The notion that pre-Copernican cosmology betrayed some kind of ‘hubris’ on our part—vis-à-vis our place in the larger scheme of things—could not be more mistaken. In that model we are on the outside looking in. The conflating of ‘occupying the central position of the material cosmos’ with ‘being the most important object therein’ is a modern, not a premodern, error.
Consider…