John Banville’s Scientific Trilogy

An Mapping of Episteme Change through Literature

Abstract

The paper shows the power of John Banville’s trilogy, Doctor Copernicus, Kepler y The Newton Letter, focused on the scientific revolution, to analyze epistemologic processes. It is especially interested in some samples of famous epistomologic complex processes in the histoty of ideas: a) the epistemic transition from the Early Modern Period to Enlightnment; b) the epistemologic issues of historiography to rebuild the past with confidence, becoming a hard science; c) the controversy around innatism, which involved sir Isaac Newton and Thomas Hobbes. All reasoning developed in the paper is based on Banville’s trilogy.