The Genesis of the Copernican World [Paperback]

This major work by the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg is a monumental rethinking of the significance of the Copernican revolution for our understanding of modernity. It provides an important corrective to the view of science as an autonomous enterprise and presents a new account of the history of interpretations of the significance of the heavens for man.

This book is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy

His sweeping panorama... ranges from remote antiquity through Greek and Roman, medieval Christian, Hebrew, and Islamic authors, Renaissance humanists, Reformation and Counter Reformation polemicists, secular thinkers and observers, to today's cosmonauts.

I know of no book that helps us more toward understanding [the Copernican revolution] than Blumenberg's.... The length and complexity of the work are an expression of the extraordinary care with which Blumenberg approaches historical phenomena.