Friday, April 13, 2018

Heliocentrism and Relativism

The Heliocentric revolution demonstrates that what might appear to be the motion of the Sun in one direction is actually the motion of the Earth in the opposite direction.  But it also implicitly demonstrates that the same appearance would obtain if both were in motion in their respective directions.  Indeed, the possibilities are infinite, since what appears is the sum of two motions, which can be constituted in an infinite number of combinations, one of which is the Geocentrist thesis that the Earth is at rest, another is the Heliocentrist thesis that the Sun is at rest.  Physicists have, of course, respected this plain evidence, but aside from Kant, Philosophers seem to have been side-stepping the implications, Berkeley, for example, as has been previously discussed.  What is plain from the example is that the immediate object of ordinary perception is a relation between perceiver and perceived, e. g.  an increasing distance between Sun and location on Earth, naively interpreted as an encounter between two independent entities.  But the atomization of the scenario is an error; for, from the perception, nothing can be inferred about either Subject independently or Object independently, e. g. the velocity of either the Earth or the Sun.  So, the Epistemological lesson from the Heliocentric revolution is that Perception is fundamentally Relativistic, not Perspectivistic, which usually connotes that Subject and Object are at rest, and certainly not Subjectivistic, despite the Berkeleyan effort to reduce it to the mere private entertainment of a Phenomenon.

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