ABSTRACT
Historians and philosophers of science maintain that “fundamental changes in our understanding of the natural world” occurred at the turn of the sixteenth century (Jacob 1999, xiii). Some scholars refer to that series of events as the beginning of the scientific revolution. Others have denied that a revolutionary transformation really occurred at the beginning of the seventeenth century and have claimed that it is more fruitful to describe that period in terms of complex exchanges and mutual influences with technological developments, societal practices, and intellectual traditions (cf., for instance, Hadden 1994 and Shapin 1996). Regardless of the historiographic and philosophical perspectives, most would agree that, throughout the seventeenth century, “the gradual rejection of the Aristotelian binary physics of metaphysical natures and places in favor of the modern physics of universal forces whose behavior can be quantified and expressed in terms of mathematical laws” characterized the emergence, gradual or otherwise, of novel styles of inquiry within the philosophical tradition of Western Europe (Jacob 1999, xiii). Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was an initiator of processes of transformation which, in the nineteenth century, culminated in the consolidation of the social and intellectual institutions that constitute modern mathematical physics. Over the past four centuries, Galileo has been the subject of passionate debate and acrimonious controversy, for very different reasons, some stemming from the intellectual battles of the Enlightenment philosophers against the Christian church, some from the affirmation of the positivist philosophical movement in the nineteenth century, which elevated science to a form of religion whose first martyr would have been Galileo (recall his notorious abjuration of Copernicanism before the Roman Inquisition in 1633). Yet, paradoxically enough, we still know very little about how Galileo contributed to the mathematization of nature, and what is even more striking is that there is little or no consensus among scholars concerning his achievements.
