread. It is Bruno attempting to reconcile his views with more traditional positions of faith.

Bruno packages his ideas for the Tribunal of the Holy Office in Venice thus:

• I hold an infinite universe, that which is the effect of an infinite divine power, because I value it as something worthy of divine goodness and power which, able to produce beyond this world another and others infinitely, could produce a finite world. Yes, I have declared infinite worlds particularly similar to this of the earth; which with Pythagoras I intend a star similar to that of the moon other planets and other stars, which are infinite; and all of these bodies are worlds and without number, which thus constitute the infinite universe in an infinite space; and this one calls infinite universe in which there are innumerable worlds. It seems that the double lot of infiniteness of size of the universe and of multiplicity of worlds is such that indirectly one intends it to be repugnant to the truth according to faith. Moreover, in this universe there is a universal providence, in whose virtue everything lives, grows, and moves, and is in its perfection; and I intend this in two ways: one in the way in which the spirit is in the body, all of it (the spirit) throughout it (the body), and all of it in its parts, and this is called nature, the shadow and the vestige of divinity; the other in the ineffible way in which God by essence, by presence, and by power, is in all and above all, not as part, not as spirit, but in an inexplicable way...

I am not paid to waste my time doing Buridan's job for him. If he wants to comment on Bruno, he should be able to do so quoting Bruno.

Buridan

This is getting more and more amusing

What is the new insight I have been asking for here? A cop out if I have ever seen one.

This is just another instance of what everyone into Bruno has always said he has believed. And this is what you have consciously mystified?! I can't believe it...

Bruno believing in an infinite number of everything is no surprise. Neither is his Theological reasons for doing it, or his utter lack of Mathematics, Geometry, Experiments or Observations to argue for it, at least in this passage you for some reason have deemed it worthy to translate.

His reasoning is of course interesting, as I have always found Theology interesting. However, I can't quite see the scientific in Bruno helding that the Infinite Divine Everything is Spirit, "all of it in its parts" and that this Spirit is what is called nature.

However, it does explain why Bruno didn't do any natural science. That is extremely hard to do about a Spirit.

Ciao:Cheeky:

freigeister

Wow, I never thought I'd be posting in defense of Spin (you may want to go hang yourself now, Spin. I would understand.) Bruno's doctrine is scientific. Reality can be seen in two ways: as pure matter, or as pure idea,spirit. This notion is preserved to this day in German where physical science is called Naturwissenschaft, and is contrasted with Geistwissenschaft, literally spirit science, but which we translate as human or social science.

spin

As usual these guys simply take no notice of context. In front of the inquisition they expect Bruno not to try to package his ideas so that they are acceptible to his inquisitors.

The fact is, he defended the notion of an infinite universe and of multiple worlds, as the essence of his ideas for which he was put before the inquisition. He went down defending his scientific views the best he could.

NOGO

Not quite true.
The purely mechanistic explanation of motion was abondoned with quantum mechanics.

We now realize that life itself is simply impossible with the world conceived by Newton.

Kepler's elliptical orbits were wrong. Planet orbits cannot be elliptical no more than they can be circular. The world is far too complex to have simple models like that. To have an elliptical orbit you need two point masses, the sun and the planet and nothing else. Point masses do not exist in nature. The orbit of any planet depends not only on the sun and the planet in question but also on their composition, variation of mass through each body, other bodies such as planets, comets, star, star dust, and, if we are to believe quantum mechanics, chance (ie an unknown uncertainty about everything).

If a body is exactly between two earths it will drift toward one of them and if you repeat the experiment it will drift toward the other. Newtonian mechanics would wrongly have it reamain motionless betwee the two forever.

I would say that Bruno was on a better track than anybody else.

Another thing one should know about Kepler. After he published his famous three laws of motion he went back to trying to fit the solar system to the 5 geometrical shapes of antiquity. He spent the rest of his life at this task.

Kepler got this idea of the 5 shapes of antiquity whole he was teaching. All of a sudden he stopped talking when he realized that their were 5 planets and 5 shapes of antiquity. Surely there must be a connection. He took this as an inspiration from God. Kepler clearly was not satified with mathematical modelling of measured data. He went back to his "God inspired" model.

Chris Weimer

This is the worst line of reasoning I've ever hear you utter. Have any more illogical fallacies you'd like to throw out there?