Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo


Book Description

Directing his polemics against the pedantry of his time, Galileo, as his own popularizer, addressed his writings to contemporary laymen. His support of Copernican cosmology, against the Church's strong opposition, his development of a telescope, and his unorthodox opinions as a philosopher of science were the central concerns of his career and the subjects of four of his most important writings. Drake's introductory essay place them in their biographical and historical context.




Galileo's Muse


Book Description

Mark Peterson makes an extraordinary claim in this fascinating book focused around the life and thought of Galileo: it was the mathematics of Renaissance arts, not Renaissance sciences, that became modern science. Galileo's Muse argues that painters, poets, musicians, and architects brought about a scientific revolution that eluded the philosopher-scientists of the day, steeped as they were in a medieval cosmos and its underlying philosophy. According to Peterson, the recovery of classical science owes much to the Renaissance artists who first turned to Greek sources for inspiration and instruction. Chapters devoted to their insights into mathematics, ranging from perspective in painting to tuning in music, are interspersed with chapters about Galileo's own life and work. Himself an artist turned scientist and an avid student of Hellenistic culture, Galileo pulled together the many threads of his artistic and classical education in designing unprecedented experiments to unlock the secrets of nature. In the last chapter, Peterson draws our attention to the Oratio de Mathematicae laudibus of 1627, delivered by one of Galileo's students. This document, Peterson argues, was penned in part by Galileo himself, as an expression of his understanding of the universality of mathematics in art and nature. It is "entirely Galilean in so many details that even if it is derivative, it must represent his thought," Peterson writes. An intellectual adventure, Galileo’s Muse offers surprising ideas that will capture the imagination of anyone—scientist, mathematician, history buff, lover of literature, or artist—who cares about the humanistic roots of modern science.




Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science


Book Description

This 3 volume collection includes 80 of the 130 papers published by Drake, most on Galileo but some on medieval and early modern science in general (principally mechanics). An essential supplement to Drake's translations and other books.




Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries


Book Description

The essays in this collection have been written for Gerd Buchdahl, by colleagues, students and friends, and are self-standing pieces of original research which have as their main concern the metaphysics and philosophy of science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They focus on issues about the development of philosophical and scientific thought which are raised by or in the work of such as Bernoulli, Descartes, Galileo, Kant, Leibniz, Maclaurin, Priestly, Schelling, Vico. Apart from the initial bio-bibliographical piece and those by Robert Butts and Michael Power, they do not discuss Buchdahl or his ideas in any systematic, lengthy, or detailed way. But they are collected under a title which alludes to the book, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: The Classical Origins, Descartes to Kant (1969), which is central in the corpus of his work, and deal with the period and some of the topics with which that book deals.




Italian Literature Before 1900 in English Translation


Book Description

"Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation provides the most complete record possible of texts from the early periods that have been translated into English, and published between 1929 and 2008. It lists works from all genres and subjects, and includes translations wherever they have appeared across the globe. In this annotated bibliography, Robin Healey covers over 5,200 distinct editions of pre-1900 Italian writings. Most entries are accompanied by useful notes providing information on authors, works, translators, and how the translations were received. Among the works by over 1,500 authors represented in this volume are hundreds of editions by Italy's most translated authors - Dante Alighieri, [Niccoláo] Machiavelli, and [Giovanni] Boccaccio - and other hundreds which represent the author's only English translation. A significant number of entries describe works originally published in Latin. Together with Healey's Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature."--Pub. desc.




Engaging Nature


Book Description

Contemporary environmental political theory considers the implications of the environmental crisis for such political concepts as rights, citizenship, justice, democracy, the state, race, class, and gender. As the field has matured, scholars have begun to explore connections between Green Theory and such canonical political thinkers as Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, and Marx. The essays in this volume put important figures from the political theory canon in dialogue with current environmental political theory. It is the first comprehensive volume to bring the insights of Green Theory to bear in reinterpreting these canonical theorists. Individual essays cover such classical figures in Western thought as Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau, Mill, and Burke, but they also depart from the traditional canon to consider Mary Wollstonecraft, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and Confucius. Engaging and accessible, the essays also offer original and innovative interpretations that often challenge standard readings of these thinkers. In examining and explicating how these great thinkers of the past viewed the natural world and our relationship with nature, the essays also illuminate our current environmental predicament. -- Publisher.




Planets, Stars, and Orbs


Book Description

Edward Grant describes the extraordinary range of themes, ideas, and arguments that constituted scholastic cosmology for approximately five hundred years, from around 1200 to 1700. Primary emphasis is placed on the world as a whole, what might lie beyond it, and the celestial region, which extended from the Moon to the outermost convex surface of the cosmos.




Evidence of God


Book Description

Nick Hawkes looks at arguments for and against the existence for God and comes to the conclusion that faith can no more dispense with science than science can dispense with God. Both complete one another. He knows the terrain well and is able to explain complex ideas in ordinary language. Dr. Hawkes concludes by saying that Christian theology, rather than undermining science, actually provides science with a solid ground of meaning on which to stand"--P. [4] of cover.




Prelude to Galileo


Book Description

Can it be true that Galilean studies will be without end, without conclusion, that each interpreter will find his own Galileo? William A. Wallace seems to have a historical grasp which will have to be matched by any further workers: he sees directly into Galileo's primary epoch of intellectual formation, the sixteenth century. In this volume, Wallace provides the companion to his splendid annotated translation of Galileo 's Early Notebooks: The Physical Questions (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pointing to the 'realist' sources, mainly unearthed by the author himself during the past two decades. Explicit controversy arises, for the issues are serious: nominalism and realism, two early rivals for the foundation of knowledge, contend at the birth of modem science, OI better yet, contend in our modem efforts to understand that birth. Related to this, continuity and discontinuity, so opposed to each other, are interwoven in the interpretive writings ever since those striking works of Duhem in the first years of this century, and the later studies of Annaliese Maier, Alexandre Koyre and E. A. Moody. Historio grapher as well as philosopher, WaUace has critically supported the continuity of scientific development without abandoning the revolutionary transforma tive achievement of Galileo's labors. That continuity had its contemporary as well as developmental quality; and we note that William Wallace's Prelude studies are complementary to Maurice A.




Physics, Cosmology and Astronomy, 1300–1700: Tension and Accommodation


Book Description

Habent sua Jata colloquia. The present volume has its ongms in a spring 1984 international workshop held, under the auspices of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, by The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas of Tel-Aviv University in cooperation with The Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation. It contains twelve of the twenty papers presented at the workshop by the twenty-six participants. As Proceedings of conferences go, it is a good representative of the genre, sharing in the main characteristics of its ilk. It may even be one of the rare instances of a book of Proceed ings whose descriptive title applies equally well to the workshop's topic and to the interrelations between. the various papers it includes. Tension and Accommodation are the key words. Thus, while John Glucker's paper, 'Images of Plato in Late Antiqu ity,' raises, by means of the Platonic example, the problem of interpreta tion of ancient texts, suggesting the assignment of proper weight to the creator of the tradition and not only to his many later interpreters in assessing the proper relationship between originator and commentators, Abraham Wasserstein's 'Hunches that did not come off: Some Prob lems in Greek Science' illustrates the long-lived Whiggish tradition in the history of science and mathematics. As those familiar with my work will undoubtedly note, Wasserstein's position is far removed from my stance on ancient Greek mathematics.