Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science by Stillman Drake (review)

humanities 367 the comedies and the tragedies. Her study also generates fresh respect for that originally `status-less' writer, by Elizabethan standards an upstart nobody from nowhere, who like Iago kept his ear open to the intricate play of voices in his society, but who appropriated them not to destroy but to preserve and recreate. (JOHN REIBETANZ) Stillman Drake. Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science. Edited by N.M. Swerdlow and T.H. Levere University of Toronto Press. xxiv, 474; viii, 380; vi, 392. $21.95 each volume Stillman Drake of the University of Toronto was for the last decades of his life the most original and important scholar to study the seventeenthcentury physicist Galileo Galilei. Drake published 16 books, many of them translations, and about 130 articles and essays. This extremely welcome collection gathers 79 of the essays, more than twelve hundred pages, omitting for the most part only small pieces that cannot be read apart from their original context. The three sturdy volumes remind us of the magnitude of Drake's achievement, for he almost single-handedly restored a once-popular view that had become unfashionable: that Galileo introduced precise measurement into physics in place of philosophical concerns, and therefore, by implication, that Galileo was the prototype of the modern physical scientist. Stillman Drake was not a professionally trained historian. His first major publication on Galileo came only in 1953, when he was a successful forty-two-year-old financial consultant. He was not lured into the academic world until 1967, when he accepted a full professorship at the University of Toronto's Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, where he worked until retiring in 1979. He became a Canadian citizen in 1986, and remained active until his death in 1993. One cannot characterize Drake's style of scholarship simply. He sometimes adopted the methods of a hard-nosed scientist, sometimes those of a humanist scholar. He was dedicated to his subject, which was indeed one of the most important events in the history of civilization: the emergence, in Galileo's work, of physical science as a dominant way of understanding and controlling the world. Drake downplayed, however, the immediate influence of Galilean physics. `Galileo's science offered a brief interlude between the all-inclusive system of the Aristotelians and the all-inclusive system of the Cartesians. It was an interlude marked by the invasion of horse-sense ... into the alien territory of philosophy and science.' A persistent theme in Drake's readings of Galileo was the latter's hostility to the academic philosophy of his day. One noticed a parallel hostility of Drake to philosophical interpretations of Galileo. He saw Galileo (despite his court title as philosopher to the Medici Grand Duke of 368 letters in canada 1999 Tuscany) as no philosopher but rather a scientist, specifically a physicist, and one who had a remarkably modern attitude towards the scientific investigation of nature. In late twentieth-century historiography such an interpretation often seemed old-fashioned, harking back to an earlier age which was innocent of the contextualism that has come to dominate the field. Yet Drake was neither naïve nor unhistorical. As Galileo studied the world itself, and not philosophers' concepts of the world, so Drake studied Galileo, and not scholars' interpretations of Galileo. Drake's most important work divides into two genres. First, he translated most of Galileo's publications into English, and it is still for these translations that he is best known. Starting around 1960, though, he investigated the origins of Galileo's physics in a series of penetrating studies based largely on archival research. A surprising number of Galileo's manuscripts survive in the Florentine archives, and Drake's work in these archives particularly distinguishes the papers collected here. We owe much of our present understanding of Galileo's physics to this archival work. In a poignant remark on the contingency of our historical knowledge, Drake observed that `if the Florence flood had destroyed Galileo's manuscript notes in 1966, as it came within a few feet of doing, then the prevailing sophisticated myth of Galileo's essential resemblance to medieval physicists would forever...