The Reception of the Galilean Science of Motion in Seventeenth-Century Europe / Edition 1

by Carla Rita Palmerino, J.M.M.H. Thijssen

Overview

This book collects contributions by some of the leading scholars working on seventeenth-century mechanics and the mechanical philosophy. Together, the articles provide a broad and accurate picture of the fortune of Galileo's theory of motion in Europe and of the various physical, mathematical, and ontological arguments that were used in favour and against it. Were Galileo's contemporaries really aware of what Westfall has described as "the incompatibility between the demands of mathematical mechanics and the needs of mechanical philosophy"? To what extent did Galileo's silence concerning the cause of free fall impede the acceptance of his theory of motion? Which methods were used, before the invention of the infinitesimal calculus, to check the validity of Galileo's laws of free fall and of parabolic motion? And what sort of experiments were invoked in favour or against these laws? These and related questions are addressed in this volume.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789048166589
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	12/10/2010
Series:	Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science , #239
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2004
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.02(d)

Table of Contents

What Was “Mechanical” about “The Mechanical Philosophy”?.- Cartesian Mechanics.- The “Rational” Descartes and the “Empirical” Galileo.- A Historical-Analytical Framework for the Controversies over Galileo’s Conception of Motion.- Galileo’s Unpublished Treatises. A case study on the role of shared knowledge in the emergence and dissemination of an early modern “new science”.- A Master and his Pupils: Theories of Motion in the Galilean School.- Galileo’s Theories of Free Fall and Projectile Motion as Interpreted by Pierre Gassendi.- Hobbes and the Galilean Law of Free Fall.- Christiaan Huygens’ Galilean Mechanics.- Seventeenth-Century Theories of the Tides as a Gauge of Scientific Change.- Mathematization of the Science of Motion at the Turn of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Pierre Varignon.