Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxiii

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2. Galileo’s Logical Methodology

   1. Galileo’s Logical Methodology

      • William A. Wallace

      Pages 1-29

3. Logica Docens

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 31-31

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   2. The Understanding of Logic Implicit in MS 27

      • William A. Wallace

      Pages 33-83

   3. Science and Opinion as Understood in MS 27

      • William A. Wallace

      Pages 84-133

   4. Demonstration and Its Requirements in MS 27

      • William A. Wallace

      Pages 134-190

4. Logica Utens

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 191-191

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   2. Galileo’s Search for a New Science of the Heavens

      • William A. Wallace

      Pages 193-237

   3. Galileo’s New Sciences of Mechanics and Local Motion

      • William A. Wallace

      Pages 238-298

   4. Epilogue

      • William A. Wallace

      Pages 299-303

5. Back Matter

   Pages 304-333

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This volume is presented as a companion study to my translation of Galileo's MS 27, Galileo's Logical Treatises, which contains Galileo's appropriated questions on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics - a work only recently transcribed from the Latin autograph. Its purpose is to acquaint an English-reading audience with the teaching in those treatises. This is basically a sixteenth-century logic of discovery and of proof about which little is known in the present day, yet one that arguably guided the most significant research program of the seventeenth century. Despite its historical and systematic importance, the teaching is difficult to explain to the modern reader. Part of the problem stems from the fragmentary nature of the manuscript in which it is preserved, part from the contents of the teaching itself, which requires a considerable propadeutic for its comprehension. A word of explanation is thus required to set out the structure of the volume and to detail the editorial decisions that underlie its organization. Two major manuscript studies have advanced the cause of scholarship on Galileo within the past two decades. The first relates to Galileo's experimental activity at Padua prior to his discoveries with the telescope that led to the publication of his Sidereus nuncius in 1610. Much of this activity has been uncovered by Stillman Drake in analyses of manuscript fragments associated with the composition of Galileo's Two New Sciences, fragments now bound in a codex identified as MS 72 in the collection of Galileiana at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence.

• Galileo Galilei
• logic
• science

• University of Maryland at College Park, USA

  William A. Wallace

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