ʿAlī Qūshjī on the Earth’s Motion and Bīrjandī’s Critique
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his commentary on Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī’s Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād, ʿAlī Qūshjī (d. 879/1474) took s eral radical positions. One notable argument was his insistence that astronomy did not need Aristotelian natural philosophy. Because of this stance, in conjunction with his agreement with Ṭūsī that there were no valid empirical proofs for the Earth’s state of rest, Qūshjī concluded that “nothing fallacious follows” from the assumption of a rotating Earth. In the following generation, ʿAbd al-ʿAlī al-Bīrjandī (fl. 913/1507) was intent on refuting Qūshjī, both regarding the rejection of Aristotelian natural philosophy and the unprovability of the Earth’s state of rest. To do this, Bīrjandī, in his commentary on Ṭūsī’s al-Tadhkira fī ʿilm al-hayʾa, presents a vigorous defense of the need for Aristotelian natural philosophy and metaphysics for the practitioners of astronomy. In so doing, he affirms Ṭūsī’s position that one could justifiably prove the Earth’s immobility using natural philosophy since empirical proofs were lacking. Bīrjandī’s extended discussion is quite cogent and contains a number of interesting ideas, including the proposal of what can arguably be called “circular inertia” if the Earth were indeed rotating.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".