Abstract
In his La révolution astronomique, published in 1961, Alexandre Koyré for the first time foresaw the important role played by musical interests in Kepler’s cosmological model. Overcoming some widespread prejudices, he built his analysis of the mental paths practiced by the German astronomer on an accurate reading of original sources. In this way he was able to recover important steps in the Scientific Revolution and to enlighten the history of scientific thought. Following in Koyré’s footsteps, I will focus on the finding of Kepler’s third law. This astronomical law for the German astronomer represents in part the successful end of a 23-year-long path and in part the empirical measure of the Harmony of the Spheres. It is a long journey, which committed Kepler for a great part of his life, accompanying him through personal and scientific events. Going forward, I will offer a general picture of the presence and the role of harmonic studies in Kepler’s work, focusing particularly on Kepler’s own translation and commentary to Ptolemy’s Harmonica, set as an appendix to Harmonice mundi, and on the differences between Kepler’s edition and the other ones.
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Notes
- 1.
Kepler’s education and experiences as theorist and practicing musician have been recently analyzed by Peter Pesic (Pesic 2014, p. 75).
- 2.
On the web you find an animation explaining the astronomical model via: http://www.mogi-vice.com/Scaricamento/Keplero-MC.zip.
- 3.
A complete account is given in a letter from Kepler to Maestlin, August 2, 1595.
- 4.
The complete title of this work is Harmonices Mundi Libri V, i.e., The Five Books of the Harmony of the World, usually referred to as Harmonice Mundi or The Harmony of the World. “Harmonices” is the genitive of the Greek term for “theory of harmony,” which Kepler has taken over in his Latin (Caspar 1993, p. 288).
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Acknowledgments
I want to express my gratitude to Fabrizio Castelli, who supported my work.
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Lombardi, A.M. (2018). Alexandre Koyré, Kepler’s Reader Without Prejudices. Harmony of the World, Music of the Heavens. In: Pisano, R., Agassi, J., Drozdova, D. (eds) Hypotheses and Perspectives in the History and Philosophy of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61712-1_13
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