Hegel has commonly been ridiculed for views expressed in his 1801 dissertation, On the Orbits of the Planets, in the final pages of which he had adopted a series of numbers from Plato’s Timaeus – a cosmological text earlier taken seriously by Kepler – to account for the ratios of the distances from the sun of the then known six planets of the solar system. While defenders of Hegel have usually toned down the extent of these claims, this chapter argues that Hegel’s reference to Plato’s Pythagorean cosmology must be taken seriously – not as cosmology, however, but as instantiating the logic appropriate for empirically based science. Hegel’s allusion to Plato’s mythologically expressed “syllogism” is consistent with his idea that logic as Plato conceived it allowed its application to the empirical world but that this applicability had been compromised by Aristotle adaptation of it. With the proper grasp of logic’s utilization of the category of “singularity” in its difference to “particularity” – available to Plato but not Aristotle – we can appreciate how, while Kepler’s Laws were empirically based, Newton’s were not as they relied on abstract entities that could not be justified empirically.

In this chapter we end our more strenuous hike and start to enjoy a technically more relaxed stroll through the landscape of risk. An important feature throughout the book is that, for all the data examples given, we first start with a section “About the data”. In this way, you gain experience in finding and preparing the relevant data before starting with a statistical analysis. In order to discuss the consequences of climate change, we analyze the Hadley Centre Central England Temperature (HadCET) dataset. For the implications of a rise in temperature to the loss in volume of alpine glaciers, we apply the techniques learned to the case of the Lower Arolla Glacier in Switzerland. For an application to the realm of agricultural production, we look at the consequence of climate change to wine production. For this, we analyze data from a specific wine producer in France. We end this stroll with an interesting and perhaps somewhat surprising story of the astronomer Johannes Kepler. The story relates to his second marriage and the measurement of the volume of wine barrels.

It has long been recognized that astronomy was a catalyst of the Scientific Revolution, spurring on deeply consequential speculation about the nature of the cosmos and its physical principles. Yet the history of celestial physics is far richer than was thought a generation ago, and there is much to be learned about the origins of the field, particularly in the sixteenth century, when humanist activity brought forth a dazzling array of philosophical possibility—from reconsiderations of Aristotle and Islamicate commentary to the revival of Platonic, Epicurean, and Stoic worldviews. Celestial physics offered some of the most heated arguments for or against the Aristotelian cosmos, with controversial attempts to account for astronomical observation by integrating various causal innovations. This chapter will focus on a number of themes that mark celestial physics and cosmological speculation in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the order of the celestial bodies and their nature, the relationship between celestial and terrestrial things, the question of celestial animism or vitalism, and the status of the divine in celestial nature.

The discovery and implementation of telescopy and microscopy extended the power of the senses, with often surprising results. The discoveries made with these instruments challenged existing theories of nature, while simultaneously demanding new theories to account for their operation, especially of vision. Moreover, early modern epistemology had to accommodate experiential evidence made by these “artificial” means. The chapter also address advances in the literature since the twenty-year-old classic, The Invisible World by Catherine Wilson.

The Conclusion traces the importance of astrometeorological forecasts from the seventeenth century onwards. It finds surprising evidence that they finally disappeared only in the nineteenth century, despite increasing criticism. In fact, one of the attackers mourned the continuing high sales of Moore’s almanac in the 1830s. A central finding is that the increasing rejection of astrology in the eighteenth century, and the attacks on astrometeorology, led to the absence of any accepted basis for making weather forecasts. This problem, together with ongoing demand for knowledge of coming weather, led to the revival of old-fashioned weather-signs. The support given by Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler to both astrometeorology and the keeping of waether records is considered, as are early modern treatises on weather prediction. A detailed study of English 18th-century almanacs shows use of weather journals and instruments such as barometers, alongside traditional astrometeorological methods. The final conclusion is that it was only the production of FitzRoy’s new, ‘practical’ system of forecasting the weather that finally ended the age of medieval meteorology.