1
Galileo Then and Now
William R. Shea, University of Padua
(Draft of paper to be discussed at the Conference, HPD1, Center for Philosophy of
Science, University of Pittsburgh, 11-14 October 2007)
The aim of this paper is to examine how, on one hand, new material about
Galileo and, on the other hand, shifts in the current philosophical fashion and
societal moods have affected our way of looking at the man and his actual
procedure. In the first part, we consider what was omitted in the monumental
National Edition of Galileo Works in twenty volumes that Antonio Favaro edited
between 1890 and 1909.1 In the second part, we consider the new material that has
been brought to light; in the third, we mention some of the fuller accounts that have
been offered of aspects of Galileo's scientific career that were already known and,
in the fourth and concluding part, we ask how the new setting affects HPS.
2
Part I: The Favaro Edition
"Publish or perish" is an injunction that resonated as clearly in the ears of
young professors at the end of the 19th century as it does in the first decade of the
21st. But publishing can also mean perishing when what is being edited is the work
of an eminent scientist of the past. It simply won't do to offer material that readers
can find disappointing, and well authenticated sources are sometimes disregarded
when they lack apparent interest. It is largely for this reason that the Italian
government is funding a new National Edition of Galileo's Works that will be
published, from 2009 onwards, by a team of scholars working under Paolo
Galluzzi.
Over the last hundred years, a number of letters from and to Galileo as well
as a few laudatory or damning comments about his personality or his work have
been uncovered, but this would not have been enough to drum up financial and
scholarly support for a major editorial project. The interesting material is what
Favaro left out. Before mentioning what this material is, allow me a disclaimer. I'm
not focusing on Favaro because he is a singularity, but because he illustrates how a
conscientious historian can ride slipshod over evidence because of a philosophical
commitment that he is only vaguely aware of, in this case, naïve positivism. So
3
what did Favaro to leave out? The answer is large chunks of three collections of
manuscript notes in Galileo's own hand that are bound in some of the 347 volumes
of the Galilean Manuscripts in the National Library in Florence. The first of these
collections deals with logical treatises and related essays on Aristotelian
philosophy, the second with astrological computations, and the third with
laboratory notes on experiments with inclined planes and the pendulum. Favaro
rejected the first collection because they were "pre-Galilean" and hence could only
have been trite scholastic exercises that "poor" young Galileo had to undergo in
high school. The second, astrological collection, he set aside because it was,
epistemologically speaking, equally "pre-Galilean", and the third, experimental set
of notes, he only published in part because he had trouble making sense of them.
Beyond editing Galileo's works, Favaro wrote extensively on Galileo's life,
the University of Padua, and the Italian scientific milieu during the period that runs
from Galileo’s birth in 1564 to his death in 1642. Several of Favaro's remarkable
studies have been reprinted in recent years, including his two-volume Galileo
Galilei e lo Studio di Padova and a companion volume of essays, Galileo Galilei a
Padova: Ricerche e Scoperte, Insegnamento, Scolari,2 as well as the series on
Galileo’s friends and correspondents, Amici e Corrispondenti di Galileo, and his
opponents, Oppositori di Galileo.3 Also available are his Scampoli Galileiani,4 154
4
notes originally published in the Atti e Memorie della R. Accademia di Scienze
Lettere ed Arti in Padova between 1885 and 1915. Favaro mainly used his
scampoli to update and revise information provided in his previous works. For
instance, scampoli 58 and 138 both deal with the lamp in the Cathedral of Pisa
whose oscillations were once credited with putting the young Galileo in mind of the
isochronism of the pendulum. Favaro provides proof that the lamp was installed in
the cathedral only in 1587, after Galileo had left the university. In one case, Favaro
admits to be genuinely baffled, and this over a question that no biographer of
Galileo can consider trivial—namely, the date of birth of the great man himself. In
an essay published in 1887, Favaro had explained an earlier ascription of 18
February as the day Galileo was born to the desire to make his arrival into this
world coincide with Michelangelo Buonarroti’s departure. New documents
discovered by Favaro pointed in a seemingly non controversial way to 15 February
as the correct date. In scampolo 118, written twenty years later, Favaro draws
attention to a note in Galileo's own handwriting. The first of the two brief lines
reads, 15 febr. h. 22.30, the second, 16 febr: h. 4. p.m., with the numbers 3.30
placed under 4. p.m. On the second line, the 6 of 16 is clearly written over a "5."
Now before the calendar reform of 1582, Italians counted days from sunset or half
an hour there after. This would mean that if Galileo was born at 22:30 on 15
5
February, a day on which the sun set at 5:30 p.m., then he was born at 4:00 p.m. on
16 February, according to our modern calendar.
Part Two. The Student of Aristotelian Philosophy, the Distinguished
Astrologer, and the Original Experimentalist
A Scholastic Background
Favaro's strong sense of what was right and wrong in science led him to take
scant notice of the manuscript notes on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics bound in
manuscript volume 27 of the Galilean Manuscripts in the National Library in
Florence. He rashly assumed that these were copied out of textbooks when Galileo
studied at the Benedictine monastery of Vallombrosa before going to the University
of Pisa, and he omitted them in the national edition of Galileo's Works. William A.
Wallace grasped the importance of these notes and commented extensively on them
in 1984.5 Four years later they were transcribed from the Latin and published with
an introduction.6 They comprise two treatises, one on foreknowledge and the other
on demonstration, and were subsequently made available in English by Wallace in
Galileo's Logical Treatises with notes and an extensive commentary.7 Wallace
argues that Galileo was sufficiently interested in Aristotle's logic to cull long
6
passages from the lecture notes that Paolo Valla, a Jesuit professor at the Roman
College, used during the academic year 1587-88, when he taught a course on the
Posterior Analytics. It was customary for professors to hand out their "notes", and
Galileo could easily have secured a copy from friends such as Christopher Clavius,
whom he visited at the Roman College and with whom he corresponded in 1588.
In all likelihood, Galileo drafted these treatises during the academic year
1588-89, shortly before he was appointed professor of mathematics at Pisa. What
role the study of Aristotle's logic played in the development of Galileo's own views
on the nature of the scientific method remains a moot question in spite of the new
material. Galileo attacked several of Aristotle’s ideas, but he never queried
Aristotle’s scientific realism, namely the view that there is a uniquely true physical
theory, discoverable by human powers of reason and observation, and that
alternative theories are consequently false. Where Galileo differed from Aristotle
was in his conception of the nature of this physical reality. In a very broad sense,
Aristotle looked at nature as a process by which things fulfill their potential, and
this turned speculation away from questions of structure and mechanism and
toward questions of function and development. Galileo never vouchsafed a
definition of science or a systematic account of scientific procedure. Yet his
practice is eloquent. There is no doubt that he considered himself a disciple of
7
Archimedes and that he believed mathematics to be the key to the interpretation of
nature. He made this clear in a famous passage in The Assayer: "Philosophy is
written in this great book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to
our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first studies the language and the
characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its
characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is
humanly impossible to understand a single word of it".8 In a companion volume to
Galileo’s Logical Treatises, suitably entitled Galileo Logic of Discovery and
Proof,9 Wallace argues that Galileo created, in the heavens and on earth, a new
science of motion by following the Aristotelian canons laid down in the Posterior
Analytics. In this way Galileo would have used Aristotle's logic to subvert
Aristotelian physics.
It is interesting to contrast Wallace's thesis with the one put forward by
Joseph C. Pitt, who offers a reconstruction of Galileo's methodology along lines
that are much more modern and in which the epistemological core is no longer
Aristotelian logic, but commonsense instrumentalism.10 Pitt emphasizes Galileo's
pragmatic shifts and points out the futility of trying to turn his creative blend of
mathematics and experimentation into a full-fledged philosophical program. No
one should read Galileo without heeding Pitt's words of caution and his reminder
8
that if experiments sometime speak with a forked tongue, methodological rules
have also been known to be no more than clashing cymbals.
Galileo Astrologer
That Galileo was, like other astronomers of his day, a practicing astrologer
no longer shocks our students who are familiar with bookshops that contain (by an
embarrassing margin) more books on the new age than on the history and
philosophy of science. A hundred years ago, matters were very different and
Favaro hesitated about publishing some twenty-five astrological charts that are
bound in volume 81 of the Galilean Manuscripts in the National Library in
Florence. They comprise forty-eight pages and contain Galileo's own horoscopes,
and those of his children, his friends, and prominent personalities including the
Granduke of Tuscany. They are only a small sample of those that he produced
during his lifetime. Favaro published four of them but they attracted little attention.
In 1978, the Italian astronomer, Guglielmo Righini, suggested that they tell us
something important about Galileo's view of himself as a practicing scientist.11
More recently, Noel Swerdlow has begun a detailed study of their composition and
their significance.12 He considers them so significant that he is editing them for
forthcoming new National Edition of Galileo's Works. What is striking is not only
the time and dedication that Galileo lavished on these charts, but the fact that he
9
composed character-judgments based upon them. For instance, he describes how
his two daughters, Virginia and Livia, can be expected to behave, and we can only
assume that he was guided by these forecasts in the way he brought them up.
Gianfrancesco Sagredo, the very man whom Galileo immortalized as the openminded amateur in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,
repeatedly called on Galileo for astrological advice, and recommended him to other
Venetian aristocrats.
Laboratory Notes Retrieved
In his last book, the Discourses on Two New Sciences (1638), Galileo offers
a logical sequence of postulates, theorems and problems that explain his two
fundamental laws about naturally accelerated motion and the path of projectiles.
The first law tells us that freely failing bodies accelerate at a constant speed,
regardless of their weight, and that the distance they cover is proportional to the
square of the time elapsed during their fall. The second identifies the trajectory of
projectiles as a parabola and rests on the realization that horizontal and vertical
motions can be combined without interfering with one another. These important
discoveries altered the course of physics, but what about their genesis? Galileo kept
notes of his experimental work from 1602 onwards, and they are preserved in
volume 72 of the Galilean Manuscripts. Written over a period of 35 years, they
10
cover 160 folios. Favaro despaired of restoring their original order of composition,
and what he published in volume 8 of the National Edition of the Opere is arranged
partly on the appearance of topics in Galileo Discourses on Two New Sciences, and
partly on conjectures made by Raffaello Caverni. Favaro left out notes bearing only
diagrams, calculations or experimental data, whence the occasions when Galileo
advanced by making careful measurements were lost to view. The chronology of
the notes was restored, albeit in a tentative way, by Stillman Drake, who based
himself on Galileo's handwriting that changed, as is normal, over a long period of
time, but was also affected by a rheumatic condition that recurred and can at times
be identified from dated letters. Drake considered not just size and regularity but
also habitual ligatures, abbreviations and the like, and he made an extensive study
of the watermarking of paper used by Galileo. For instance, the "rhinoceros"
watermark is found on dated letters by Galileo only in 1607 and 1609. Drake's
temporal ordering has sometimes been questioned but scholars can now make up
their own mind by going on the web where there is a high resolution scan of
volume 72.13
The laboratory notes are posterior to another Galilean manuscript, De Motu
Antiquiora, which was included by Favaro in the first volume of the National
Edition. It consists of a ninety-page treatise on motion, a dialogue on the same
11
topic, and drafts or revisions of the treatise. Most scholars ascribed these works to
the period before Galileo left Pisa for Padua in 1592. A. C. Crombie and Adriano
Carugo claimed that they are much posterior, perhaps as late as 1630-32,14 but
Michele Camerota produced a convincing rebuttal of this hypothesis, adducing,
among other evidence, that Dionisio Font, who is mentioned as a contemporary in
the dialogue form of the treatise, died in September 1590.15 The traditional dates,
1589-92, can safely be retained for the composition of De Motu Antiquiora, with its
scholastic analysis of motion and its incisive, but traditional, critique of Aristotle. A
major conceptual shift occurred only later in Padua sometime between 1604 and
1609, when Galileo wrote an essay, De Motu Accelerato, in which he transcended
the medieval physics of impetus to arrive at his celebrated law of free fall.
Part Three: Familiar Landscapes Under Better Lighting
Galileo's Instruments Re-examined
While in Padua Galileo not only studied the properties of uniformly
accelerated motion but also invented, produced, and sold a mechanical computing
device, the geometrical and military compass. This instrument, known in English as
a sector, consists of two arms joined at one end by a pivot. The arms are of equal
12
length and bear a set of identical numerical scales on the front and a second set of
identical numerical scales on the back. By following the instructions in the manual
that Galileo provided, a person untrained in mathematics could rapidly perform a
number of operations, such as constructing a regular polygon with an area equal to
that of a given circle, converting one currency into another, extracting square roots,
finding mean proportionals, calibrating cannonballs of different materials, or
determining the height of distant objects. Galileo published his instruction manual
in 1606, and it was promptly plagiarized by a former student, Baldassar Capra,
whom Galileo sued in court and rebutted in print. Galileo's manual, Il Compasso
Geometrico e Militare, Capra’s Usus et Fabrica Circini cuiusdam Proportionis,
and Galileo’s scathing reply Difesa contro alle Calunnie ed Imposture di Baldassar
Capra, are reprinted by Roberto Vergara Caffarelli in a facsimile of the Paduan
edition of 1744.16 One of the features of this reprint is the inclusion of the
commentary of Mathias Bernegger (1582-1640) that runs for thirty-eight pages and
is of great help in understanding how Galileo constructed his instrument and
determined the scales, something he was careful not to disclose in his manual in
order to safeguard his invention. Caffarelli provides a useful introduction in which
he compares Galileo's compass with those of other instrument makers. Galileo
hoped to fly back to Florence on the wings of his compass but, in the end, his return
13
to his native Tuscany was rendered possible by the more spectacular achievements
of his telescope.
When Galileo visited friends in Venice in the summer of 1609, he heard that
someone had presented Count Maurice of Nassau with a spyglass by means of
which distant objects could be brought closer. When Galileo returned to Padua on 3
August, his fertile mind was teeming with possibilities. By 21 August he was back
in Venice with a telescope capable of eightfold magnification. He convinced
worthy senators to climb with him to the top of high towers from whence they were
able to see boats coming to port a good two hours before they could be spotted by
the naked eye. The strategic advantage of the new instrument was not lost on a
maritime power, and Galileo’s salary was increased from 520 to 1,000 florins per
year. Unfortunately, after the first flush of enthusiasm, the senators heard the
sobering news that the telescope was already widespread throughout Europe, and
when the official document was drawn up, it stipulated that Galileo would only get
his raise at the expiration of his existing contract a year later and that he would be
barred, for life, from the possibility of subsequent increases. This incident
understandably made Galileo sour. He had not claimed to be the inventor of the
telescope, and if the senators had compared his instrument with those made by
others, they would have found that his was far superior. Let the Venetian republic
14
keep the eight-power telescope. He would make a better one and offer it to a more
enlightened patron! Better still, he would show how much more could be revealed
not only on land and sea but beyond the reaches of human navigation as well.
Galileo pointed his telescope to the heavens, and for the first time the human
eye had a close-up view of the moon with its mountains and valleys. Soon
thereafter Galileo saw ten times as many stars as had been previously known,
observed the Milky Way dissolving into a swarm of starlets, and, more exciting
still, discovered in January 1610 four satellites orbiting around Jupiter. He named
these "Medicean" stars in honor of Cosimo II, the Granduke of Tuscany, and, lest
others publish before him, he rushed into print. His last observation of the satellites
of Jupiter is dated 2 March, and, on 13 March, Galileo could already send an
unbound copy of the slim volume to the Granduke. Five hundred and fifty copies
were printed, and the edition was soon sold out, to be promptly followed by a
pirated
edition
in Frankfurt. Shortly thereafter Galileo
was
appointed
mathematician and philosopher of the Granduke of Tuscany. He did not exactly
thumb his nose at the Venetians, but he left the republic without the usual
courtesies of leave taking and made haste to settle in Florence.
15
The Sidereus Nuncius is available in several English versions,17 but French
scholars have produced two excellent translations with extended commentaries.18
Particularly rich is the one by Isabelle Pantin, Le Messager Céleste, which
reproduces the editio princeps of 1610 with a number of corrections that make the
text superior to the one that we find in the third volume of Favaro's National
Edition of Galileo's works.19 On the technical side Sven Dupré has investigated two
telescopes of Galileo that are preserved in Florence and is currently pursuing
research on Galileo's optics.20
Another instrument that Galileo used, a musical one this time, is the lute that
is discussed from a variety of viewpoints in Music and Science in the Age of
Galileo,21 the proceedings of what must have been a memorable musical event.
Claude V. Palisca shows that Galileo's father, Vincenzo Galilei, had a strong
experimental bent and that his son probably learned from him how to carry out tests
on the way consonance relates to the length, the thickness, and the tension of a
string. Robert E. Butts offers a provocative analysis of Galileo's distinction
between what came to be called primary and secondary qualities, and what this
implied for his interpretation of sounds as musical. Robert Lundberg has Galileo in
tune with the universe and even teases out the metaphysics of his instrument.
16
The Galileo Affair Reconsidered
Galileo's clash with the Church has become a fashionable topic since the
publication of Pietro Redondi's Galileo Heretic.22 Redondi's claim that Galileo was
condemned for his views on atomism rather than for his advocacy of the motion of
the Earth has generally being discarded, but his re-examination of the Roman Curia
has given rise to a renewed interest in the way the Inquisition worked. Maurice A.
Finocchiaro has devoted two books to the subject,23 and so have Mariano Artigas
and William R. Shea.24 Richard J. Blackwell has delved behind the scenes,25 and
Annibale Fantoli has taken the Vatican to task for failing to rehabilitate Galileo
properly in 1992.26 The various and varying views are discussed in The Church and
Galileo that Ernan McMullin edited in 2005, and in which a new document about
the trial is analyzed by Mariano Artigas, Rafael Martinez and William R. Shea.27
A writer and his patrons.
In recent years considerable attention has been paid to Galileo's
outstanding rhetorical gifts and his dialectical skill. Never before had any advocate
of the heliocentric theory been so apt at convincing an audience by the sheer
brilliance of his presentation nor so masterful at laughing an opponent off the stage
when he refused to be persuaded. Galileo drew from the literary resources of his
17
native Italian to convey insights and to stimulate reflection. His arguments were not
presented in the bare factualness of the modern laboratory report or the unflinching
rigor of mathematical deduction. Galileo did not offer his ideas in the nakedness of
abstract thought but clothed them in the colors of feelings, intending not only to
inform but also to move and entice to action. He wished to bring about nothing less
than a reversal of the 1616 decision against Copernicanism, and the dialogue form
that he chose for his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems seemed to
him most conducive to this end. Galileo strategy is illuminated by Jean Dietz Moss
in her Novelties in the Heavens28 where dialectic is recognized and studied as a tool
of scientific investigation. As she puts it very nicely, "The ethos of the Tuscan
scientist and the pathos of his situation argued more strongly than the scientific
proofs".29 Galileo aimed his arguments at a specific audience, and we cannot study
his rhetorical strategy without taking cognizance of the values and whims of the
society in which he operated. In order to understand the background against which
Galileo’s arguments were assessed and the reasons why he favored some strategies
over other ones, Mario Biagioli has written a couple of monographs on the role of
patronage in Galileo's career.30 Biagioli sheds light on the Tuscan court and the
Roman famiglia (as the Popes styled their entourage), where Galileo found many of
his readers and most of his critics. The visibility that Galileo acquired when he
became philosopher and chief mathematician of the Granduke of Tuscany in 1610
18
created opportunities for the dissemination of his views but also pitfalls that, as a
university professor, he had not been trained to circumnavigate. Galileo's success
as a courtier was not unqualified, and patronage does not seem to have played a
determining role either in the choice of his scientific problems or the way he went
about investigating them. What cannot be disputed, however , is the shift of interest
away from earlier efforts to relate Galileo's achievements to the development of
modern philosophy of science towards works that consider his personality and his
relations to this family and his contemporaries. Hence the immensely successful
Galileo's Daughter of Dava Sobel,31 or the more controversial, almost pugnacious,
Galileo's Mistake by the journalist Wade Rowland's, who wants to show that the
claims of science should be judged before being celebrated.32 Annibale Fantoli's
Galileo: for Copernicanism and for the Church,33 a well-balanced and
comprehensive survey, is essentially concerned with the drama of Galileo's trial
and its traumatic effect on Catholic scientists. A welcome exception is Michael
Sharratt's Galileo Decisive Innovator that locates Galileo in the scientific context
that he inherited and transformed.34
19
Part IV: So What About the Scientist and the Philosopher?
In the first half of the last century, Galileo was usually presented as a clearheaded empiricist and ruthless gatherer of facts who had the mathematical skill to
order and interpret his observations in such a way that laws of nature emerged. He
was seen as both an antidote to medieval superstition, and an example to future
generations. Experiments enabled him to find the law of freely falling bodies (it is
here that the Tower of Pisa story proved useful), and to formulate the principle of
inertia, according to which a body continues at rest or in steady straight-line
motion, unless an outside force acts upon it. This, the most debatable discovery of
all, had been valued as providing the key to the Newtonian system. The most
influential spokesmen for this characterization were Ernst Mach in Europe and
Edward Strong in America.35 With Alexander Koyré, Galileo studies were given a
thoroughly paradoxical twist.36 By comparison with Platonist influences,
empiricism was accorded a very small part in Galileo's total achievement and,
hence, in the birth of modern science. Galileo now became a rationalist. In the
meantime, and out of the limelight, scholars such as Pierre Duhem and Annaliese
Maier claimed that whatever the character of Galileo's philosophy, as a scientist he
was merely continuing a classical and medieval tradition, and that the scientific
revolution had been slowly and unobtrusively gathering pace for centuries.
20
Where does the truth lie? Colorful philosophers like Paul Feyerabend argued
that it doesn't matter because in science, as in politics, "anything goes". This
provocative and controversial statement received much attention in a society that
was fast becoming multicultural and had just witnessed the collapse of Fascism,
Communism, and a host of other "isms". Sociologists and political scientists
jumped on the bandwagon under the erroneous impression that history and
philosophy of science needed no serious study but were just a parlor game.
Meanwhile philosophers and historians of science sought a middle course, arguing
that Koyré went too far, and that traditional versions of empiricism, in which
theories were supposedly deduced from experience, were wrong. The recovery of
Galileo's laboratory notes have enabled scholars to reassess his actual procedure but
much still has to be done. I am happy to be able to report that the best work in this
field is being done in Pittsburgh by Paolo Palmieri whose recent papers has shed
new light on how Galileo went about his experiments.37 Since he is attending this
meeting, I'll let him enlighten us personally about his current research. The other
place where Galileo's experiments are being examined in a fresh light is Pisa where
Roberto Vergara Caffarelli has reconstructed several of the instruments that Galileo
used. In Padua, from a more philosophical and mathematical perspective, Tiziana
Bascelli is studying Galileo's mature views about the force of percussion, and the
way his most distinguished disciple, Evangelista Torricelli, cast Galileo's
21
arguments about motion in a new mould. The aim is to understand how modern
science moved from Galileo to Newton. I have a feeling that we are getting
somewhere.
The current challenge to HPS is how to use our enhanced knowledge of
Galileo’s education, language, style and salary to understand his science, not to
supplant it.38 It is useful to know that Galileo held a court appointment but more
important to realize, for instance, that he did not use algebra and never wrote an
equation in his life, not even in his private papers. Nor did he use decimal fractions,
which were first introduced in 1585. He adhered to the Euclidean theory of ratios
and proportionality among mathematically continuous magnitudes, and this is the
technique that played an important role in his analysis of motion. When he began
investigating the properties of falling bodies, he could not legitimately measure
speed as a kind of "ratio" of a distance to a time. In principle those entities had no
ratio, properly speaking, for in Euclid’s mathematics "ratio" was defined as a
relation between magnitudes of the same kind, for example, two distances or two
times. To express a relation between distances and times of motion, it was
necessary to establish a proportionality, that is, a sameness of ratio for two
distances and two times. In uniformly accelerated motions, proportionality exists
22
between distances and the squares of the times. How Galileo came to see this is
linked with discovery of the isochronism of the pendulum.
A good way to see how things have changed is to contrast two remarkable
collections of essays on Galileo that have appeared at an interval of thirty-one
years. I refer, of course, to Ernan McMullin's Galileo Man of Science of 1967,39
and Peter Machamer's The Cambridge Companion to Galileo of 1998.40 The only
author to appear in both volumes is Ernan McMullin, and it is interesting to note
that although he has not changed his mind, he has shifted his ground. In 1967 he
wrote a fifty-page essay on "Galileo, Man of Science"; and in 1998 an eighty-page
essay on "Galileo on Science and Scripture". Both are outstanding and repay close
study, but whereas the first is intended for readers interested in the philosophy of
science, the second is aimed at an audience concerned with a wider variety of
issues. Ernan McMullin has always remained fashionable, I suppose because he has
been able not only to anticipate trends but to contribute to their formation.
The current state of the art will strike historians and philosophers of science
as one of the ironies of university education. HPS stemmed, at least partly, from the
realization that the great seventeenth and eighteenth-century creators of the modern
way of philosophizing–Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant–were
23
studied in total isolation from the scientific belief and the methodology of their
contemporaries. It is ironical because, time after time, their metaphysical claims
prove to have been rooted in empirical discoveries, scientific theories, and
mathematical procedures. On the one hand, HPS has showed how much they owe,
to such as Galileo. On the other, HPS has disclosed, in the opposite direction as it
were, how Galileo was moved by certain firm philosophical ideals. The discussion
may have flagged but it deserves to be taken up once again.
1
2
Galileo Galilei, Opere, edited by Antonio Favaro. Florence: Barbèra, 1890-1909.
Antonio Favaro, Galileo Galilei e lo Studio di Padova. 2 vols. Padua: Editrice
Antenore; 1966; Galileo Galilei a Padova: Ricerche e Scoperte, Insegnamento,
Scolari. Padua: Antenore, 1968.
3
Antonio Favaro, 1983. Amici e corrispondenti di Galileo, edited by Paolo
Galluzzi. Florence: Salimbeni, 1983; Oppositori di Galileo, edited by William R.
Shea. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, 2007.
4
Scampoli galileiani. 2 vols., edited by Lucia Rossetti and Maria Laura Soppelsa.
Trieste: Lint, 1992.
24
William A. Wallace, Galileo and His Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio
5
Romano in Galileo's Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Galileo Galilei, Tractatio de Praecognitionibus et Praecognitis and Tractatio de
6
Demonstratione, transcribed from the Latin autograph by William F. Edwards, with
an introduction, notes and commentary by William A. Wallace. Padua: Antenore,
1988.
7
William A Wallace; Galileo Logical Treatises: A Translation, with Notes and
Commentary, of His Appropriated Latin Questions on Aristotle′s “Posterior
Analytics.” Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992.
8
Galileo Galilei, Opere, edited by Antonio Favaro. Florence: Barbèra, 1890-1909,
vol. 6, p. 232. English translation in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, edited by
Stillman Drake. New York: 1957, pp. 237-238.
William A. Wallace, Galileo's Logic of Discovery and Proof. Dordrecht: Kluwer,
9
1992.
10
Joseph C. Pitt, Galileo, Human Knowledge, and the Book of Nature. Dordrecht
and Boston: Kluwer, 1992.
11
Guglielmo Righini, "L'Oroscopo Galileiano di Cosimo II de' Medici", Annali
dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze 1 (1976), pp. 29-36.
25
12
Noel Swerdlow, "Galileo's Horoscopes", Journal for the History of Astronomy 35
(2004), pp. 135-141. See also Bernadette Brady, "Four Galilean Horoscopes: An
Analysis of Galileo's Astrological Techniques" in Galileo's Astrology , a special
issue of Culture and Cosmos 7 (2003), pp. 113-144.
13
www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Galileo_Prototype; http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/ms72.
The manuscript is made available courtesy of the National Library of Florence, the
Institute for the History of Science of Florence, and the Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science of Berlin.
14
Adriano Carugo and A. C. Crombie. "The Jesuits and Galileo's Idea of Science
and of Nature", Annali dell’istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze 8
(1983), pp. 3-68. A perceptive account of the relations between Galileo and the
Jesuits can be found in Corrado Dollo, Galileo Galilei e la Cultura della
Tradizione. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003.
15
How the manuscript came to be edited in the nineteenth century by Antonio
Favaro is told by Michele Camerota in Gli Scritti “De Motu Antiquiora” di Galileo
Galilei: il Ms Gal 71: Un'analisi storico-critica. Cagliari: Cooperativa
Universitaria Editrice Cagliaritana, 1992. The important contribution of Raffaello
Caverni is stressed, and we learn that Favaro lifted passages out of Caverni′s letters
without always giving him due credit. Caverni was aware of the work of Galileo′s
26
forerunners, and he was less prone than most nineteenth-century historians of
science to see in Galileo's early papers the adumbration of views that Galileo
published only four decades later.
16
Galileo Galilei, Il Compasso Geometrico e Militare, edited by Roberto Vergara
Caffarelli, Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1992.
17
There are several English translations: The Sidereal Messenger, translated by E.
Stafford Carlos. London: Rivington, 1880. (Facsimile, London: Dawson, 1960);
The Starry Messenger in Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
(incomplete translation) New York: Doubleday, 1957, pp. 21-58. Complete
translation, but imbedded in other material, in Stillman Drake, Telescopes, Tides
and Tactics. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983; Sidereus Nuncius or The
Sidereal Messenger, translated by Albert Van Helden. Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1989.
18
The French have had an incomplete translation by Alexandre Tinelis since 1681,
but 1992 was a bounty year with the publication of two French translations: Le
messager des étoiles, translated by Fernand Hallyn. Paris: Seuil, and Le messager
céleste, translated by Isabelle Pantin. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
19
Pantin has given the same painstaking and erudite attention to the reaction of
Johannes Kepler to Galileo's celestial discoveries. Kepler′s Dissertatio cum
27
"Nuncio Sidereo" and his Narratio de Observatis Jovis Satellibus are edited and
translated in Johannes Kepler, Discussion avec le Messager Céleste: Rapport sur
l’Observation des Satellites de Jupiter. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993.
20
Sven Dupré, "Galileo's Telescope and Celestial Light", Journal for the History of
Astronomy XXXIV (2003), pp. 369-399.
21
Music and Science in the Age of Galileo, edited by Victor Coelho. Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1992.
22
Pietro Ridondi, Galileo Heretic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. The
original Italian, Galileo Eretico, appeared in 1983.
23
Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair. A Documentary History. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989, and Retrying Galileo 1633-1992. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005.
24
William R. Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003 and Galileo Observed. Science and the Politics of Belief.
Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2006.
25
Richard J. Blackwell, Behind the Scenes at Galileo's Trial. Notre-Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
28
26
Annibale Fantoli, Galileo and the Catholic Church. Notre Dame, Ind.: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2003. This is a slim volume of 35 pages. The heavy artillery
is found in the Italian version, Il Caso Galileo. Dalla condanna alla
"riabilitazione". Una questione chiusa? Milan: Rizzoli, 2003, which runs to 277
pages.
27
Ernan McMullin (ed.), The Church and Galileo. Notre-Dame, Ind.: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2005.
28
Moss, Jean Dietz, Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science in the
Copernican Controversy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. See also
Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Galileo and the Art of Reasoning. Boston: Kluwer, 1980
and, more recently, Mauro di Giandomenico and Pasquale Guaragnella (eds.), La
Prosa di Galileo: La Lingua, la Retorica, la Storia. Lecce: Argo, 2006.
29
Jean Dietz Moss, Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science in the
Copernican Controversy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. xi.
30
Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of
Absolutism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; Galileo's Instruments of
Credit. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006.
31
Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter: A Drama of Science, Faith and Love. London:
Fourth Estate, 1999. The letters of Galileo's daughter in Italian with an English
29
translation on facing pages is available in Dava Sober (ed.), To Father. The Letters
of Sister Maria Celeste to Galileo 1623-1633. London: Fourth Estate, 2001.
32
Wade Rowland, Galileo's Mistake. The Archeology of a Myth. Toronto: Thomas
Allen, 2001.
Annibale Fantoli, Galileo: for Copernicanism and for the Church, translated by
33
George V. Coyne. Vatican: Vatican Observatory Publications, 1994, second revised
edition, 1996.
34
Michael Sharratt, Galileo Decisive Innovator. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
35
Ernst Mach's Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung Historisch-Kritisch Dargestellt
went through seven editions in Mach's lifetime (1838-1916). The sixth edition was
translated by Thomas J. McCormack as The Science of Mechanic. Chicago: Open
Court, 1893, with frequent reprints. Edward Strong, Procedures and Metaphysics
[1936]. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966. Its influence is particularly noticeable in
the writings of Stillman Drake.
36
Alexandre Koyré, Etudes Galiléennes. Paris: Hermann, 1939, reprint 1966.
English translation by John Mepham as Galileo Studies. Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1978.
37
Paolo Palmieri, "Galileo's Construction of Idealized Fall in the Void", History of
Science 43 (2005), pp. 343-389; "spuntar lo scoglio più duro": Did Galileo Ever
30
Think the Most Beautiful Thought Experiment in the History of Science?", Studies
in History and Philosophy of Science 36 (2005), pp. 223-240; "The Cognitive
Development of Galileo’s Theory of Buoyancy", Archive for History of Exact
Sciences 50 (2005), pp. 189-222; "Mental Models in Galileo′s Early
Mathematization of Nature", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 34
(2003), pp. 229-264.
38
Stillman Drake made this point in his last major work, Galileo: Pioneer Scientist.
Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1990.
39
Ernan McMullin (ed.), Galileo Man of Science. London: Basic Books, 1967.
40
Peter Machamer, The Cambridge Companion to Galileo. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.