Galileo as a commentator on Aristotle?: The reception of Galileo in the Jesuit Collegio Romano and University of Pisa, 1633--1700.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation examines the reception of Galileo Galilei's final published work, the 1638 Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno a due nuove Scienze ("Two New Sciences"), from its publication to the end of the seventeenth century.
In Part One, I rely on extant archival manuscript texts and printed materials in order to trace the incorporation of specific elements of Galileo's Discorsi in teaching at the University of Pisa and Collegio Romano during the seventeenth century. Chapter One examines the reception of the Discorsi at the University of Pisa through 1650. Analysis of manuscript and printed teaching texts composed by Claude Berigard, professor of natural philosophy from 1627 to 1639, and Vincenzio Renieri, professor of mathematics from 1640 to 1648, suggests that early incorporation of the Discorsi focused on Day 1 and ignored Galileo's work on motion. The chapter reveals how Berigard, in particular, found many of Galileo's arguments directly relevant to his own task of explicating Aristotle and shows how Galileo's manipulation of well-known Scholastic arguments could force committed Aristotelians like Berigard to respond to his claims.
Chapters Two and Three complement this analysis by examining the teaching of natural philosophy at the Collegio Romano in the last half of the seventeenth century. The analysis begins with a detailed reading of Sylvester Mauro's 1658 Quaestiones Philosophicae, the first teaching text from the Collegio Romano to cite specifically Galileo's Discorsi. I then consider how Mauro's successors dealt with two of the passages from the Discorsi referenced by Mauro. I argue that characteristics inherent to the Jesuit natural philosophical curriculum were at least as important as the content and context of the Discorsi in encouraging professors to include Galileo's work in their teaching. This analysis highlights the willingness of Jesuit professors to incorporate the newest natural philosophical research in their teaching, yet also suggests that such inclusion was limited in some cases by certain inflexibilities intrinsic to the structure and content of the standard curriculum. These findings, in turn, allow for rumination on the compatibility of Galileo's and the traditional Aristotelian-Scholastic approach to the study of nature.
Part Two, comprising Chapters Four, Five, and Six, revolves around a series of case studies that nuance the detailed archival analysis presented in the first two chapters. The trends noted in Part One serve as the impetus for a new interpretation of Galileo's Day 1, which is advanced in Chapter Four. Comparing Aristotle's Physics as it was presented in early seventeenth-century teaching commentaries to Galileo's First Day, I argue that Galileo's choice of topics and organizational structure have close parallels with Books 3-8 of Aristotle's Physics as it was traditionally taught in the early modern university. These observations point suggestively to a means for reconciling Galileo's early studies of Aristotelian natural philosophy with his purportedly mature repudiation of Aristotelian natural philosophy in his 1632 Dialogo and 1638 Discorsi.
Chapter Five departs from the analysis of this university readership to provide a new interpretation of a well-known reader of Galileo's Discorsi, Marin Mersenne. Mersenne's 1639 translation and adaptation of the Discorsi, his Nouvelles Pensees de Galilee, serves as a window into how Mersenne read and understood Galileo's text. Though Mersenne's interest in Galileo's experiential claims mark him as a distinctly different reader than the university professors of Part One, Mersenne evinces certain similarities with this readership, particularly in the way in which he read and interpreted Galileo's work on local motion. By analyzing Mersenne's treatment of Galileo's experiential claims, the Chapter argues that even readers committed to Galileo's enterprise, like Mersenne, could mischaracterize and misunderstand him.
Chapter Six sets the previous examination of Galileo's mechanics in context by considering the effect of Galileo's condemnation on Italian university teaching in this period. Seventeenth-century classroom presentations of Copernicanism form the core of this chapter. I argue that Galileo's condemnation served as a catalyst to propel Copernicanism and related questions, such as that of the earth's motion, to a more central place in the teaching of both mathematics and natural philosophy. This analysis illuminates the nature of early modern university teaching, particularly that of the Jesuits, and provides the means for assessing how the labels of "innovative" or "dangerous" impacted the way in which Galileo's ideas were presented in the classroom. It also serves as an entry-point for considering how Galileo's reputation, both as a well-known mathematician and natural philosopher and as a Copernican condemned by the Catholic Church, influenced the reception of his Discorsi (Abstract shortened by UMI.).