Geocentricity

We put forward the working hypothesis that the heliocentric, rather than the geocentric view, of the Solar System was the essential belief of the early Greek philosophers and astronomers. Although most of them referred to the geocentric view, it is plausible that the prevalent religious beliefs about the sacred character of the Earth as well as the fear of prosecution for impiety (asebeia) prevented them from expressing the heliocentric view, even though they were fully aware of it. Moreover, putting the geocentric view forward, instead, would have facilitated the reception of the surrounding world and the understanding of everyday celestial phenomena, much like the modern presentation of the celestial sphere and the zodiac, where the Earth is at the centre and the Sun makes an apparent orbit on the ecliptic. Such an ingenious stance would have set these early astronomers in harmony with the dominant religious beliefs and, at the same time, would have helped them to 'save the appearances', without sacrificing the essence of their ideas. In Hellenistic and Roman times, the prevailing view was still the geocentric one. The brilliant heliocentric theory advanced by Aristarchos in the early third century B.C. was never established, because it met with hostility in Athens—Aristarchos was accused of impiety and faced the death penalty. The textual evidence suggests that the tight connection which existed between religion and the city-state (polis) in ancient Greece, and which led to a series of impiety trials against philosophers in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., would have made any contrary opinion expressed by the astronomers seem almost a high treason against the state.

Following recent work by Don Ross (Ross, 2000; Ross & Spurrett, 2004), I contrast the influential theories of Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland in information-theoretic terms. Dennett makes much of the fact that the morphological shorthand which emerges before a witness as she looks upon cohesive aggregates of matter commands some measure of predictive power. This, for him, speaks against eliminating recourse to an intentional vocabulary. By contrast, the eliminative materialism defended by Churchland does not gloss such informational compressibility as an explanatory desideratum, and thus regards the informational noise which accrues at higher levels of description as patently unacceptable. Yet, since it is unlikely, as Ross et al. (2007) have recently suggested, that anything remains once we subtract the appeal to patterns, I argue that the ubiquity of informational compression in scientific explanation seriously undermines the claim that talk of the mental could be eliminated.

Introduction
In my paper I am interested primarily with the reception of the Copernican theory in Renaissance England. I have chosen this topic because I consider that it ranks, for reasons which I shall explain later, as one of the most interesting developments in the entire history of the Copernican revolution. Moreover, despite its intellectual attractiveness it has since been neglected by historians of science and the secondary sources on it are few and far between. Therefore I considered it a difficult subject which challenged my abilities and ingenuity.
The subject of the reception of the Copernican theory in Renaissance England could be written from the three points of view: the technical (mathematical and scientific), the chronological (historical), and the cosmological (philosophical). Abundant publications of the history of geocentric and heliocentric astronomy were available to me to draw inspiration from /.../. I refrained from the use of a mathematical approach. I considered it to be sufficiently covered by other works. However, each relevant mathematical idea is carefully explained in my thesis’s Appendix in laymen’s terms to give the background for an unambiguous understanding of the whole of the Copernican controversy in England.
On the one hand my materials are presented historically although not strictly chronologically. The history provided is selective, being organized chiefly around the two questions of the Aristotelian debate over Copernican theory in England. On the other hand my cosmological materials are set out in such a way as to give dominance to an understanding of the philosophical ideas involved in the process which caused Englishmen to abandon the Ptolemaic system with its justification in the empirical evidence of the eyes and other sensors for the purely abstract Copernican system.