This assignment is for the whole of next week. For Tuesday, you should be ready to discuss ch. 1 and the first two sections of ch. 2 (pp. 1-55). Much of our class discussion will focus on Kuhn's diagrams, so be prepared to talk about them. That doesn't mean I will expect you to have mastered all the details; it as valuable, if not more valuable, to come with questions about things you find puzzling.

Kuhn's aim in Tuesday's assignment is to lay out the basic framework and presuppositions of ancient astronomy and, at the beginning of ch. 2, to pose its central problem, how to account for the observed motion of the planets. You should try to think your way into the ancient framework, especially its earth-centered orientation and the idea that the sun and other planets move against the fixed stars along the line of the ecliptic (see p. 23 for Kuhn's introduction of that term).

The rest of ch. 2, which is the first part of your assignment for Thursday, presents the two theoretical frameworks used in ancient astronomy to account for planetary motion. The first, due to Eudoxus, may be the harder to grasp; but try to see how it worked because, although it was not the one that held sway up to Copernicus, it lay behind Aristotle's cosmology, which is the main topic of ch. 3. You should, of course, think through (and be ready to ask questions about) the key ideas of the other framework—in particular, epicycles, eccentrics, and equants.

The last section of ch. 2 (pp. 73-77) deserves special attention. A few years after publishing this book, Kuhn wrote another, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first published in 1962), and that book was probably the most influential philosophical work written on science in the 20th century. As its title suggests, Kuhn was concerned in it with the general idea of a scientific revolution, something he took to happen repeatedly and to be the key source of historical development in science. We will see him focus on only one example of such a revolution, but the points he makes at the end of ch. 2 are a good indication of the sort of general account he offered in the later book.