Galileo Studies: Personality, Tradition, and Revolution
Title | Galileo Studies: Personality, Tradition, and Revolution PDF eBook |
Author | Stillman Drake |
Publisher | Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press |
Pages | 310 |
Release | 1970 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN |
In a startling reinterpretation of the evidence, Stillman Drake advances the hypothesis that Galileo's condemnation by the Inquisition was caused not by his defiance of the Church, but by the hostility of contemporary philosophers. Galileo's own beautifully lucid arguments are used to show how his scientific method--based on a search not for causes but for laws--was utterly divorced from the Aristotelian approach to physics. His methodology had a definitive impact on the development of modern physics, and led to a final parting of the ways between science and philosophy.
Reading Galileo
Title | Reading Galileo PDF eBook |
Author | Renée Raphael |
Publisher | JHU Press |
Pages | 279 |
Release | 2017-03-15 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 142142178X |
How did early modern scientists interpret Galileo’s influential Two New Sciences? In 1638, Galileo was over seventy years old, blind, and confined to house arrest outside of Florence. With the help of friends and family, he managed to complete and smuggle to the Netherlands a manuscript that became his final published work, Two New Sciences. Treating diverse subjects that became the foundations of mechanical engineering and physics, this book is often depicted as the definitive expression of Galileo’s purportedly modern scientific agenda. In Reading Galileo, Renée Raphael offers a new interpretation of Two New Sciences which argues instead that the work embodied no such coherent canonical vision. Raphael alleges that it was written—and originally read—as the eclectic product of the types of discursive textual analysis and meandering descriptive practices Galileo professed to reject in favor of more qualitative scholarship. Focusing on annotations period readers left in the margins of extant copies and on the notes and teaching materials of seventeenth-century university professors whose lessons were influenced by Galileo’s text, Raphael explores the ways in which a range of early-modern readers, from ordinary natural philosophers to well-known savants, responded to Galileo. She highlights the contrast between the practices of Galileo’s actual readers, who followed more traditional, “bookish” scholarly methods, and their image, constructed by Galileo and later historians, as “modern” mathematical experimenters. Two New Sciences has not previously been the subject of such rigorous attention and analysis. Reading Galileo considerably changes our understanding of Galileo’s important work while offering a well-executed case study in the reception of an early-modern scientific classic. This important text will be of interest to a wide range of historians—of science, of scholarly practices and the book, and of early-modern intellectual and cultural history.
Galileo
Title | Galileo PDF eBook |
Author | J. L. Heilbron |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 539 |
Release | 2012-07-26 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0199655987 |
Heilbron takes in the landscape of culture, learning, religion, science, theology, and politics of late Renaissance Italy to produce a richer and more rounded view of Galileo, his scientific thinking, and the company he kept.
Hobbes and Galileo: Method, Matter and the Science of Motion
Title | Hobbes and Galileo: Method, Matter and the Science of Motion PDF eBook |
Author | Gregorio Baldin |
Publisher | Springer Nature |
Pages | 234 |
Release | 2020-04-15 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 3030414140 |
This book, translated from Italian, discusses the influence of Galileo on Hobbes’ natural philosophy. In his De motu, loco et tempore or Anti-White (~ 1643), Thomas Hobbes describes Galileo as “the greatest philosopher of all times”, and in De Corpore (1655), the Italian scientist is presented as the one who “opened the door of all physics, that is, the nature of motion.” The book gives a detailed analysis of Galileo’s legacy in Hobbes’s philosophy, exploring four main issues: a comparison between Hobbes’ and Mersenne’s natural philosophies, the Galilean Principles of Hobbes’ philosophical system, a comparison between Galileo’s momentum and Hobbes’s conatus , and Hobbes’ and Galileo’s theories of matter. The book also analyses the role played by Marin Mersenne, in spreading Galileo’s ideas in France, and as a discussant of Hobbes. It highlights the many aspects of Hobbes’ relationship with Galileo: the methodological and epistemological elements, but also the conceptual and the lexical analogies in the field of physics, to arrive, finally, at a close comparison on the subject of the matter. From this analysis emerges a shared mechanical conception of the universe open and infinite, that replaces the Aristotelian cosmos, and which is populated by two elements only: matter and motion.
Galileo
Title | Galileo PDF eBook |
Author | Jr. James Reston |
Publisher | Beard Books |
Pages | 346 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 9781587982514 |
A suspenseful narrative and spiritive rendition of the life of Galileo.
The Cambridge Companion to Galileo
Title | The Cambridge Companion to Galileo PDF eBook |
Author | Peter Machamer |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 474 |
Release | 1998-08-13 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 9780521588416 |
Not only a hero of the scientific revolution, but after his conflict with the church, a hero of science, Galileo is today rivalled in the popular imagination only by Newton and Einstein. But what did Galileo actually do, and what are the sources of the popular image we have of him? This 1998 collection of specially-commissioned essays is unparalleled in the depth of its coverage of all facets of Galileo's work. A particular feature of the volume is the treatment of Galileo's relationship with the church. It will be of interest to philosophers, historians of science, cultural historians and those in religious studies.
On the Life of Galileo
Title | On the Life of Galileo PDF eBook |
Author | Stefano Gattei |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | |
Release | 2019-07-23 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0691185743 |
The first collection and translation into English of the earliest biographical accounts of Galileo’s life This unique critical edition presents key early biographical accounts of the life and work of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), written by his close contemporaries. Collected and translated into English for the first time and supplemented by an introduction and incisive annotations by Stefano Gattei, these documents paint an incomparable firsthand picture of Galileo and offer rare insights into the construction of his public image and the complex intertwining of science, religion, and politics in seventeenth-century Italy. Here in its entirety is Vincenzo Viviani’s Historical Account, an extensive and influential biography of Galileo written in 1654 by his last and most devoted pupil. Viviani’s text is accompanied by his “Letter to Prince Leopoldo de’ Medici on the Application of Pendulum to Clocks” (1659), his 1674 description of Galileo’s later works, and the long inscriptions on the façade of Viviani’s Florentine palace (1702). The collection also includes the “Adulatio perniciosa,” a Latin poem written in 1620 by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini—who, as Pope Urban VIII, would become Galileo’s prosecutor—as well as descriptive accounts that emerged from the Roman court and contemporary European biographers. Featuring the original texts in Italian, Latin, and French with their English translations on facing pages, this invaluable book shows how Galileo’s pupils, friends, and critics shaped the Galileo myth for centuries to come, and brings together in one volume the primary sources needed to understand the legendary scientist in his time.