It is a topic he discusses in great detail in book II of his work On the Heavens, engaging with the various arguments that preceded him, using philopshical arguments and observations of the natural world ( On the Heavens, 2.14): Plato has Socrates offer a definitive answer to the question, but it was perhaps Aristotle who was the first to really attempt to prove it. “I am convinced, then,” said he, “that in the first place, if the earth is round and in the middle of the heavens, it needs neither the air.” “Well,” said Simmias, “that will be enough.” “However, there is nothing to prevent my telling what I believe the form of the earth to be, and the regions in it.” By the time that Plato was writing in the fourth century BC, the debate was well known but a philosophical consensus may well have been forming ( Phaedo, 108d-e): It is not known who was the first to suggest that the earth could have been spherical in shape, but it is often associated with the Pythagorean school.
His younger associate Anaximander theorised that it was a cylinder – like a column floating upright in the centre of the universe. In the late seventh to early sixth century BC, the Ionian geometer Thales hypothesised that the earth was a disk that floated on the ocean: so round, but still flat. Even then, a spherical globe was not the first solution offered.
Yet, as trade became more widespread and with it came an appreciation for, and study of, geography and astronomy, the notion of a flat disc-like earth quickly came into question. It is true that the earliest cultures for which we have records on this topic, such as the Babylonians and the Egyptians, do seem to describe the world as flat. The shape of the world was a subject that fascinated a great variety of ancient cultures.
0 kommentar(er)
