Galileo's Logic of Discovery and Proof
Subtitle: The Background, Content, and Use of His Appropriated Treatises on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics
By: by William A. Wallace
Series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science -- 137; Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science -- 137
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published: 1992
Place of publication: Dordrecht
Language: eng
Format: [electronic resource] :
Number of pages: 333
ISBN-13: 9789048141159; 9789401580403
Subjects: Science; Philosophy; Philosophy (General); Logic; History
Description: The problem of Galileo's logical methodology has long interested scholars. In this volume William A. Wallace offers a solution that is completely unexpected, yet backed by convincing documentary evidence. His analysis starts with an early notebook Galileo wrote at Pisa, appropriating a Jesuit professor's exposition of the Posterior Analystics of Aristotle, and ends with one of the last letters Galileo wrote, stating that in logic he has been a Peripatetic all his life. Wallace's detective work unearths the complete logic course from which the notebook was excerpted, then proceeds to show how its terminology and methodology continue to surface in Galileo's later writings in which he founds his new sciences of the heavens and of local motion. The result is a tour de force that commends itself not only to Galileo's scholars and to logicians, philosophers, and historians, but to anyone interested in the epistemic roots of modern science.
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