Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: The Galileo Myth Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_galileo_myth#15606 Post contents: Well, Cognate, maybe you ought first read Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Then ponder the fact that Renaissance Italy was the seminal breeding ground for many of the ideas that gave birth to scientific modernity. The Medici court. Leonardo Da Vinci. Galileo himself. And Nicolas Steno http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Steno as well as Evangelista Torricelli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelista_Torricelli And many others. Not to mention all the monastic and university communities (like that at Genoa) as well as the Papal court itself, which though they all mostly supported the established Ptolemaic & Aristotelean scientific orthodoxy, where utterly seminal to the Scholastic intellectual culture that precipitated the early modern scientific revolution that culminated in Descartes and Newton. It was a paradigm shift, but one that depended on antecedent Scholasticism born of Catholic scholarship. It is of a piece, this history. Never forget it. The idea that the Catholic faith is incompatible or even antagonistic with intellectual progress is utter dishonest idiocy. Idiocy that we may very well soon come to rue. Sent at: 2008 12 02