Introduction
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was one of the first astronomers to embrace Copernicus’s heliocentric theory and argue that it was a real, physical description of the cosmos. He is most famous for what are now called his three laws of planetary motion (that planets move around the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one focus, that they sweep out equal areas in equal time as they revolve, and that the squares of their orbital periods around the sun are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun). These broke with two central cosmological orthodoxies of his day: the traditional perfect circles that had characterized heavenly motion in the past, and the traditional disciplinary separation of astronomy and physics.
A religious Lutheran who had initially hoped for a career in the priesthood, Kepler ultimately framed his astronomical pursuits in theological terms. As he wrote to Michael Maestlin, his teacher of astronomy and fellow Copernican at the University of...
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Rothman, A. (2022). Kepler, Johannes. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31069-5_581
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