In the Throes of Birth (The Making of the Early Greek Picture of Universe)

It is widely believed that the ancient Greek ideas about the world are barely mythological by nature. And even in cases they are built on firm ground of facts, those nevertheless grow from anticipations and guesses. Meanwhile, the early accounts of cosmos underwent a long evolution — from Homeros and Hesiodus to Pythagoreans — during which subtle observation and sophisticated reasoning gained increasing significance. That allowed of, at first, switching from an unshaken solid to the body freely hovering in the universe and, finally, exceeding the bounds of immediate evidence and creating a complicate image treating many phenomena otherwise than they appear to be seen from the Earth. How these patterns of cosmos developed? What the logic of their evolution consisted in? How the Philolaus’ teaching as an omen of heliocentricism became possible and why it had not been kept in ancient science? These are the questions the paper tries to answer.

Keywords: ancient astronomy, science picture of world, symmetry of the heaven, non-geocentric model, hearth of the universe.