Book Review: The Foundations of Copernicus's Book I: Niccolò Copernico e la Fondazione del Cosmo Eliocentrico, con testo, traduzione e commentario del Libro I de Le Rivoluzioni Celesti

Abstract

THE FOUNDATIONS OF COPERNICUS'S BOOK I Niccolo Copernico e la Fondazione del Cosmo Eliocentrico, con testo, traduzione e commentario del Libro I de Le Rivoluzioni Celesti. Anna De Pace (Bruno Mondadori, Milan, 2009). Pp. 450. euro32 (paperback). ISBN 978-88-6159071-7.This is a study of the philosophical foundations of Copernicus's planetary theory focused on the first book of De revolutionibus. It contains a new edition with an Italian translation of the manuscript version of Book 1,1-1 1, the original preface (absent in the editio princeps of 1543, published for the first time in the Torun edition of 1 873), and Copernicus's dedicatory letter to Paul DI. Appendices present Copernicus's Latin translation of Lysis's letter to Hipparchus, Osiander's anonymous preface, and Cardinal Schonberg's letter to Copernicus.This new edition aims at bring Book I of De revolutionibus back to the form in which it was presumably conceived by the author (Rosen has already provided the English reader with a translation, On the revolutions (1978), which integrates the printed and the manuscript versions of Copernicus's major work). De Pace explicitly distances herself from the editorial line of the Gesamtausgabe, which relies on the printed edition and relegates the original introduction to an appendix (NCG, ii, 487-8), as well as from the same decision by Lerner and Segonds for the announced Les Belles Lettres edition. De Pace's transcription is accurate and readable; she expands the ligatures and abbreviations and provides some normalization (e.g., capital letters and the distinction of 'u' and V). In some points, she improves and slightly corrects former transcriptions (as emerges from a comparison with NCG). However her normalization is not always consistent (ptolemaeus becomes Ptolemaeus whilst plutarchus is not standardized (p. 256). The Italian translation is elegantly agreeable, an improvement on the already available ones, the most important of which appeared in Barone's edition of Copernicus's astronomical works (Copernico, Opere (Turin, 1979)). The most original renderings of particular terms are discussed and justified in the notes (1,1, 'parte perfetta' for 'absolutae partes', Rosen: 'separate parts'; 1,2, 'cime delle montagne' for 'vertices', Rosen: 'poles'; 1,8, 'corpi integrali' for 'universi' as opposed to the 'partes', Rosen, more elegantly: 'wholes').De Pace presents Copernicus's achievement as essentially philosophical. This undertaking can be regarded as a continuation of a continental scholarly tradition that includes A. Birkenmajer and Bilinski, as well as Barone, Lerner and Hallyn. Moreover, she accepts Koyre's judgement on the importance of the geokinetic theory for the emergence of classical mechanics but questions the claim that no adequate philosophical and physical doctrine supported Copernicus's system. By contrast, she emphasizes his essentially Platonic commitment and the philosophical coherence of his program. Her solid background in the history of philosophy allows her to trace Copernicus's explicit and implicit references to Plato's works, especially Timaeus and Laws, but also Phaedo and Republic. As a strong evidence of Copernicus 's familiarity with Timaeus, she also cites (36-7 ana passim) a passage from Rheticus's Praise of Prussia (cf. Narrano prima, ed. Hugonnard-Roche and Verdert (Wroclaw, 1982), 85-6 and 144) reporting on Copernicus's and Giese's rebuttal of Aristotle's criticism on the geokinetic doctrines of the Pythagoreans and Timaeus. Yet, it should be remarked that this passage merely refers to Aristotle's De caelo 11,13, that is, to an indirect source of the Pythagoreans' and Plato's conceptions.She regards two Copernican ideas as essentially 'Platonic' (p. 38); (i) his claim that the main task of astronomy is to unveil the beauty underlying the cosmos, that astronomical geometries and physical causes shall be derived from higher purposes rooted in God's goodness; (ii) his assertion of the ontological and epistemological priority of astronomy over physics which undermines the Aristotelian hierarchy of knowledge. …