Galileo: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

161 Pages·2001·1.86 MB·English

by  Stillman Drake

Galileo: A Very Short Introduction
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Malise Ruthven THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Habermas Gordon Finlayson Martin Conway
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Stillman Drake
Galileo
A Very Short Introduction
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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First published as an Oxford University Press paperback 1980
Reissued 1996
First published as a Very Short Introduction 2001
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ISBN 0–19–285456–9
357910864
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To the memory of
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Preface
The silencing and punishment of Galileo toward the end of a life
devoted to scientific inquiry was an event of profound significance for
our cultural history. Its full understanding requires much more than an
assumption of inevitable conflict between science and religion – a
cliché which originated largely from the case of Galileo that it is widely
used to explain. If any simple explanation existed, it would rather be in
terms of the customary ruthlessness of societal authority in suppressing
minority opinion, and in Galileo’s case with Aristotelianism rather than
Christianity in authority. To understand the fate of Galileo requires
knowledge of events throughout his whole career coupled with that
sense of inevitable outcome, hidden from the actors, that authors of
classical Greek tragedy gave to its spectators.
Those spectators were kept posted by the chorus, whose role I must
undertake to play, since in a short book it is not possible to deal in detail
with more than a single theme in Galileo’s multiple activities. I have
chosen as the focal point Galileo’s condemnation by the Roman
Inquisition in 1633, with his biography as the background. That choice
entails certain limitations. There is not room to justify statements about
technicalities of Galileo’s science, even when they depart from currently
received scholarly opinion; all I can do is to assure the reader that they
are based on documentation more extensive than general histories of
science have used.