The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler

In this major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture - the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler - Fernand Hallyn applies a theory of rhetoric to the philosophy and history of science to show how the new sun-centered universe is inseparable from the aesthetic epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both Neoplatonism and Mannerism in the sixteenth century.