Reading Galileo: Scribal Technologies and the Two New Sciences [Book Review]

Abstract

Presented as a study of 'Galileo's debts to the scholarly traditions he inherited, both from his contemporaries and predecessor' (p. VIII), Renée Raphael's book focuses, in fact, almost exclusively on Galileo's last and arguably most important work, the Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences Pertaining to Mechanics and Local Motions – in short, Two New Sciences – published in Leiden in 1638. Although he wrote it towards the end of his life, Galileo began his work on motion and mechanics while still in Pisa, in the 1580s and early 1590s. That is why scholars usually agree that the questions Galileo tackles in the Two New Sciences coincide with the questions that originally motivated his work, before he became entangled in the defense of the Copernican hypothesis following the telescopic discoveries of 1609-1610. Its importance notwithstanding the Two New Sciences has been far less studied than the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632), which, as is well known, led to the trail of 1633 and the condemnation of Galileo for vehement suspicion of heresy. If only for this reason, Raphael's book is an uncommon and very welcome contribution of the ever-growing Galileo scholarship.

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