The Copernican Revolution

Part 6 of 10 in the history of philosophy

Copernicus (Image Public Domain)

The Medieval period came to an end with the Renaissance, in particular with the Scientific Revolution (roughly 1550CE – 1700CE), which ushered in enormous changes in the worldview of European civilization. The period from Nicolaus Copernicus (1473CE – 1543CE) to Isaac Newton (1643CE – 1727CE) serves as an epochal demarcation separating Antiquity and the Middle Ages from the period known as the Modern Age. That is to say, starting with Copernicus’s work of 1543, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium) and culminating in Newton’s work of 1687, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy(Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica), the old world was upended.