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Galileo and Reasoning Ex Suppositione: The Methodology of the Two New Sciences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

William A. Wallace
William A. Wallace*
Affiliation:
The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C.
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Extract

Galileo has been seen, from the philosophical point of view, alternately as a Platonist whose rationalist insights enabled him to read the book of nature because it was written in ‘the language of mathematics,’ and as an experimentalist who used the hypothetico-deductive methods of modern science to establish his new results empirically (McTighe, 1967; Settle, 1967; Drake, 1970; Shapere, 1974). Both of these views present difficulties. In this paper I shall make use of recent historical research to argue that neither is correct, that the method utilized by Galileo was neither Platonist nor hypothetico-deductivist, but was basically Aristotelian and Archimedean in character. This method, moreover, was not merely that of classical antiquity, but it had been emended and rejuvenated in the sixteenth century, and then not by Greek humanist Aristotelians or by Latin Averroists but rather by scholastic authors of the Collegio Romano whose own inspiration derived mainly from Thomas Aquinas.

Type
Contributed Papers: Session I
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1974 , 1974 , pp. 78 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland

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Footnotes

*

The research on which this paper is based was supported by the National Science Foundation, whose assistance is gratefully acknowledged. The author also expresses his thanks to Stillman Drake and Thomas McTighe for their helpful comments on an earlier version read at the Philosophy of Science Association biennial meeting at Notre Dame on November 1,1974.

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