References
- Randall , John Hermann Jr. 1940 . The Development of the Scientific Method in the School of Padua . J. Hist. Ideas , 1 : 177 – 206 . Hereafter cited as: ‘Padua’. This article demonstrates that empiricism emerged from one of the schools of Aristotelianism. Galileo could be traced back to a century-long development in science inaugurated with the study of the Stagirite's botony texts. Scholars who ignore this tradition frequently speak of a ‘radical break’ in learning with all of Aristotelianism. So Edward Grant, ‘Late Medieval Thought, Copernicus, and the Scientific Revolution’, J. Hist. Ideas, 1962, 23, 197–220.
- Frederick Copleston , S.J. 1962 . A History of Philosophy Vol. i , 15 – 15 . Garden City, N.Y. Part II
- Hall , A.R. 1960 . The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800 134 – 134 . Boston
- Crombie , A.C. 1959 . Medieval and Early Modern Science Vol. ii , 13 – 15 . Garden City, N.Y. Hereafter cited as ‘Crombie’.
- Ptolemy was a Hellenistic astronomer. Basically they were concerned about mathematical computations. The physical nature of the universe was not their concern. The Hellenic predecessors, like Aristotle, wanted very much to articulate a physical model which would correspond to their mathematical computations. See Kuhn Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution New York 1959 187 187 and p. 105. Hereafter cited as: Kuhn.
- Crombie , A.C. 1953 . Robert Grosseteste and the Origin of Experimental Science 27 – 29 . Oxford 52–90; 193–194 and 297–318
- Expositio super Libro de Caelo et Mundo , ii chap. xvii. The translation is mine. The original Latin reads: “Illorum autem suppositiones, quas adinvenerunt, non est necessarium esse veras: licet enim talibus suppositionibus factis appareat solvere, non tamen oportet dicere has suppositiones esse: quia forte secundum alium modum nondum ab hominibus comprehensum, apparentia circa stellas salvatur”. Aquinas was not about to convert a mathematical formula into physical reality. Latin text believed to have first been composed in Naples, 1272–1273. An English translation is not yet available. Text can be read in Thomae Aquinatis, Opera Omnia, Paris, 1889, vol. xiii, p. 461.
- Copleston , Frederick . 1963 . A History of Philosophy Vol. iii , 168 – 168 . Garden City, N.Y. Part I
- By the end of the fifteenth century Padua had gained possession of most of Aristotle's biological works. Gerard of Cremona's Latin translation of the De Generatione was donated to Padua by John Marchanova, probably in 1467. He dated the manuscript itself ‘1438’. A gloss notes that the manuscript also contains the Latin versions of De Caelo et Mundi, Physica, De Meterorum, De Anima, De Vegetabilibus et Plantis, De Animalibus and remarks that De Minerabilibus is missing and, if it were not for that loss, it would sic completur doctrina totius naturalis philosophiae (‘contain the entire corpus of natural philosophy.’) Aristoteles Latinus et al. Cambridge 1955 ii 1095 1095 This Latin catalogue lists all the translations of Aristotle available in scholarly libraries, and when each university acquired the text. Padua went on to recover more of the biological texts of Aristotle as the sixteenth century progressed. See ‘Padua». The works on botany were published in Italy in 1476. (See Crombie, p. 263). By 1498 almost the entire body of Aristotle's works was in print.
- This is the judgment of Hall The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800 Boston 1960 134 134
- Padua , 177 – 178 .
- Armitage , Angus . 1962 . Copernicus: The Founder of Modern Astronomy 51 – 51 . New York Hereafter cited as: Armitage.
- Copernicus started medicine at Padua in 1503. The same year the university acquired Guillelmus's translation of the De Animalibus Aristoteles Latinus, Supplementa Altera Lawrence-Palluello Paris 1961 22 22 and 145. By this time, Randall tells us in ‘Padua’, the faculties of medicine and philosophy were engaged in lively debates about the biological texts. Copernicus would have had medical professors who were slowly forcing their philosophical counterparts to see the validity of the empirical method.
- De Humani Corporis Fabrica 1543 – 1543 . Basle
- Padua , 183 – 183 .
- Crombie , 27 – 28 .
- Copernicus started medicine at Padua in 1503. The same year the university acquired Guillelmus's translation of the De Animalibus Aristoteles Latinus, Supplementa Altera Lawrence-Palluello Paris 1961 22 22 and 145. By this time, Randall tells us in ‘Padua’, the faculties of medicine and philosophy were engaged in lively debates about the biological texts. Copernicus would have had medical professors who were slowly forcing their philosophical counterparts to see the validity of the empirical method.
- Burtt , Edwin Arthur . 1954 . The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science 52 – 56 . Garden City, N.Y. So he is strictly in the Ptolemaic tradition. His originality, of course, was in his insistence that his mathematical model truly depicted the physical universe. Hereafter cited as: Burtt.
- Armitage 56 – 56 .
- Kuhn 73 – 73 . Copernicus argues that his system is better because it is simpler. Pythagoreans and most of the mediaevals contended that Nature was simple. The most accurate mathematical model of the physical universe would therefore be the simplest. Burtt, p. 39.
- Kuhn 126 – 127 .
- Copernicus , Nicolaus . 1543 . De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium Nuremberg states in his preface: ‘I found first in Cicero that Nicetas had realized that the Earth moved. Afterwards I found in Plutarch that certain others had held the like opinion. I think fit here to add Plutarch's own words, to make them accessible to all: ‘The rest hold the Earth to be stationary, but Philolaus the Pythagorean says that she moves around the (central) fire on an oblique circle like the Sun and Moon. Heraclides of Pontus and Ecphantus the Pythagorean also make the Earth to move, not indeed through space but by rotating round her own centre as a wheel on an axle from West to East.” trans. John F. Dobson and Selig Brodetsky, in Occasional Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society, No. 10 (1947), p. 5. Cf. Kuhn, p. 142. Copernicus mistakes Nicetas for Hicetas. This was a common error at his time because of typal similarities between “h” and “n”.
- Armitage 60 – 61 .
- James Brodrick , S.J. 1964 . Galileo: The Man, His Work, His Misfortunes 82 – 82 . London Hereafter cited as: Brodrick.
- de Santillana , Giorgio . 1955 . The Crime of Galileo 101 – 101 . Chicago Professor de Santillana, is most often quoted in reference to ecclesiastical obscurantism in regard to Galileo. The present author feels he is too often eager, in his enthusiasm for one of the most fascinating intellects of all time, to create a world of villainous fools and shining heroes. For instance, he blames Cardinal Bellarmine for being too quick to accept the spurious preface and yet at the same time admits that only a mathematical specialist could see the discrepancy. As far as can be determined, the first one to discover the preface was false was another brilliant mathematician, Kepler. See Brodrick, p. 82.
- Copernicus could be followed only by someone who had versed himself in mathematics. Our modern society does not realize that we can follow his arguments, since we belong to an empirical culture, but that his contemporaries found it most difficult. ‘“Mathematics are for mathematicians.” There is the first essential incongruity of the De Revolutionibus Though few aspects of Western thought were long unaffected by the consequences of Copernicus's work, that work itself was narrowly technical and professional. It was mathematical planetary astronomy, not cosmology or philosophy, that Copernicus found monstrous, and it was the reform of mathematical astronomy that alone compelled him to move the Earth. If his contemporaries were to follow him, they would have to learn to understand his detailed mathematical arguments about planetary position, and they would have to take these abstrusive arguments more seriously than the first evidence of their senses. The Copernican Revolution was not primarily a revolution in the mathematical techniques employed to compute planetary position, but it began as one.’ Kuhn, pp. 143–144.
- De Revolutionibus 19 20 Chapter 10. As translated in Dobson and Brodetsky Cf. Kuhn, p. 180. Kuhn goes on to comment on how extremely difficult it is to accept these proofs on empirical grounds. Astronomers like Kepler followed the work of Copernicus because, basically, it substantiated their Pythagorean supposition of a harmonious universe which could be described perfectly through mathematics. p. 209.
- Randall , John Herman Jr. 1954 . The Making of the Modern Mind 229 – 230 . Cambridge, Mass.
- Kuhn 93 – 93 .
- Quoted and explained in Knobel E.B. Astronomy and Astrology Shakespeare's England Oxford 1916 i 444 461
- 1573 . De Stella Nova Copenhagen
- Crombie 178 – 179 .
- Crombie 179 – 181 .
- By Bessel in 1838. Cf. Armitage 217 218
- 1588 . De Mundi Aetherei Uraniborg
- Kuhn 201 – 206 .
- Burtt 57 – 58 .
- Kuhn 209 – 210 .
- 1596 . Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicarum continens Mysterium Cosmographicum Tübingen A copy was sent to Brahe and made him quite willing to take Kepler as an assistant.
- Randall . The Making of the Modern Mind , 230 – 231 .
- 1606 . De Stella Nova in pede Serpentarii Prague The discovery of new stellar bodies was one of the most serious challenges to the Aristotelian contention that the superlunary world was immutable.
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1609
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Astronomia Nova
seu Physica coelestis tradita commentariis de motibus stellae Martis Vol. ii , ix – ix . Prague The translation is from The Making of the Modern Mind, p. 231.
- The Making of the Modern Mind , 231 – 231 .
- Padua 183 – 183 .
- Brodrick 30 – 30 .
- Galilei , Galileo . 1610 . Siderius Nuncius Venice The translation is from Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, Garden City, New York, 1957, p. 29. Hereafter cited as: Drake.
- See Drake Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo Drake Garden City, New York 31 58
- See Galilei Galileo Siderius Nuncius Venice 1610 The translation is from Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, Garden City, New York, 1957, p. 29. Hereafter cited as: Drake.
- Brodrick 51 – 51 . Cf. Drake, p. 75.
- 1603 . Romani calendarii a Gregorio XIII restituti explicatio Rome
- Dunne , George H. and S.J. 1962 . Generation of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the last Decades of the Ming Dynasty 211 – 211 . Notre Dame, Indiana Since they had to preserve the Chinese time-measurement system and the basic structure of their calendar, they could not totally abandon the Ptolemaic system. Alfons Väth, S. J., Johann Adam Schall von Bell, S.J., Köln, 1933, p. 103. Too, ‘they could not be insensitive to the condemnation of Galileo by the Church.’ Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 3 vols, Cambridge, 1959, p. 438. Fr Terrenz, a principal figure in the reform of the Chinese calendar, was a fellow member with Galileo of the Lincei Academy and was quite unhappy over the condemnation proceedings of 1616. Dunne, p. 214.
- Brodrick 115 – 115 .
- Brodrick , James and S.J. 1961 . Robert Bellarmine: Saint and Scholar 341 – 347 . Westminster, Maryland Hereafter cited as: Bellarmine.
- 1615 . Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina 186 – 186 . Drake A Latin-Italian version was first published in Strasbourg, 1635.
- ‘Cardinal Barberini, who, as you know from experience, has always admired your worth, told me only yesterday evening that with respect to these opinions he would like greater caution in not going beyond the arguments used by Ptolemy and Copernicus, and finally in not exceeding the limitations of physics and mathematics. For to explain the Scriptures is claimed by the theologians as their field, and if new things are brought in, even by an admirable mind, not everyone has the dispassionate faculty of taking them just as they are said. One man amplifies, the next one alters, and what came from the author's own mouth becomes so transformed in spreading that he will no longer recognize it as his own.’ Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale Favaro Antonio Florence 1890–1909 xii 145 147 20 vols. The English text is from Drake, p. 158.
- Brodrick . Bellarmine , 355 – 356 .
- de Santillana, pp. 48–49. In 1600 Giordano Bruno had been burnt at the stake as a heretic. He had used the concept of a Copernican solar system and the theory of a multiplicity of worlds to deny the uniqueness of man, the Incarnation and Redemption. Randall The Making of the Modern Mind 243 243
- Tuscan Ambassador in Rome, Piero Guicciardini to the new Tuscan Secretary of State, Curzio Picchena. (15 December 1615). Le Opere di Galileo Galilei xii 206 207 Probably this is exactly what he and others told Galileo orally. English translation from Brodrick, Galileo, p. 102.
- Brodrick . Galileo , 105 – 105 . This interpretation is based on the report about the meeting written on 3 March 1616, which clearly states that Galileo had agreed. Also the works of Copernicus were suspended, not prohibited, which meant the book could be reissued as soon as its tenets were placed in an hypothetical form. Original text of report A. Favaro, Galileo e l'inquisizione, Florence, 1907, p. 16. English translation in Brodrick, Galileo, p.105.
- See Vatican MS fol. 378v for the text of the injunction. An English translation is in de Santillana, p. 126. The German scholar Wohlwill was the first to note a discrepancy between the injunction and the official report in 1870, when the report was first published. Bellarmine 374 374 An analysis of the legal implications and the validity of the injunction is given by de Santillana, pp. 261–274.
- As of this writing, Stillman Drake is expected to reconstruct the proceedings of 1616. He will either correct or substantiate the present interpretations. Fr Brodrick feels he will substantiate the opinion expressed. Galileo 1 134 134
- Brodrick . Bellarmine , 376 – 377 . The evidence from de Santillana is that the document is wrongly positioned in the proceedings, illegal, unsigned by the principals involved, etc. Professor de Santillana does not feel that the injunction was ever recited to Galileo but simply added to the records. pp. 271–272, n. 8. The false injunction is in the same handwriting as the rest of the records. Brodrick, Bellarmine, p. 377.
- Letter of Robert Cardinal Bellarmine to Galileo, 26 May 1616. The original text is in Favaro Galileo e l'inquisizione 68 68 English text is in Brodrick, Bellarmine, p. 376.
- Brodrick . Galileo , 115 – 115 . Drake claims that the Jesuits of the Roman College used this argument. Brodrick wisely points out that the better astronomers among the Jesuits did not. They were under orders not to teach Copernicanism, but it is interesting to note how often they avoided defending Ptolemaic theories by weak arguments, such as the new comets. Cf. Drake, p. 221.
- Drake 222 – 222 .
- de Santillana 159 – 159 .
- Brodrick . Galileo , 117 – 118 .
- de Santillana 183 – 186 .
- Brodrick . Galileo , 127 – 128 .
- de Santillana 183 – 183 .
- Brodrick . Galileo , 127 – 127 .
- 1632 . Dialogo dei dui massimi sistemi del mondo Florence The fact that Galileo wrote in Italian instead of the language of scholarship, Latin, annoyed many prelates. With heretical countries all around them, they felt the last thing Italy needed was some scientist stirring up the populace and trying to win their allegiance to an astronomical system which would force a re-thinking of the philosophical and scriptural basis of the faith. Galileo thought that the movements of the tides were the best proofs that the Earth really moved. It is an irony of history that he probably never read or comprehended Kepler's mathematical proofs for the elliptical orbit of Mars. It was in his library, but he probably never got past the early parts of the book and its Pythagorean presumptions which would have lessened his enthusiasm. Ironically, he offered an empirical evidence which the scientific community would eventually reject when Newton explained gravitational attraction. Kepler suspected that it was the moon that influenced the tides and not the motion of the Earth. Cf. de Santillana, pp. 168–169.
- Galilei , Galileo . 1953 . Dialogue on the Great World Systems Edited by: de Santillana , Giorgio . 471 – 472 . Chicago
- de Santillana 165 – 166 .
- Brodrick 128 – 129 . Aside from all the political and military implications, there is also the real possibility that the Pope felt the foundations of Christendom, already weakened by heresies and bloody wars. were really threatened to their very depths by the book. To use scientific evidence to challenge philosophical and theological presumptions would revolutionize Christianity. Christianity had had enough revolutions already and blood was being spilt all over Europe at that very moment because of religious heresies and the new concept of nationalism.
- Opere , xix 413 ff – 413 ff .
- de Santillana 293 – 293 . It sounds extremely harsh to modern ears, but they were trying to save the reputation of their Office and to avoid having Galileo go through the process of a formal abjuration which would have been even worse for all concerned. Obviously, they had realized the injunction would never be considered a legal document in court. At the same time they realized the astronomer was under papal disfavour and they were expected to try him.
- Brodrick . Galileo , 138 – 138 .
- de Santillana 303 – 303 . Brodrick claims Galileo perjured himself here, Galileo p. 139.
- de Santillana 311 – 311 . An English text of the abjuration is in de Santillana, p. 312. The author declares that Galileo was surprised by being asked to recite the formal abjuration. The suggested compromise had made no mention of it. The formal abjuration would have a definite effect on the public, which a warning would not have. On the other hand, it could be needed because Galileo had begun to insist that he had always taught Copernicanism hypothetically.