Publication Details

Abstract

At the occassion of the 500th anniversary of Nicolaus Copernicus’s birth the author points in his paper at the philosophical arid view-of-the-world importance of his new astronomic opinions. Copernicus considered himself a philosopher and he was, in many respects, tributary to the speculative opinions of the ancient, especially Greek philosophers. But he provided an incentive, however unconsiously, also to modern philosophical thinking. With his implicit scepticism towards the naive belief in reliability of sencuous data, upon which medieval thinking was constructed, he was one the initiators of the rise of noetics, of the theory of cognition. It is with Copernicus that the modern natural — scientific critique of the Bible starts, the pointing at the historically conditioned, relative, human character of its opinions, it is him that has a great share in the fact the religious view-of-the-world of modern man was bring and has still been laysized, that a „Copernican turn“ took place in the whole thinking of the medieval man. Copernicus’s heliocentrism had thus not only an astronomic, but even more a general cultural importance.