The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (Zone Books)

Fernand Hallyn

ISBN 10: 0942299612 / ISBN 13: 9780942299618

Published by Zone Books, 1993

About this Item

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read but remains in clean condition. All of the pages are intact and the cover is intact and the spine may show signs of wear. The book may have minor markings which are not specifically mentioned.

Seller Inventory # rev3012804440

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (Zone Books)
• Publisher: Zone Books
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0942299612
• ISBN 13: 9780942299618
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 580 grams

About this title

Synopsis

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Conceiving of their work not in terms of a history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices, Fernand Hallyn insists that these new representations of the universe cannot be explained by recourse to theories of “genius” and “intuition.”

The scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination, and the work of Copernicus and Kepler, Hallyn contends, must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Thus the new sun-centered universe is shown to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both Neoplatonism and Mannerism in the sixteenth century.

About the Author

Fernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Department of French Literature at the University of Ghent.