(^104) › STEP 4. Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High
Hermetic tradition, Neoplatonism taught that mathematics described the essential nature
and soul of the cosmos, a soul that was God itself. The use of mathematics to discover and
describe the world of forms was reflected in both the use of perspective in art and the rec-
onciliation of pagan and Christian symbols.
The Platonic–Pythagorean Tradition
By the advent of the seventeenth century, these alternative traditions had fused into an
approach to gaining knowledge of the natural world that has come to be known as the
Platonic–Pythagorean tradition (after Plato and the ancient mathematically oriented school
of Pythagoras), which had as its goal the identification of the fundamental mathematical
laws of nature.
Development of New Institutions
Because the curricula of traditional universities were devoted to the teaching of Aristotle
and other authorities in the scholastic tradition, new institutions were required for the
alternative traditions to flourish. New institutions that emerged to fill that role included
the following:
• Royal courts, where kings, dukes, and other ruling nobles were determined to show off
both their wealth and their virtue by patronizing not only great artists and musicians but
also natural philosophers
• Royal societies and academies, like the Royal Society of London and the Royal Academy
of Sciences in Paris, both established in the 1660s, where organized groups of natural
philosophers sought and received the patronage of the Crown by emphasizing both the
prestige and the practical applications of their discoveries
• Smaller academies under the patronage of individual nobles, like the Accademia dei Lincei,
founded in Italy in 1603 by Federico Cesi, the oldest scientific academy in the world
• New universities, particularly in Italy, which were funded by the civic-minded merchants
in the Renaissance tradition and which were outside the control of the ChurchThe Rise of Copernicanism
The central challenge to the traditional view of the cosmos was made in the context of the
Church’s own effort to reform the calendar and, therefore, the science of astronomy. The
annual changes in the position of the sun, the moon, and the planets with respect to the con-
stellations of stars are the means by which human beings construct calendars that keep track
of time and predict seasonal climate patterns. In keeping with the philosophy of scholasti-
cism, European Church scholars constructed calendars based on ancient astronomical tables
that dated back to the ancient Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy. Though amazingly accu-
rate, the multiplication over thousands of years of small errors in the Ptolemaic astronomical
tables led to a situation in the early sixteenth century in which the calendars were dramatically
out of sync with the actual seasons.
In 1515, a church council appointed to consider calendar reform summoned the Polish
churchman and astronomer Nicolas Copernicus to remedy the situation. Educated in a
Neoplatonic academy and a proponent of the Platonic–Pythagorean tradition, Copernicus
proposed to reconcile the calendar and the actual movements of the heavens by introducing
a new sun-centered, or “heliocentric,” astronomical model of the cosmos.15_Bartolini_Ch15_099-118.indd 104 27/04/18 1:54 PM