What do Aristotle and St. Aquinas have to do with the Galileo Affair? Parts 1 and 2

Gabrielle Birchak/ February 8, 2022/ Ancient History, Classical Antiquity, Middle Ages, Modern History, Post Classical, Uncategorized

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The Greek philoso­pher Aris­to­tle was born in 384 BCE. The Ital­ian philoso­pher St. Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225. Galileo Galilei was born on Feb­ru­ary 15, 1564. Between the three of them, there is a sto­ry that spans almost 2000 years. That sto­ry is known as the Galileo Affair.

The Greek philoso­pher Aris­to­tle was born in 384 BCE. The Ital­ian philoso­pher St. Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225. Galileo Galilei was born on Feb­ru­ary 15, 1564. Between the three of them, there is a sto­ry that spans almost 2000 years. That sto­ry is known as the Galileo Affair.

The sto­ry of the Galileo affair is a pop­u­lar one. If there is a moment in the his­to­ry of sci­ence that defined the way we look at sci­ence and reli­gion, it would be the Galileo Affair. Born on Feb­ru­ary 15, 1564, Galileo Galilei is con­sid­ered the father of mod­ern sci­ence. As a stu­dent, his father denied him the oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn math­e­mat­ics. He want­ed to study the­ol­o­gy and con­sid­ered becom­ing a priest. How­ev­er, his father want­ed him to join the field of med­i­cine. And so, he attend­ed the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pisa to do so.

Galileo lamp in the Pisa Cathe­dral (Tus­cany, Italy) by Tan­gopa­so. Licensed under Pub­lic Domain, CC0.

One day, while attend­ing church ser­vices at the cathe­dral of Pisa, he became intrigued by a swing­ing chan­de­lier that was being pushed by the air. It would move in wide arcs and then in small arcs. While watch­ing this chan­de­lier swing, he real­ized that regard­less of the ampli­tude of the swing, the chan­de­lier always swung at the same time. He test­ed this rev­e­la­tion by mon­i­tor­ing his heart’s pulse on his wrist while watch­ing the chan­de­lier. When he got home, he set up two chan­de­liers. He arranged to make broad sweeps for one chan­de­lier and the oth­er to make short sweeps. He found that his the­o­ry was cor­rect and that the chan­de­liers always swung simultaneously. 

Galileo became fas­ci­nat­ed with geom­e­try and even­tu­al­ly con­vinced his father to let him study math­e­mat­ics instead of med­i­cine. He stayed at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pisa, where he com­plet­ed his stud­ies in math. He remained there, where he would even­tu­al­ly earn the chair in math­e­mat­ics in 1589. His the­o­ries on grav­i­ty did not agree with the University’s Aris­totelian foun­da­tion of sci­ence, so the uni­ver­si­ty forced him out. After that, he accept­ed a posi­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pad­ua, where he also earned the chair in math­e­mat­ics. Dur­ing his time at Pad­ua, he learned about a new tool called the tele­scope. This tele­scope allowed him to see things in the sky that were once reserved only for the eyes of God. As a sci­en­tist, his dis­cov­er­ies in physics were ground­break­ing. In 1623, Galileo pub­lished The Assay­er – Il Sag­gia­tore, which sup­port­ed math­e­mat­ics and the process of exper­i­men­ta­tion to uphold his the­o­ries. In The Assay­er, Galileo assert­ed his beliefs in atom­ism, which states that the world is com­posed of indi­vis­i­ble par­ti­cles. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this work shook the author­i­ta­tive grounds of the Church and ulti­mate­ly led to his arrest.

In the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry, the Inqui­si­tion, an insti­tu­tion of the Catholic Church, was formed to seek out and pun­ish heretics. On June 22, 1633, the Inqui­si­tion sen­tenced Galileo to prison. They charged him for “vehe­ment sus­pi­cion of heresy,” which was a reli­gious crime more severe than a “slight sus­pi­cion of heresy,” but not as seri­ous as a “for­mal heresy.” Accord­ing to the Indict­ment, Sen­tence, and Abju­ra­tion court doc­u­ments of 1633, the charges were that Galileo espoused “the false doc­trine taught by some that the sun is the cen­ter of the world.”[1]

Church guards then ush­ered him to jail. The next day, he was escort­ed to his home, where he would remain under house arrest until his death in 1642. Had Galileo been accused of for­mal heresy, the Church would have ordered his death.

How­ev­er, he was not accused of for­mal heresy because he arranged for a plea bar­gain. In this plea bar­gain, the Inqui­si­tion informed him that they would not exe­cute him if he admit­ted to going too far with heliocentricism.

The sus­pi­cions of Galileo’s heresy revolve around his works as a sci­en­tist and his helio­cen­tric dis­cov­er­ies. His insight ques­tioned the valid­i­ty of the Church’s sci­en­tif­ic belief sys­tem found­ed in Aris­totelian philoso­phies. The Church taught and believed that the Earth was geo­cen­tric, mean­ing that Earth was the cen­ter of the Universe.

But Galileo was just build­ing his the­o­ry upon the find­ings of Nico­laus Coper­ni­cus. The sto­ry of Coper­ni­cus is fas­ci­nat­ing because his helio­cen­tric approach was based on his obser­va­tions with­out a tele­scope. In 1543, just a few months before his death, Coper­ni­cus pub­lished his man­u­script De Rev­o­lu­tion­ibus Orbium Coelestium, which in Eng­lish trans­lates to On the Rev­o­lu­tions of the Celes­tial Spheres. In this man­u­script, Coper­ni­cus describes his helio­cen­tric the­o­ry based on “assump­tions.” These assump­tions are that in the solar sys­tem, there are celes­tial cir­cles, there is no one cen­ter for all these celes­tial cir­cles, and that the cen­ter of the Earth is not the cen­ter of the Uni­verse but instead the sun is the cen­ter of the Universe.

But these were assump­tions. Coper­ni­cus didn’t uti­lize the Holy Scrip­ture to sup­port his view. Nev­er­the­less, the Church wouldn’t let Coper­ni­cus get away with this. In 1559, the Catholic Church placed Copernicus’s book on the Index of For­bid­den Books. Con­ve­nient­ly, Coper­ni­cus passed away short­ly after he pub­lished these find­ings. As a result, the Church could not try him for heresy. How­ev­er, Galileo became a tar­get for dis­sent because he was still alive after pub­lish­ing his work.

So why did Galileo’s defense to the court fail? There are sev­er­al the­o­ries, one of which is that when Galileo pub­lished his book Dia­logue on the Two Chief World Sys­tems, the dia­logue from with­in the book offend­ed Pope Urban VIII. The Pope believed Galileo was mock­ing him and imply­ing that he was a fool.

You see, in Galileo’s book, there is a char­ac­ter named Sim­p­li­cio. The name Sim­p­li­cio refers to a sim­ple-mind­ed man. In his book, the char­ac­ter Sim­p­li­cio refused to look through the tele­scope to see with his own eyes that the Earth was not the cen­ter of the Uni­verse. Fur­ther­more, Sim­p­li­cio was a devot­ed fol­low­er of Ptole­my and Aristotle.

But why would the Pope take this per­son­al­ly? Espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing that at one point, years before Car­di­nal Maf­feo Bar­beri­ni became Pope Urban VIII, he and Galileo were close friends. One evening, when the two of them were at a din­ner host­ed by the Grand Duke of Tus­cany, Galileo and the Aris­totelian physi­cist Lodovi­co delle Colombe enter­tained the guests by debat­ing on the top­ic of float­ing bod­ies. Dur­ing this debate, Galileo uti­lized math­e­mat­i­cal analy­ses pre­sent­ed by Archimedes. Colombe was unpre­pared for this. He wasn’t as trained in math­e­mat­ics as Galileo. Instead, Colombe employed the qual­i­ta­tive prin­ci­ples of Aris­to­tle, which were more philo­soph­i­cal than math­e­mat­i­cal. At the end of the debate, Bar­beri­ni claimed Galileo as the win­ner of the debate.[2] Thus Galileo and the Pope were close friends and had a friend­ship that spanned many years.

When Bar­beri­ni became Pope, he and Galileo had a falling out. Thus, this decay­ing friend­ship also pos­si­bly con­tributed to the details of Galileo’s conviction.

On top of the rumors and the dete­ri­o­rat­ed friend­ship, the Pope was also under a great deal of stress. There had been some talk among the Col­lege of Car­di­nals to impeach the Pope due to the pol­i­tics unfold­ing dur­ing the Thir­ty Years War. Addi­tion­al­ly, the Pope had nefar­i­ous inform­ers telling him that Galileo was call­ing him a sim­ple-mind­ed fool. Being called sim­ple-mind­ed did not look good for the Pope.

Anoth­er rea­son for the charge of heresy is that the appli­ca­tion of sci­ence, as it was dic­tat­ed by the Catholic Church in the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry, was espoused by Saint Thomas Aquinas, who used the ideas of Aris­to­tle in his philo­soph­i­cal theories.

So how did Aris­to­tle, who lived two thou­sand years before Galileo, con­tribute to the Galileo Affair? Well, the evo­lu­tion of Aris­totelian­ism began around the time that Aris­to­tle flour­ished in Alexan­dria, Egypt, around 360 BCE. Though Aris­to­tle was a stu­dent of Pla­to, he even­tu­al­ly dis­agreed with many of Plato’s philo­soph­i­cal the­o­ries and cre­at­ed his own sys­tem of rea­son­ing. Thus, he reject­ed Plato’s meth­ods of ide­al­ism and formed his own phi­los­o­phy steeped in realism.

Aris­to­tle stud­ied at the Pla­ton­ic Acad­e­my for twen­ty years, until 347 BCE, when he found­ed the Lyceum acad­e­my. From 266 BCE to about 90 BCE, the Pla­ton­ic Acad­e­my thrived as a skep­ti­cal school. Then, in 86 BCE, the Roman dic­ta­tor Sul­la ordered the clos­ing of the Pla­ton­ic Academy.

Aris­to­tle taught Alexan­der the Great, who found­ed Alexan­dria, Egypt. For those unfa­mil­iar with Alexan­der the Great, he envi­sioned cre­at­ing a city built on acad­e­mia. Thus, it is fit­ting that Aristotle’s the­o­ries are foun­da­tion­al to the philoso­phies of acad­e­mia. Aristotle’s work was so vast that it encom­passed approx­i­mate­ly 200 trea­tis­es, even though only thir­ty-one of his works sur­vived. In each of his trea­tis­es, Aris­to­tle employed the process of infor­mal log­ic, argu­men­ta­tion, and decep­tive rea­son­ing. Accord­ing to Aris­to­tle, sci­ence is des­ig­nat­ed into three class­es: the­o­ret­i­cal, prac­ti­cal, and pro­duc­tive.[3] The pur­pose of these domains, he pro­posed, is to deter­mine which sci­en­tif­ic dis­ci­pline belongs in each domain. One can con­duct this process by iden­ti­fy­ing the goals in the dis­ci­pline. Some sci­ences are meant for prac­tice and production.

In con­trast, oth­er sci­ences are specif­i­cal­ly the­o­ret­i­cal and pre­sume no oth­er pur­pose than to obtain knowl­edge.[4] To deter­mine these goals, Aris­to­tle stat­ed that one must apply the four caus­es of being to each dis­ci­pline to deter­mine the domain to which it belongs. These four caus­es include Mate­r­i­al Cause, For­mal Cause, Effi­cient Cause, and Final Cause. Aristotle’s work was so ground­break­ing that this lev­el of log­ic and analy­sis changed how sci­en­tists worked and answered the ques­tion, “Why?”

Aris­to­tle taught a phi­los­o­phy that was struc­tured sim­i­lar­ly to the three-step Socrat­ic method. Aris­to­tle rea­soned that if a per­son pre­sent­ed an argu­ment, if the premis­es are true, then the out­come of the dis­cus­sion would also be true. Aris­to­tle, employ­ing infor­mal log­ic, argu­men­ta­tion, and decep­tive rea­son­ing, addressed tan­gi­ble things, includ­ing the cos­mos. He also taught that the com­bi­na­tion of moral­i­ty and real­i­ty is sto­icism. Aris­to­tle believed that some sci­ences are meant for prac­tice and pro­duc­tion. In con­trast, oth­er sci­ences are specif­i­cal­ly the­o­ret­i­cal and pre­sume no oth­er pur­pose than to obtain knowledge.

The Domini­can the­olo­gian Thomas Aquinas was so enam­ored with Aristotle’s teach­ings and pre­sen­ta­tion of sto­icism that he used aspects of Aristotle’s writ­ings to illus­trate Chris­t­ian theology.

Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225 in an area now known as Lazio, Italy. His father, Lan­dulf of Aquino, was a knight who served Emper­or Fred­er­ick. As a result, his father was a mil­i­tary man and held sway over the pol­i­tics of Italy. Even though most of his fam­i­ly went into the mil­i­tary, Aquinas had his sights set on the abba­cy. By the time Aquinas was nine­teen-years-old, he was study­ing at a uni­ver­si­ty in Naples, where he learned of the teach­ings of Aris­to­tle. He was also intro­duced to the Domini­can preach­er John of Saint Julian, who influ­enced Aquinas to join the Domini­can order. The Domini­can order is an order of preach­ers with­in the Catholic Church.

The his­to­ri­an Riv­ka Feld­hay, in her arti­cle “Author­i­ty, Polit­i­cal The­ol­o­gy, and the Pol­i­tics of Knowl­edge in the Tran­si­tion from Medieval to Ear­ly Mod­ern Catholi­cism,” notes that the Catholic Church was divid­ed at this time. Feld­hay argues that the Roman Catholic Church was not mono­lith­ic.[5] Instead, she explains that the Church had two divi­sions: con­ser­v­a­tive, con­trolled by the Domini­cans, and pro­gres­sive, con­trolled by the Jesuits. The Domini­cans adhered to the writ­ings of Thomas Aquinas and the foun­da­tions of Aris­to­tle. They also devel­oped an epis­te­mol­o­gy that viewed Coper­ni­can­ism as unproved and unprov­able. Fur­ther­more, accord­ing to Feld­hay, the Jesuits had devel­oped “a dia­logue with Galileo but attempt­ed to con­trol his sci­ence insti­tu­tion­al­ly by sus­pend­ing the philo­soph­i­cal impli­ca­tions of Coper­ni­can­ism.”[6]

How­ev­er, Aquinas’s deter­mi­na­tion to join the Domini­can order did not go well with the fam­i­ly. It turned into a year-long dis­as­ter for Aquinas. His moth­er was not hap­py. Aquinas, who main­tained com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the Domini­can order, had informed them of his family’s dis­con­tent. Thus, the Domini­cans stepped in. They attempt­ed to move Aquinas to Paris via Rome. How­ev­er, Aquinas’s moth­er learned of this and arranged to have his broth­ers seize him and escort him back to the cas­tle of Monte San Gio­van­ni Cam­pano. Here, his fam­i­ly held him “pris­on­er” for almost one year.

Over time, his moth­er capit­u­lat­ed and arranged to have him “escape” so that he could join the Domini­can order. Aquinas went to Paris, where he would study under the Domini­can order. Oth­er than a brief stint in Cologne, Ger­many, he remained in Paris, where he would earn his master’s in the­ol­o­gy. Through his edu­ca­tion, Aquinas became so enam­ored with Aristotle’s teach­ings and pre­sen­ta­tion of sto­icism that he used aspects of Aristotle’s writ­ings to illus­trate Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy. Aquinas did this through his work Sum­ma The­o­log­i­ca to present the real­ism of God, the writ­ten works about Jesus, and the sacra­ments as pre­sent­ed by the Church.

How­ev­er, anoth­er sect of the Church, the Jesuits, admon­ished Aquinas for his works, even after his death. Regard­less, the Church can­on­ized Aquinas in 1323, which was cause for cel­e­bra­tion among the Domini­can defend­ers of Aquinas. Through the dialec­tics of Canon Law and The­ol­o­gy, Chris­t­ian Aris­totelian­ism had become a move­ment known as Scholas­ti­cism. Three hun­dred years lat­er, this move­ment became the foun­da­tion of phi­los­o­phy, knowl­edge, and sci­ence as pre­sent­ed at the Catholic Church’s Coun­cil of Trent that assem­bled between 1545 and 1563. Its pur­pose was to assem­ble Church lead­ers to clar­i­fy Church doc­trine as the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion con­tin­ued to oppose the prin­ci­ples of the Catholic Church. Dur­ing these coun­cils, the works of Aquinas, as val­i­dat­ed through the writ­ings of Aris­to­tle, served as appli­ca­tions of lit­er­al truth, as pre­sent­ed by Nature and Scrip­ture. This doc­trine upheld the words of the scrip­ture. It estab­lished that if the scrip­ture con­tra­dict­ed sci­ence as observed through nature, the scrip­ture was to be treat­ed as an alle­go­ry and not truth. And this is where Galileo found him­self at odds with the Church.

Galileo was a math­e­mati­cian. Many of his find­ings com­bined exper­i­men­ta­tion and math­e­mat­ics. For exam­ple, after the Church placed Galileo under house arrest, he used this time to write more sci­en­tif­ic man­u­scripts. In 1638, upon com­ple­tion of one work, Galileo arranged to have some of his friends smug­gle one of his man­u­scripts out of Italy and sent to a pub­lish­er in France. This man­u­script is titled Dis­cor­si e dimostrazioni matem­atiche intorno a‘ due nuove scien­ze, which in Eng­lish is known as Dis­cours­es and Math­e­mat­i­cal Demon­stra­tions Relat­ing to Two New Sci­ences.[7] This work pro­vid­ed some ground­break­ing math­e­mat­i­cal sci­ences because it estab­lished the math­e­mat­ics behind dynam­ics. Galileo’s belief that math­e­mat­ics was the thoughts of God got him in trou­ble. The Inqui­si­tion accused Galileo of believ­ing that he could think like God.

The his­to­ri­og­ra­phy of the Galileo affair shows an ongo­ing argu­ment of ratio­nal­ism ver­sus empiri­cism, Aris­totelian­ism ver­sus Coper­ni­can­ism, Aris­totelian­ism ver­sus Pla­ton­ism, geo­cen­tric ver­sus helio­cen­tric, geo­sta­t­ic ver­sus geo­ki­net­ics, faith ver­sus method­olo­gies, Domini­cans ver­sus Jesuits, and the har­mo­ny of the Church ver­sus the con­flict of sci­ence. One such his­to­ri­an, Mau­rice Finoc­chiaro, made a mar­velous effort to show how these argu­ments are over­sim­pli­fied, which dilutes the rea­son why the Church tried Galileo for heresy.[8]

As a result, through this over­ar­ch­ing argu­ment of con­flict ver­sus har­mo­ny, there appears to be a gap in explain­ing why Galileo could not effec­tive­ly argue for his defense. With­in that gap, there is anoth­er the­o­ry: Galileo’s argu­ment to the Church made no sense to the Inqui­si­tion, and they could not fol­low his logic.

Pro­fes­sor Philip Paul Wiener effec­tive­ly points out Galileo’s argu­ment in his 1936 arti­cle “The Tra­di­tion behind Galileo’s Method­ol­o­gy.” This arti­cle was pub­lished in the very first vol­ume of Osiris, an aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nal for the his­to­ry of sci­ence, and demon­strates that Galileo’s ulti­mate demise was a fail­ure to dis­tin­guish the dif­fer­ence between momen­tum and kinet­ic ener­gy, which devi­at­ed from the teach­ings of Aris­to­tle. In oth­er words, Galileo’s epis­te­mol­o­gy was flawed, which led to con­fu­sion among the Inqui­si­tion. Also, with­in the his­to­ri­og­ra­phy of the Galileo Affair, Wiener showed that Galileo’s most sig­nif­i­cant mis­take was pre­sent­ing the argu­ment of Pla­to and the math­e­mat­ics of Coper­ni­cus, both of which the Church opposed through the philoso­phies of Aris­to­tle. By oppos­ing Aris­to­tle, he became a heretic of the Church.[9]

How­ev­er, as a math­e­mati­cian, Galileo stud­ied Aristotle’s works exten­sive­ly. As a result, in his argu­ment to the Inqui­si­tion, he attempt­ed to dis­tin­guish between abstract and con­crete con­cepts in physics. His attempt to dis­tin­guish between the two is not­ed where he wrote that “forces, resis­tances, moments, fig­ures, may be con­sid­ered either in the abstract, dis­as­so­ci­at­ed from mat­ter, or in the con­crete, asso­ci­at­ed with mat­ter.”[10] So, while his inten­tions were steeped in Aris­totelian philoso­phies, the out­come of his argu­ment sup­port­ed Pla­ton­ic philoso­phies. Thus, though he intend­ed to sup­port Aristotle’s doc­trines, as trans­lat­ed by Saint Thomas Aquinas, he end­ed up sup­port­ing Plato’s philoso­phies, which were con­sid­ered hereti­cal. Or, as the his­to­ri­an Riv­ka Feld­hay writes, “the Galilean strug­gle for sci­en­tif­ic truth was revealed as full of sci­en­tif­ic errors as well as polit­i­cal rhetoric and tac­ti­cal blun­ders.”[11] In oth­er words, Galileo con­fused the Inqui­si­tion, which is very rem­i­nis­cent of many con­fus­ing dis­cus­sions with large gov­ern­ing bodies.

Thus, the Church placed Galileo under house arrest in 1633. While under house arrest, he pub­lished anoth­er book, Dis­cours­es and Math­e­mat­i­cal Demon­stra­tions Relat­ing to Two New Sci­ences. In his life­time, he pub­lished thir­teen writ­ten works, includ­ing his work Dis­course on the Tides, which was used against him in court dur­ing his trial.

Some of his oth­er works were phe­nom­e­nal and con­tributed a great deal to the future of sci­ence. As one of the first sci­en­tists to observe the Uni­verse through a tele­scope, Galileo observed that the moon was not smooth. With his tele­scope, he also observed Jupiter’s four largest moons. He did much work with buoy­an­cy and pos­si­bly invent­ed the ther­mo­scope, which is a device that shows changes in tem­per­a­ture. His work with analy­sis of tem­per­a­ture and buoy­an­cy led two of his stu­dents, Evan­ge­lista Tor­ri­cel­li and Vicen­zo Viviani, to design and invent the ther­mome­ter that relies on buoy­an­cy to indi­cate the room’s tem­per­a­ture. This ther­mome­ter is called the Galileo Thermometer.

Galileo was a bril­liant man who made incred­i­ble con­tri­bu­tions to math­e­mat­ics and sci­ence. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the rest of his life did not play out in such a way that he would have known how much of an impact he had on the world of sci­ence. While under house arrest, Galileo began to lose his eye­sight. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, house guards denied him the oppor­tu­ni­ty to seek prop­er med­ical help. He even­tu­al­ly went com­plete­ly blind. Galileo passed away on Jan­u­ary 8, 1642. Sad­ly, the Church denied him a Chris­t­ian bur­ial despite his devo­tion to Chris­tian­i­ty and Catholi­cism.[12] Fur­ther­more, the Church denied per­mis­sion to erect a mon­u­ment in his honor.

Three hun­dred and fifty years after Galileo’s death, the Catholic Church final­ly par­doned Galileo for adher­ing to sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence that the Earth was not the cen­ter of the Uni­verse. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, we can­not immerse our­selves in his­to­ry to ful­ly under­stand what exact­ly hap­pened dur­ing the tri­al. Still, that does not absolve us from ques­tion­ing why the Catholic Church did not par­don Galileo until Octo­ber 31, 1992.


[1] Finoc­chiaro, Mau­rice A., ed. The Galileo Affair: A Doc­u­men­tary His­to­ry. Cal­i­for­nia Stud­ies in the His­to­ry of Sci­ence. Berke­ley, CA: Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press, 1989.

[2] Uni­ver­si­ty Libraries. “Galileo’s World: An Exhi­bi­tion With­out Walls.” Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa, 2015. https://galileo.ou.edu/.

[3] A. W. Price, Virtue and Rea­son in Pla­to and Aris­to­tle (New York: Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, USA, 2015).

[4]. Geor­gios Anag­nos­topou­los, Aris­to­tle on the Goals and Exact­ness of Ethics (Berke­ly: Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press, 1994), 88.

[5] Feld­hay, Riv­ka. “Author­i­ty, Polit­i­cal The­ol­o­gy, and the Pol­i­tics of Knowl­edge in the Tran­si­tion from Medieval to Ear­ly Mod­ern Catholi­cism.” Social Research 73, no. 4 (2006): 1065–92.

[6] Riv­ka Feld­hay, Galileo and the Church: Polit­i­cal Inqui­si­tion or Crit­i­cal Dia­logue? (Cam­bridge, Eng­land: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1995), 9.

[7] Galilei, Galileo. Dia­logues Con­cern­ing Two New Sci­ences. Trans­lat­ed by Hen­ry Crew and Alfon­so De Salvio. New York: Macmil­lan Pub­lish­ing, 1914. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.203974/mode/2up.

[8] Finoc­chiaro, Mau­rice A. “Sci­ence, Reli­gion, and the His­to­ri­og­ra­phy of the Galileo Affair: On the Unde­sir­abil­i­ty of Over­sim­pli­ca­tion.” Osiris 16, no. 1 (Jan­u­ary 1, 2001): 114–32. https://doi.org/10.1086/649341.

[9] Philip Paul Wiener, “The Tra­di­tion behind Galileo’s Method­ol­o­gy,” Osiris 1 (Jan­u­ary 1, 1936): 733–46, https://doi.org/10.1086/368452.

[10] Wiener, Philip Paul. “The Tra­di­tion behind Galileo’s Method­ol­o­gy.” Osiris 1 (Jan­u­ary 1, 1936): 733–46. https://doi.org/10.1086/368452.

[11] Riv­ka Feld­hay, “Author­i­ty, Polit­i­cal The­ol­o­gy, and the Pol­i­tics of Knowl­edge in the Tran­si­tion from Medieval to Ear­ly Mod­ern Catholi­cism,” Social Research 73, no. 4 (2006): 1065–92.

[12] Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daugh­ter: A His­tor­i­cal Mem­oir of Sci­ence, Faith, and Love (New York: Blooms­bury Pub­lish­ing USA, 2011), 59.

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