Abstract
From the time of Aristotle to that of Galileo, physics had remained pure theory unmixed with knowledge gained from experience. Mechanics as a mixed science being regarded as subordinate and inferior to physics, the concept of a domain for the practice of physics did not exist until the seventeenth century. The practice of astronomy existed separately from the science of cosmology, and a certain tension between them held ever since Hipparchus and Geminus. A similar tension had held since antiquity between music theorists and practitioners of music. The same is true of architecture and hydraulics. But physics, by Aristotle’s definitions, had no practical component.
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Notes
Galileo’s Treatise de motu gravium,reprinted in Metaphysics and Measurement (London, 1968), p. 75.
Details are given in my `Hipparchus — Geminus — Galileo’, Stud. Hist. Philos. Science 20: 1 (1989), pp. 47–56.
Descartes to Marin Mersenne, 11 October 1638. Translated in S. Drake, Galileo at Work (Chicago 1978 ), pp. 387–8.
Benedetti’s proposition is translated in I. E. Drabkin & S. Drake, Mechanics in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Madison 1960), pp. 147–53 as it first appeared at Venice in 1553.
Translated in S. Drake, `A neglected Galilean letter’, Irnl. Hist. of Astron. 17 (1987), pp. 93–105.
Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum, tr. A. M. Duncan (New York 1981), esp. pp. 85–105.
S. Drake, Galileo against the Philosophers (Los Angeles 1976), p. 38.
Claude Palisca, `Scientific Empiricism in Musical Thought’, in H. H. Rhys, ed., Seventeenth Century Science and the Arts (Princeton 1961 ), p. 137.
Details are given in the second edition of my translation of Galileo’s Two New Sciences (Toronto, Wall & Thompson, 1989).
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Drake, S. (1994). Theory and Practice in Early Modern Physics. In: Gavroglu, K., Christianidis, J., Nicolaidis, E. (eds) Trends in the Historiography of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 151. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3596-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3596-4_2
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