ABSTRACT
Aristotle plays many roles in Johannes Kepler's oeuvre. He is a source of anecdotes, observations, and exempla in some of Kepler's most playful and cornucopian texts, De stella nova of 1606, and the posthumous Somnium of 1634. Kepler's goal was to improve correspondence with the original, and to rephrase in the interest of clarity and effectiveness. Kepler's Contra Ursum is composed strictly in accordance with the Ciceronian conventions for a judicial oration. Kepler seeks to substantiate his unveiling of the Pythagorean doctrines with great subtlety, by showing that it renders cogent the apparently incoherent arguments that Aristotle had uncomprehendingly attributed to them. Fernand Hallyn has written of the anagogical movement of Kepler's cosmological discourse, from the creation as manifest to us to 'the Creator's poetics'. Kepler's philological engagements with Aristotle are surely of a piece with his anagogical discourse on the creation.
