William Wallace’s Preludes and Études: Variations on the Continuity Theme

WILLIAM WALLACE'S PRELUDES AND ETUDES: VARIATIONS ON THE CONTINUITY THEME A REVIEW DISCUSSION * T O THOSE OF US familiar with the thorough, solid, and traiLblaz:ing work of Father Wallace, the first impression in perusing this volume is one of deja lu. This is a correct impression. Indeed, as Father Wallace himself points out, the contents reproduce substantially studies and essays published during the past fifteen years. The exceptions to this statement 'are few: a couple of appendices providing further clarification of the author's positions about reasoning ex suppositione and additional examples of Galileo's knowledge of the fourteenth-century Parisian nominalist school; also, a brief article (1based on a 1976 conference paper) discussing Galileo's views on causality. The rest is essentially old hat (i.e., classical), even though it contains sometimes minor rewriting , small modifications, as well as attempts at supplying transitions between the various chapters and parts to make the volume unified and homogeneous. All this does NOT mean that the publication of this volume is unwelcome. Quite the contrary. As Father Wallace indicates, there are some good reasons for collecting the previously widely scattered papers in one readily available tome. Among these reasons, one can mention the following: As an aggregate, these papers " present a unified thesis about the medieval and sixteenth -century sources of early modern science" (p. ix); the volume represents a true ingathering of the author's pertinent historical diaspora, serving to set his interpretation apart from *Prelude to Galileo: Essays on Medieval and Sixteenth-Century Sources of Galileo's Thought. By WILLIAM A. WALLACE. (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 62.) Dordrecht, Boston, and London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981. Pp. xvi + 869. Cloth $49.95, paper $28.50. 466 WILLIAM WALLACE'S PRELUDES AND :filTUDES: 467 those of his illustrious predecessors, Duhem, Maier, Koyre, Moody, and Drake; and, as a whole, the various essays fill in an important lacuna, dealing systematically with Galileo's early works, some of which are seminal for a proper understanding of Galileo's mature contribution to the modern science of motion. The sixteen chapters of greatly unequal length and substance are distributed among the four major subdivisions of the volume . These four parts deal respectively with (1) the medi.ev:il roots of sixteenth-century developments in mechanics, (2) the sixteenth-century achievement in the study of motion, (3) Galileo's crucial contributions to mechanics seen as growing out of both medieval and sixteenth-century preoccupations with the logic and physics of motion, and finally (4) an analysis and critical assessment of the historiographic contributions of Duhem, Anneliese Maier, and Ernest Moody in light of the author's own findings in his own "Etudes Galileennes." Father Wallace's fundamental thesis is prima facie both obvious and welcome to the historically minded reader; indeed it is a historical truism: Galileo Galilei did not spring fully formed out of the ahistorical head of a transcendent Zeus. Though a great genius, he was a man of his times who absorbed the kindred ideas of his predecessors and contemporaries, and it is upon these ideas that his creative spirit exerted itself. In Wallace's own words: "Galileo will never be understood either historically or philosophically, when viewed in isolation from the intellectual background out of which his scientific work emerged" (ibid.). Of course. For the historian this is almost axiomatic. It is the historian's job, however, to flesh out, to substantiate this quasi-axiom. This Wallace does admirably. Dropping Drake's approach to Galileo Studies, an approach which Wallace calls a parte post, and adopting the a parte ante perspective of Duhem, Maier, and Moody, Wallace shows convincingly , by focusing on newly available manuscript sources of Galileo's sixteenth-century notebooks which he has unearthed and dissected (cf. also Galileo's Early Notebooks: The 468 SABETAI UNGURU Physical Questions) , that Galileo's early views on motion owe their ultimate inspiration to thirteenth-century scholastics, that the views of these commentators on Aristotle were known to Galileo primarily through the intermediary of reportationes of lectures of professors at the Collegio Romano, and that realist currents of thought (primarily Thomism, Averroism, Scotism , and, in general, Renaissance Aristotelianism...