New Foundations in the History of Astronomy: Four Papers in Honor of Bernard R. Goldstein

Introduction

In 1999 the History of Science Society held its annual meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., the home and academic base of Bernard R. Goldstein, who had recently retired from full-time teaching at the University of Pittsburgh and had been honored with a University Professorship. Several of his friends and collaborators used the opportunity to present a program of four papers in his honor, entitled 'The New History of Astronomy'. The session was chaired by Professor Nancy Siraisi, Distinguished Professor of History at Hunter College in the City University of New York; and Professor Goldstein himself commented on the papers. Revised versions of the presentations at this session make up the current volume.

Our title invites the question: What was the old history of astronomy? Here perhaps one should distinguish between the views of historians of science in general, and those of the small but very vigorous group of specialists who would count themselves as historians of astronomy. For the greater part of the twentieth century historians in general, and historians of science in particular, accorded a special place to astronomy during antiquity and in the events collectively labelled the Scientific Revolution. Astronomy was made a paradigm of ancient science because of the visible continuity of its tradition and the prominent use of mathematics by its practitioners. In fact, astronomy overshadowed other mathematical sciences like optics that were developed by the Greeks and Romans, perhaps because of the later importance of astronomy in the European university curriculum. Accounts of the Scientific Revolution typically began with Copernicus, who was depicted as overturning ancient astronomy. The standard narrative then proceeded by way of Kepler, who discovered the correct laws of planetary motion, and Galileo, who publicly defended Copernicanism against religious critics, to Newton, who discovered the fundamental laws that vindicated all the work of his predecessors. With few exceptions, the period from the decline of Roman science to the outset of the Scientific Revolution was passed over in silence or treated as a special subject unconnected to later scientific thought. This picture of the general development of science from antiquity to the time of Newton has proved surprisingly impervious to revision in the light of new historical information or historiographical challenge. Even would-be iconoclasts like Steven Shapin tell essentially the same story with the same characters in the same order. So much for the non-specialist historian. Meanwhile, led by the work of Bernard Goldstein, opinion on these matters among specialists rapidly developed beyond the standard narrative. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is possible to convict the twentieth-century narrative as wrong in its general structure as well as in its specific understanding of the key individuals to whom it gave prominent roles. The papers presented at the Pittsburgh meeting, and now published in this volume, attempt to present some of the new ideas in the history of astronomy that entail a new evaluation of the history of science from antiquity to the Scientific Revolution.

According to one of the founding myths of the history of astronomy, the Greeks developed two separate theories of planetary motion. The most important of these was the deferent-epicycle system that is best known from Ptolemy's Almagest but was thought to lack a physical interpretation until the late Middle Ages. A second and older system that was assumed to address the same planetary phenomena on the basis of homocentric spheres was ascribed to Eudoxus and Callippus as well as to Aristotle, who was credited with giving it a physical interpretation.

Ptolemy's alleged deficiencies in physical astronomy were dramatically remedied by Goldstein when he published The Arabic Version of Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses in 1967. This restored a portion of Ptolemy's sequel to the Almagest, available in Arabic but unknown...