Abstract
Astronomy and philosophy are closely connected. To understand the astronomical thought of any culture, ancient or contemporary, we have to understand the philosophical underpinnings of its general worldview, from which its understanding of itself and the cosmos arises. The history of astronomy should also be understood more broadly than the history of western astronomical thought. In this book I aim to open a window onto ancient Non-Western and Western astronomical thought through consideration of the philosophical foundations of this thought.
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Notes
- 1.
Zhou 2006, 190. Translation is my own.
- 2.
Gary Urton, in his discussion of Quechua mathematics , offers a good example of how, even in the realm of mathematics these cultural and philosophical assumptions are crucial to understanding a particular tradition: “numbers are not conceived of in Quechua ideology as abstractions whose nature and relations to each other rely on the predications of pure logic, as in the West. Rather, numbers are conceptualized in terms of social—especially family and kinship—roles and relations.” (Urton 1997, 13).
- 3.
While there have been an increasing number of works written in this area, the available work still pales in comparison to that available on issues in the history of Western astronomy. Material on astronomy and cosmology in specific at Cahokia is limited, but a number of authors writing on Cahokia in general cover it. See in particular Chappell 2002, Fowler 1996, Pauketat 2009.
- 4.
Although there is still not as much Non-Western material as desirable, some museums do relatively very well at this, and attitudes are slowly beginning to change about the importance of Non-Western philosophy. One of my favorite museum collections in astronomy, for example, of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, IL, contains a large number of Non-Western astronomical tools, and magnificent exhibits on these instruments.
References
Bilgrami, Akeel, 2010, “The Wider Significance of Naturalism: A Geneological Essay”, De Caro, Mario and David Macarthur (eds), Naturalism and Normativity (New York: Columbia University Press)
Chappell, Sally, 2002, Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Fowler (ed), 1996, The Ancient Sky and Skywatchers of Cahokia: Woodhenges, Eclipses, and Cahokian Cosmology, Wisconsin Archaeologist, 77 (3-4)
Gal, Ofer, and Chen-Morris, Raz, 2012, Baroque Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Martens, Rhonda, 2000, Kepler’s Philosophy and the New Astronomy (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
Pauketat, Timothy, 2009, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Viking-Penguin)
Urton, Gary, 1997, The Social Life of Numbers: A Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmetic (Austin: University of Texas Press)
Zhou, Guidian, 2006, Qinhan Zhexue (Qin and Han Philosophy), (Wuhan: Wuhan Chubanshe)
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McLeod, A. (2016). Introduction. In: Astronomy in the Ancient World. Historical & Cultural Astronomy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23600-1_1
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