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  1. Seeing and Believing: Galileo, Aristotelians, and the Mountains on the Moon.David Marshall Miller - 2013 - In Daniel De Simone & John Hessler (eds.), The Starry Messenger. Levenger Press. pp. 131-145.
    Galileo’s telescopic lunar observations, announced in Siderius Nuncius (1610), were a triumph of observational skill and ingenuity. Yet, unlike the Medicean stars, Galileo’s lunar “discoveries” were not especially novel. Indeed, Plutarch had noted the moon’s uneven surface in classical times, and many other renaissance observers had also turned their gaze moonward, even (in Harriot’s case) aided by telescopes of their own. Moreover, what Galileo and his contemporaries saw was colored by the assumptions they already had. Copernicans assumed the moon was (...)
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  2. History and Philosophy of Science History.David Marshall Miller - 2011 - In Seymour Mauskopf & Tad Schmaltz (eds.), Integrating history and philosophy of science: problems and prospects. New York: Springer Verlag. pp. 29-48.
    Science lies at the intersection of ideas and society, at the heart of the modern human experience. The study of past science should therefore be central to our humanistic attempt to know ourselves. Nevertheless, past science is not studied as an integral whole, but from two very different and divergent perspectives: the intellectual history of science, which focuses on the development of ideas and arguments, and the social history of science, which focuses on the development of science as a social (...)
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  3. O Male Factum: Rectilinearity and Kepler's Discovery of the Ellipse.David Marshall Miller - 2008 - Journal for the History of Astronomy 39.
    In 1596, in the Mysterium Cosmographicum, a twenty-five-year-old Johannes Kepler rashly banished lines from the universe. They “scarcely admit of order,” he wrote, and God himself could have no use for them in this “well-ordered universe.” Twenty-five years later, though, Kepler had come to repent the temerity of his youth. “O male factum!” he lamented in a 1621 second edition of the Mysterium – “O what a mistake” it was to dismiss lines, for linearity is revealed in those most perfect (...)
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