Robert Westman, “The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order” (University of California Press, 2011)

Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast · Aug 29, 2012 · 1h 9m

This is an extraordinary book written by one of the finest historians of science. Ringing in at nearly seven hundred oversized, double columned pages Robert Westman‘s The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and the Celestial Order (University of California Press, 2011) exhaustively examines the science of the stars in order to understand the problems that drove Copernicus and later engagements with Copernicanism. Far more than a reception study, Westman uncovers the practices, of prognostication and knowledge production, that delimited the conceptual space available to scholars…