GASSENDI, Pierre.

by Pierre Gassendi

£3,250 · Offered by Sokol Books

.A very good copy, of illustrious English provenance, of the second edition of this most successful biography of great early modern astronomers, first published in 1654 an early example of science presented to a popular audience. Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) was a French Jesuit, philosopher and mathematician, an opponent of Descartes s rationalism, and a follower of empiricism against Aristotelianism. His important experiments spanned astronomy (he was the first to observe the transit of Mercury across the Sun), the measurement of the speed of sound, and the use of camera obscura to measure the diameter of the moon. Privately he was in favour of Copernicanism, but as a Jesuit priest in Catholic France, he found it unwise to make his sympathy publicly known. He therefore supported the Tychonian world system as a compromise approved by the Church, if only as a substitute of the heliocentric system he believed in (Kragh, p.124). .The present work is mostly devoted to the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), handsomely portrayed on the engraved frontispiece; to his biography, in six parts, are appended those of Copernicus, Peuerbach and Regiomontanus, added at the publisher s request. Gassendi focused, in non-judgemental manner, mainly on his life and work, including excursions into his side-interests in alchemy, astrology and Neo-Latin poetry, and his family history. Brahe theorized the geo-heliocentric' system - here illustrated with a woodcut diagram - in which the Sun an

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.