Skip to main content

Who was Owen Gingerich?


I have only recently discovered that a fellow named Owen Gingerich ever lived or died.  Yet he and I have very much overlapping timelines -- I was born when he was 28, and he died just two and a half years ago. Now that I know who he was, I am sorry I didn't learn of him sooner.

So here is a post for Gingerich, concluding "science week" at Jamesian Pragmatism Refreshed.  

Gingerich was an astronomer, and an important participant in debates over what we understand by the word "planet," debates that centered -- while he was most involved in them -- on the case of alleged planet Pluto.  Gingerich was also a teacher of the Harvard University course "The Astronomical Perspective," a core science course for non-scientists.

To me what is most fascinating about Gingerich, though, is his work as a historian of science, and especially of the early modern developments in astronomy and physics beginning with Copernicus and continuing through Newton's day.

In 2004, the science publisher Heinemann came out with a work of Gingerich's, THE BOOK NOBODY READ -- a discussion of the paradoxical way in which Copernicus's ideas came to have their epochal impact. The title of that work was itself a bit misleading.  Heinemann was arguing against an influential assertion by Athur Koestler, in 1959, that Copernicus' book on a heliocentric model of the solar system was "the book that nobody read ... an all-time worst seller."

Gingerich made a powerful case that Koestler was wrong. In the process he catalogues every copy of either of the first two editions of that famous book (the 1543 and 1566 editions) still known to exist. They all have extensive notes in the margins, indicating that not only were they read, they were read attentively. 

Gingerich's discussion also seems to take Galileo down a peg in importance.  Indeed, Galileo is pegged as someone who, though very adept at working the observations from new-model telescopes into arguments for the Copernican model, didn't really follow the mathematics of Copernicus' argument as well as did some of Galileo's contemporaries.    

Gingerich.  A new name for me.  One I think will be worth remembering. 

Labels:

Comments

  1. Paul D. Van PeltOctober 17, 2025 at 3:54 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BelindaOctober 18, 2025 at 2:04 PM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
23 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

A Quote from Parfit

Recently  I wrote a little about ethicist Derek Parfit. I've been doing further research on him since, and will now describe his Big Picture as I've come to understand it. Parfit believes that the western world only started taking ethical philosophy seriously (as a domain separate from theology) around the time Nietzsche declared that God was dead. There are only three possibilities, in terms of the God/morality issue: 1) You believe that God exists and that His commands define morality 2) You deny that God exists and, like Nietzsche, infer from this that in the absence of commands there is no right or wrong, or 3) You deny that God exists yet persist in believing and attempting to discern right and wrong. From a certain point of view there could be a fourth category, for people who believe that God exists but that His existence is irrelevant to morality, He doesn't issue commands at all, etc.  Still, from DP's perspective that sort of God ...
1 comment
Read more