Some progress on the HoPoS conference paper. My idea is now to contrast Bruno, Clavius and Brahe using something like the following plan. Bruno is the most enthusiastic Copernican on the 1500s. He leaps from Copernicanism to a whole series of speculative ideas, many of which are, in some sense, correct (at least in the sense of beings models which gel with our modern view) - for instance, that all the stars are sun, could have planets of their own, etc, and particularly that we have no privileged position in the universe.
Clavius and Tycho are clearly the most authoritative (and probably most read) astronomers of the late 16th Century. Their failure to accept Copernicanism is an interesting contrast to Bruno. Yet Clavius retains Ptolemaic astronomy, while Tycho rejects this. So there are plenty of contrasts - three systems are being contrasted, all in the pre-telescope period.
This all sounds like a possible good paper. But I still have to actually get a good, rhetorically suitable piece ready by the weekend - still a tall order.
What I did do today was edit my P of S essay on Lakatos's famous quote into a form where I could submit it to Rerum Causae, the journal of the LSE philosophy Society. This is published once each year and I was quite impressed with the standard of the two issues I have seen from the last couple of years. Caroline is involved in the production of this and gave me a "call for papers" document the other day. I will definitely submit something to this in the next week or so.
And also some admin - mainly creating a sensible filing system on my PC for all the articles I am downloading. I can't believe that it didn't occur to me to just download the articles I want rather than print them all off. So much better this way. Still updating my "working bibliography" for the papers that most interest me - something of the "literature review" you get as part of a PhD in this process.
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