![]() Undoubtedly he thus did much to bring upon himself the troubles for which he is now chiefly remembered. Moreover, he wielded an exceedingly able pen, and unsparingly ridiculed and exasperated his opponents. Against such a superstition Galileo resolutely and vehemently set himself, with the result that he not only soon discredited many beliefs which had hitherto been accepted as indisputable, but aroused a storm of opposition and indignation amongst those whose opinions he discredited the more so, as he was a fierce controversialist, who, not content with refuting adversaries, was bent upon confounding them. The easily available sources (Wiki,etc.) about the condemnation of indivisibles of Galileo and Cavalieri (dated August 10, 1632), led the Revisors General of the Jesuits Jacob Bidermann all ref to Amir Alexander's book.It is the great merit of Galileo that, happily combining experiment with calculation, he opposed the prevailing system according to which, instead of going directly to nature for investigation of her laws and processes, it was held that these were best learned by authority, especially by that of Aristotle, who was supposed to have spoken the last word upon all such matters, and upon whom many erroneous conclusions had been fathered in the course of time. I think that the modern source is Egidio Festa, La querelle de l'atomisme: Galilee, Cavalieri et les jesuites (1990). See also Mordechai Feingold (editor), Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (MIT Press, 2002), page 28-29, for details about jesuit Rodrogo de Arriaga's Cursus philosophicus (Anversa, 1632) condemnation of 1632, concerning "mathematical atomism" and "the opinion on quantity made up of indivisibles". The jesuit mathematician Paul Guldin was an harsh critic of Cavalieri's method of indivisibles into his De centro gravitatis (or Centrobaryca, three volumes, 1635-41), on mathematical grounds. Unlike The Assayer, which had recourse to the lethal polemical weapons of satire and the new philosophy, the Ratio used those no-less-lethal weapons of doctrinal and dialectical retort based on religious and philosophical orthodoxy. Grassi's second response to Il Saggiatore, the Ratio ponderum librae et simbellae (1626), focused mainly on doctrinal issues. ![]() The beginning of the demonstration of the law of falling bodies.Īnd see : Galileo's Saggiatore (1623) and the reply by the jesuit Orazio Grassi ( Libra, published under the name : Lotario Grassi)Īsserting that Galileo's book advanced an atomic theory of matter, and that this conflicted with the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, because atomism would make transubstantiation impossible. Indivisibles are implicitly mentioned in part of the second day of the Dialogo (1632), at In February and March 1626, Cavalieri reminded him of the project: “do you remember the work on indivisibles that you had decided to write?” On, Galileo wrote, in a letter to the secretary of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, that he was planning a piece of work on the De Compositione continui. See : Vincent Jullien (editor), Seventeenth-Century Indivisibles Revisited (2015, Birkhauser) for details about the works of Kepler (1609), Cavalieri (1635) and Guldin (1640).Ĭavalieri developed his theory of geometry during the years 1620–1622.Īccording to Vincent Jullien's chapter dedicated to Indivisibles in the Work of Galileo : The issue regards more indivisibles than infinitesimals and must be located in the context of the Early Modern European debate about the "revamping" of atomism.
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