HON 3200/3250 - Prof. Laura Woodney: Galileo

The Posterior Analytics contains some of Aristotle's most influential thoughts in logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. The first book expounds and develops the notions of a demonstrative argument and of a formal, axiomatized science; the second discusses a clusterof problems raised by the axioms or principles of such a science, and investigates in particular the theory of definition.

Aristotle's major work of cosmology was wrritten around 350 BCE and describes his ideas about the workings of the heavens and the earth. Artistotle's ideas influenced European scientists and philosophers for centuries.

In 1633 the Roman Inquisition concluded the trial of Galileo Galilei with a condemnation for heresy. The trial was itself the climax of a series of events which began two decades earlier (in 1613) and included another series of Inquisition proceedings in 1615-1616. This book provides a collection of the essential primary documents containing information about both the key events and the key issues.

This book of essays looks at topics such as Galileo and the philosophy of his time, and Galileo's influence on modern science.

An account of the conflict between Galileo and the Church. It reconstructs the history of the ideas that were the principle factors in defining his struggle with the Church, and provides an objective analysis which presents the issues as seen by both sides involved in the conflict.

Challenges the long-standing ideas that opponents of the heliocentric ideas of Copernicus and Galileo were primarily motivated by religion or devotion to an outdated intellectual tradition, and that they were in continual retreat in the face of telescopic discoveries. Graney calls on newly translated works by anti-Copernican writers of the time to demonstrate that science, not religion, played an important, and arguably predominant, role in the opposition to the Copernican system.

Of Galileo's three illegitimate children, the eldest best mirrored his own brilliance, industry, and sensibility, and by virtue of these qualities became his confidante. Born Virginia in 1600, she was thirteen when Galileo placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her loving support, which Galileo repaid in kind, proved to be her father's greatest source of strength throughout his most productive and tumultuous years. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from their original Italian and masterfully woven into the narrative, graces her father's life now as it did then.

Galileo's 1632 book, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, takes the form of a debate, divided into four "days," among three highly articulate gentlemen. It is one of the most influential scientific books in Western civilization.

This edition includes a foreward by Albert Einstein.