MetaphorNavigating the site:
Galileo's life and career, 1564-1642, reveal that Renaissance learning about nature was deluged by new information, disturbingly different findings, and imponderable anomalies which after scrutiny and debate–even fierce confrontations–led to changes in worldviews due to:
calendar error, deviations, economic transformation & evidence.
"Galileo dealt with epistemological and methodological questions about the nature of truth and knowledge and the truth and knowledge of nature."
Finocchiaro, p. 3.
"one of the founders of modern science" -- "the most pivotal of these founders: Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, and Newton."
"Galileo is also a cultural icon and symbol because he was tried and condemned as a suspected heretic...."
Finocchiaro, p. 1.
symbolic importance | spirit of the times | worldview challenged | conclusion
What did he see and ascertain from those observations?
The apparent movement of the planets as seen from the Earth.
A solar eclipse occurs when the sun, moon and the earth align and the moon orbits between them both.
Iconography of Galileo
Galileo Galilei became a "larger than life" figure, because he was at once a practitioner, publicist and challenger of the existing order of knowledge. This we refer to as his symbolic importance or his iconography, because he ceases to be a mere person and takes on emblematic characteristics, representiing a universal struggle, beyond the scope of ordinary human beings.
Practitioner of a revolutionary scientific method
symbol of a modern, free thinking empiricist, who forged a working union between epistemology & tekne (craft) due to experiment
The reformation (1517) generated one long and unending struggle over authority with respect to and among these ideas: truth, power, morals and customs.
Truth, "truths," and heresies (doxa vs. episteme)
Power, "powers," and duty (sacred & secular spheres of influence)
Values, the morality of what we know, or "ethics" (authenticity versus integrity)&
Custom, between tradition and modernity, progress and precedent.
Zeitgeist or "spirit of the times" 2000
The Challenges to Authority
Galileo in the 1600s had a foot in the faith community and another in the incipient community of authorities on natural philosophy in Universities where science matters were subject to scrutiny based on authority and observation,
He was raised as a devout Northern Italian catholic during the Church's counter-reformation against Protestantism that attacked the moral and interpretive power of the Papacy.
In schooling he was "an Archimedean," as one who was "critical of Aristotelian physics" while at the University of Pisa, his birthplace.
Finocchiaro, p. 3.
Like many who had to seek patrons to pay for their investigations, Galileo was a mathematics tutor to sons of wealthy families. He was never a "free agent" in the sense that he could ignore the city states in which he lived --Padua, Venice, Florence-- and their needs, or the Holy Inquisition, that tried to save Europe from the alleged apostasy, sullen heretics, and wars of the Protestant Reformation.
"Modern science tells us that we are an integral part of nature, dependent on cosmic forces beyond our control, and that time, space, matter and perhaps consciousness are mysteries which transcend our present understanding. That is a view of the world consistent with the basic religious intuition that Man is not the measure of all things." (183)
Hanbury Brown, The Wisdom of Science
That is a view of the world
This means that every person in every age in different cultures sees the reality of the world very differently.
James Clavell, in the novel Shogun, explains the confusion of Europeans when they meet Japanese Islanders, for the first time, in the sixteenth century when the Jesuits landed in and around Hiroshima, Japan. The Europeans where filthy barbarians who ate rotten meat and rarely if ever bathed. The Japanese by contrast were vegetarians and fish consuming people, who bathed regularly, were fastidious and frequently opened their windows to allow fresh air into their home made of wood and rice paper.
Despite Galileo's brilliance, the world of the Eastern Asians and the worlds of the Aztec and Inca differed substantially from the medieval mind that Galileo confronted.
Consider that Europeans in the middle ages believed:
that hell was the center of the universe.
that there were four elements: fire, earth, air, and water.
all things found their natural place, due to impetus -- the place of their original beginnings to which they long to return:
fire, leapt into the heavens (sun),
water, fell into the oceans,
air, levitated above the base earth to reunite with spirits,
earth, surrounding hell was a base substance attracted to the center.
That Adam and Eve where the parents of us all.
The Earth was the pivot around which five planets and the sun moved as did the moon.
Galileo replaced many of these beliefs with observational conclusions, tested with respect to: falling bodies, telescopic observations of the moon, Venus and Jupiter, mathematical formulas. ice floating in water, and the quantitative idea of gravity.
"the metaphors
and symbols which we use to describe our experience of the world are only
valid within the 
limited context of our experience & cannot be used
outside it; they are useful simplifications of the world and must never
be confused with the much more complex reality which they represent."
"The confusion of the symbol with reality is idolatry, and that is a sin to which we are all prone.… failure to recognize the context within which the metaphors and symbols of science and religion are valid." (182)
Hanbury Brown, The Wisdom of Science
Comments on the scientific method.
Einstein | E. O. Wilson | Feynman
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