Geocentricies

When reading Sleepwalkers this time, I was very interested in how they would observe the motions of the planets as having a sort of spiral orbit. I remember sitting in class junior with our teacher trying to explain this to us, and I remember thing how at the time, a spiral orbit made so much sense. The planets would move from left to right and back left and keep doing that. But at the time it didn’t seem so far-fetched to come up with these models to explain what you can’t see and what fits exactly what you observe.

But even if this is true, I believe that the fourth chapter is titled “the Failure of Nerve” because in Greece at the time, everyone took what Aristotle and Plato said as truth. If one were to question them, horrible things would have followed. A lot of people used God to answer the unknown. Because they assumed that the heavens and everything are holy, it would have had to come from God. This was true for most of the unknowns, it was just a lot easier to say some divine being wanted it so, than to look like a fool and not know the answers to these questions that were being presented. And since people were afraid to challenge these two, who have been regarded as the brightest of their time, there was no influx of ideas to challenge the geocentric model and thus people didn’t have the nerve to challenge that was thought as truth.

I do believe that knowledge, for the Greeks, increased in some linear fashion, because everyone studied from the person prior to them. For example, Anaximendes was a student of Anaximander, and so the progression and development of ideas from one to the other changes and progressed what they thought at the time. Although there are some gaps in this, ideas always progressed from one philosopher to another, changing with each one and then being developed and formed into their own version that is different than the one prior. This to me is what I see as a linear progression of knowledge. That the knowledge changes after each successive philosopher because they make more conclusions of what they see and can then progress to the knowledge for everybody’s sake.

(i will go back and reformat this later, just ran out of time)