Syllabus
The course will proceed over specific texts (Copernicus, Brahe, Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Pringle, Humboldt, Goethe, Hutton, Lyell, More, Bentley, Derham, Wright, Kant, Herschel, Bernal, Milne, Sagan, Davies, N.A.S.A. and SpaxeX materials...), images (from medieval and renaissance art through European and American romanticism to contemporary science fiction and N.A.S.A. imagery) and motifs (comets, meteors, globes, new worlds, imaginary travels, utopia, gravity, providence, extra-terrestrial intelligence...), proving that the medieval imagination has by no means lost its power. Quite the opposite, the course will show that the surviving medieval ideas still influence and motivate the contemporary astronautics and astronoetics, including N.A.S.A., E.S.A. or Elon Musk's SpaceX initiative. We will also visit Prague's observatory.
1) General Introduction: A short history of a fascination with the night sky PART I.: GENEALOGY OF THE INFINITE UNIVERSE
2) Step One. Peripheries of the Copernican Universe: A revolution that did not take place READING: Selected sections from Commentariolus and On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres
3) Step Two. Galilean Controversies and Keplerian anxieties: Selling the Infinity Down the Cartesian River READING: Selected sections from The Sidereal Messenger and Kepler's Conversation with Galileo's Sidereal Messenger
4) Step Three: Geological Investment into the Skies READING: Selected sections from Hutton's The Theory of the earth and Lyell's Principles of Geology
5) Step Four: Meteoric Showers: Linking Earth with the Heavens READING: Selected sections from Humboldt's Cosmos and Pringle's Some Remarks upon the Several Accounts of the Fiery Meteor
6) Conclusion I.: The Fear of the Universe in art
7) Conclusion II.: Cosmos as a New Wasteland: An Imagnative Survival of the "Thermal Death Of The Universe" Theory
8) Field Trip: Prague's Observatory PART II.: PEOPLING INFINITY
9) Dante's pre-Copernican Heavens: Cosmos as the Moral Habitat READING: The Divine Comedy
10) Dante's pre-Copernican Travel and the Origins of Modern Exploration: The (Un)Friendly Universe READING: The Divine Comedy
11) The medieval and Renaissance Extraterrestrial Beings...
12) ...and their revival in the natural theology of the 18th century READING: Selected sections from Newton's Principia, Derham's Astro-Theology and Wright's
13) Contemporary Perspectives: S.E.T.I., SpaxeX and Dante (only) upside down READING: Bernal's The World, The Flesh and The Devil and Milne's Modern Cosmology and the Christian Idea of God
14) Field Trip II.: Watching the Night Sky with the Meade Telescope, Final Discussion
Annotation
The course will focus on the survival of the medieval imagination of the cosmic frontier into the contemporary
N.A.S.A., E.S.A. or SpaxeX intitiatives.
The course will be divided into two parts: the first part will focus on the key changes in our imagination of the cosmos in the European culture from the 16th to the 21th century. We will follow the path leading from the idea of the closed cosmos to the acceptance of the infinite universe. Specifically, the course will analyze this development in the perspective of the four epistemic coincidences that took place within the span of the modern history. First, we will focus on the poetic, existential and philosophical implications of the Copernican Revolution. Then we will interpret the infiltration of the Galilean earthbound physics into the Keplerian soulful metaphysics and the
“intoxication” of the Newtonian universe with geological “deep time”. After discussing Humboldt's cosmological synthesis of the modern geological episteme, the course will analyze the impact of the newly invented cosmic wastelands on our imagination, including the reconceptualization and reterritorialization of the traditional home- wilderness or habitat-wasteland dualisms.
The second part of the course will focus on the parallel conceptualizations of extraterrestrial life in science, philosophy, art and theology, showing that the idea of the alien inhabitants did not hide in the shadow of “serious” science and culture, but presented in fact a crucial factor in establishing the modern vision of the infinite and last but not least physical universe. In other words, the idea of extraterrestrial life did not contradict science; on the contrary, as an integral part of the Galilean, Keplerian and Newtonian revolutions, it helped science and philosophy to invent and comprehend the universe as we know it.
If the sky is clear, we will (occasionally) accompany the lectures with the astronomical observations (200/1000 telescope), we will also visit Prague's observatory.