Recent reading has been adding considerably to my "working bibliography" - the articles I consider most relevant to the topics I might cover in my dissertation and beyond. Included in these have been a stack of articles by Robert Westman, all of them very good indeed. Highlights have included his paper on Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution, "The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory" from Isis, and "The Astronomer's Role in the Sixteenth Century: A preliminary Study" from BJHS. But one book that I have been able to find yet is The Copernican Achievement, which he edited You would think LSE would have a copy as it is where the Lakatos and Zahar paper on Copernicus first appeared. It also contains a paper by Westman called "Three Responses to the Copernican Theory: Johannes Praetorius, Tycho Brahe and Michael Maestlin". This is essential reading it seems to me.
So having failed to find it at LSE and Senate House, I tracked down Professor Westman at the University of California in San Diego - the same place we share Nancy Cartwright with. I sent him an email asking if he happened to have a PDF file of this he could send me and was rather surprised to get a reply about 15 minutes later. This was actually quite a long and detailed reply and pointed me in the direction of some other articles that he thought might be relevant to my task.
I sent him back a reply of thanks, noting one or two other things, answering a couple of questions he asked me, and got a second reply later on. Are all US academics so helpful (following on from my emails to Maurice Finnochiaro a few weeks back)? For instance, he has asked me to keep in touch and let me know how I am getting on with my topic. Is this just politeness? Who knows? But I probably will be in touch again with him - maybe in the new year, perhaps after I hear from the &HPS conference people.
Some more pondering on PhDs this afternoon. I have been reading the material on the Cambridge University History of Science department website. Nicholas Jardine is professor there and I have just got his book on Kepler's Reply to Ursus out of the LSE library. Maybe he would agree to be my advisor if I do follow my plan to work on the early Copernicans. In my idle moments, I dream of writing a 400 page book on Kepler's science and philosophy and another 400 page book updating Kuhn's Copernican Revolution - maybe called "The Copernican Revolution - 1500 to 1635" (perhaps followed by a second volume, covering 1535 - 1750) Idle dreams, eh? It is really impossible to say this could happen?
After a spell of a few months when I haven't downloaded any "recordings of independent origin" I did spend a short time this afternoon running through the things that have appeared on my usual site for such things over the past month or so. So I now have loads of new live shows to listen to including an extraordinary recent recording of Klaus Schulze and Lisa Gerrard which I can barely wait to hear, recent Carcass, a recent show by The Fall, a 1987 show by Big Black, recent Calexico and Kristin Hersh, something I might already have by Labradford, a recent, and not very good recording of Mogwai (where there do play "Scotland's Shame" though), some Morbid Angel, a recent Nick Cave show, Pink Floyd from the early 1970s playing "Dark Side of the Moon", Ravi and Anoushka Shankar (think I have this already), two Swans shows from 1984 and 1987 respectively, recent Sigur Ros, and what could be a really excellent show by Terry Riley and Charlemaine Palestine. A suitable variety to make up for some things I downloaded for Linda the other day, which I would hate to have known that I had downloaded
Finally, I seem to be getting a cold. I am feeling a bit under the weather and found it hard to work today. My throat is sore and nose a bit blocked. So I am consuming vast quantitites of "All in One" left over from my last cold. Not much word done today - mainly copying some sections of the books I borrowed (which I can best do when I don't feel well) and reading some of the books on academia I have recently acquired. Hopefully get more done tomorrow, when I plan to mainly write up some essay notes. Maybe I caught this from Caroline who had been ill for most of the last week or so.
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