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D. R. Danielson (University of British Columbia)
Almost all the school science texts say what Britain's Astronomer Royal also recently reasserted: ``Copernicus dethroned the Earth from the privileged position that Ptolemy's cosmology accorded it." This non-scientific equation of geocentrism with anthropocentrism does an injustice to medieval cosmology, obscures some genuinely anthropocentric aspects of Copernican theory, and impedes a critical evaluation of what modern cosmology does and does not actually impy concerning the ``place" of humankind in the cosmos. By means of a cheerful but serious guided tour of Aristotelian cosmological physics and of Copernican enthusiasm at humankind's *exaltation* to the dance of the stars--with brief visits to Chalcidius, Martianus Capella, Moses Maimonides, and the poet Dante, as well as to Copernicus himself, Digges, Galileo, Kepler, le Bouvier de Fontenelle, and Huygens--this lecture will dismantle the Great Copernican Cliché and show how much richer our account of Copernicanism can be without it.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: danielso@interchange.ubc.ca