The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turningpoint in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. FernandHallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science orastronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. Thesenew representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of"genius" or "intuition."Instead, Hallyn investigates the problem of how (...) new scientific hypothesesare actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected tosupport a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentallydifferent from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must beexamined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to beinseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of bothneoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Departmentof French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

Gemma Frisius (1508–1555), who worked at the university of Louvain, heard about the Copernican system already around 1530 and afterwards was a careful reader of the Narratio prima and the De Revolutionibus. The article argues that his posthumous preface to the Ephemerides (1556) by his pupil Stadius expresses his ultimate opinion on the system of the world. Moreover, it is also the only text where he tackles the epistemological problems of the question. A careful analysis of this preface shows that (...) at the end of his life, on the ground of observations as well as philosophical demands, he admitted at least the first two movements ascribed to the earth by Copernicus. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage se veut une lecture rhétorique de quelques problèmes-clés ayant marqué la période qui s'étend des débuts de la révolution scientifique du XVIIe siècle jusqu'au moment où, au XIXe, une autre se prépare. Une telle sorte d'analyse se fonde sur le fait qu'avant d'intervenir dans les efforts de persuasion, certains schèmes " poétiques " sont déjà présents et actifs dans la formation et l'acceptation de toute représentation nouvelle. C'est pourquoi la " rhétorique profonde " que nous propose ici Fernand (...) Hallyn ne se contente nullement d'éclairer les procédés de la science qui interviennent dans la communication de positions, de démarches ou de résultats, mais vise d'abord à étudier ses formes d'invention et de découverte. Saisir la démarche scientifique en train de se faire comme un cas particulier de la problématique générale de la créativité - bref explorer plus avant la voie ouverte dans La Structure poétique du mande - tel est donc l'enjeu de ce volume. (shrink)