Abstract
What was Galileo hoping to achieve in publishing in 1632 his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican? A standard view is that he had two principal aims. Specifically, he is said to have wanted to persuade the learned world of the truth of the Copernican cosmology, and perhaps even to bring about a reversal of the 1616 Decree of the Holy Congregation against “the false Pythagorean doctrine, altogether contrary to Holy Scripture, that the earth moves and the sun is motionless.” More generally, he is said to have wanted to promote “the new science” in place of the old, a mathematically and experimentally based investigation of nature in place of the traditional qualitative natural philosophy grounded in the works of Aristotle.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Mario Biagioli, “Galileo the emblem maker,” Isis, 81 (1990), 230–258.
S. F. Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York, 1978)
E. Bellone, A World on Paper: Studies on the Second Scientific Revolution, tr. M. and R. Giaconni (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
W. A. Wallace, Galileo and His Sources. The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Galileo’s Science, and take this opportunity to withdraw a misguided criticism of it in my review of his book in International Philosophical Quarterly, 28 (1988), 121–124.
J. G. Lennox has argued that Galileo conceives his new science of local motion in a manner which conforms closely to Arisotle’s prescriptions in the Posterior Analytics for a mixed or subalternate science: “Aristotle, Galileo, and ’mixed science,’ ” in W. A. Wallace (ed.), Reinterpreting Galileo (Washington, D.C., 1986), 29–51.
R. D. McKirahan, Jr., “Aristotle’s subordinate sciences,” British Journal for the History of Science, 11 (1978), 197–220.
W. R. Laird, The Scientiae Mediae in Commentaries on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (unpubl. Ph.D. thesis, Toronto, 1983)
J. Gagné, “Du quadrivium aux scientiae mediae,” in Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge, Actes du quatrième congrès international de Philosophie mediévale (Montreal, 1969), 975–986
J. A. Weisheipl, “Classification of the sciences in medieval thought,” Mediaeval Studies, 27 (1965), 54–90.
R. S. Westman, “The astronomer’s role in the sixteenth century: a preliminary study,” History of Science, 18 (1980), 105–147
N. Jardine, The Birth of History and Philosophy of Science: Kepler’s A Defence of Tycho against Ursus with Essays on Its Provenance and Significance (Cambridge, 1984), Ch. 7.
Maurice Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley, 1989).
G. Morpurgo-Tagliabue, I processi di Galileo e l’epistemologia (Rome, 1981), 52–71.
W. Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore, 1974)
S. R. Suleiman and C. Inge (eds.) The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, 1980).
Galileo Galilei, Tractatio de praecognitionibus et praecognitis and Tractatio de demonstratione, transcribed from the Latin autograph by W. F. Edwards with an introduction, notes and commentary by W. A. Wallace (Padua, 1988).
J. D. Moss, “Galileo’s Letter to Christina: some rhetorical considerations,” Renaissance Quarterly, 36 (1963), 547–576
J. D. Moss, “The rhetoric of proof in Galileo’s writings on the Copernican system,” in W. A. Wallace (ed.), Reinterpreting Galileo (Washington, D.C., 1986), 179–204.
C. L. Hamblin, Fallacies (London, 1970).
C. Vasoli, La dialettica e retorica dell’Umanesimo. “Invenzione” e “Metodo” nella cultura del XV e XVI secolo (Milan, 1968).
L. A. Jardine, “Humanistic logic,” in C. B. Schmitt and Q. R. D. Skinner (eds.), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 173–198.
J. Monfasani, “Humanism and rhetoric,” in A. Rabil, Jr. (ed.), Renaissance Humanism: Foundation, Forms and Legacy (Philadelphia, 1988), III, 171–270.
L. Olschki, “Galileo’s literary formation,” in E. McMullin, ed., Galileo: Man of Science (New York, 1967), 140–159
E. Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Hague, 1954)
T. Wlassics, Galilei critico letterario (Ravenna, 1974).
J. H. Randall, “The development of scientific method in the School of Padua,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 (1940), 177–206
W. A.Wallace, Causality and Scientific Explanation (Ann Arbor, 1972), I, 117–155
N. Jardine, “Galileo’s road to truth and the demonstrative regress,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1 (1976), 277–318
G. Papuli, “La teoria del ’regressus’ come metodo scientifico negli autori della Scuola di Padova,” in L. Olivieri (ed.), Aristotelismo veneto e scienza moderna (Padua, 1983), I, 77.
G. C. Giacobbe has written extensively on this debate: “Il Commentarium de certitudine mathematicarum disciplinarum di Alessandro Piccolomini,” Physis, 14 (1972), 162–193
G. C. Giacobbe “Francesco Barozzi e la Quaestio de certitudine mathematicarum,” Physis, 14 (1972), 357–374
G. C. Giacobbe “Epigoni nel Seicento della ’Quaestio de certitudine mathematicarum’: Giuseppe Biancani,” Physis, 18 (1976), 5–40
G. C. Giacobbe “Un gesuita progressista nella ’Quaestio de certitudine mathematicarum’ rinascimentale: Benito Pereyra,” Physis, 19 (1977), 51–86
G. C. Giacobbe, Alle radici della rivoluzione scientifica. Le opere di Pietro Catena sui rapporti tra matematica e logica (Pisa, 1981).
D. Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
L. Russo, “Novellistica e dialoghistica nella Firenze del ’500,” Belfagor, 16 (1961), 261–283, 535–554.
S. Drake, Galileo Against the Philosophers (Los Angeles, 1976), 35–53.
G. Cantor, “The rhetoric of experiment,” in D. Gooding, T. Pinch and S. Schaffer (eds.), The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (Cambridge, 1989), 159–180.
Finocchiaro, Galileo and the Art of Reasoning (Dordrecht, 1980).
W. L. Wisan, “Galileo’s scientific method: a reexamination,” in R. E. Butts and J. C. Pitt (eds.), New Perspectives on Galileo (Dordrecht, 1978), 1–58.
“Treatise on the Heavens,” in W. A. Wallace, Galileo’s Early Notebooks: The Physical Questions. A Translation from the Latin with Historical and Paleographical Commentary (Notre Dame, 1977), 59–158.
N. W. Gilbert, “The School of Padua,” Journal for the History of Philosophy, 1 (1963), 223–231.
H. Schilling, Die Geschichte der axio-matischen Methode im 16. und beginnenden 17. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim, 1969)
G. Crapulli, Mathesis universalis (Rome, 1969).
A. Favaro, ed., Le opere di Galileo Galilei, Florence, 1890–1909, VII, 546.
R. Naylor, “Galileo: real experiment and didactic demonstrations,” Isis, 67 (1976), 398–419.
B. Vickers, “Epideictic rhetoric in Galileo’s Dialogo,” Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 8 (1983), 69–102.
H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (2nd rev. ed., London, 1975).
F. Kermode, The Classic (London, 1975).
B. Vickers, “The Royal Society and English prose style,” in Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Los Angeles, 1985), 1–76
S. Shapin, “Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle’s literary technology,” Social Studies of Science, 14 (1984), 481–520
O. Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (Baltimore, 1975).
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jardine, N. (1991). Demonstration, Dialectic, and Rhetoric in Galileo’s Dialogue . In: Kelley, D.R., Popkin, R.H. (eds) The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 124. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3238-1_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3238-1_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5427-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-3238-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive