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Nicolaus Copernicus’ Mental Path Toward the Scientific Truth About the Integration of the Univers
Abstract
This study is devoted to Nicolaus Copernicus (Mikołaj Kopernik, 1473–1543), who lived both in of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. More precisely, our interest lies in his mental path toward the scientific truth about the structure and integration of the Universe. To this end, we will try to trace his academic biogra-phy together with the studies he pursued, the professional work he undertook, and the official roles he carried out under specific historical and socio-political conditions. Accordingly, we pose two questions: (1) How did Nicolaus Coper-nicus, as a canon of the Warmian Chapter, use his medical, legal, economic, and mathematical-astronomical competencies while living in Warmia? and (2) What were the successive stages in Copernicus’s construction of a mental path to the structure of the heavens, in which the planets orbiting the Sun participate in an integrated and harmonized way? We will also try to identify the factors that played a part in building this path of his mental integration – the path that led to the adoption of the heliocentric system in European civilization, against the sensory illusions entrenched over centuries.
Keywords:
Renaissance mentality, genius of science, Ptolemy’s error, paradigm of the natural sciences, social integration, stages of the mental integration of Copernicus’s heliocentric systemDetails
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