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

214 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) France is represented as a walled city, technical images for the measurement of towers, a drawing of a water pump, a meditation hand and two pages of images of prophecies concerning harvests. It would have been a bonus had they been reproduced in colour, but the black and white reproduction is of a high standard. This book, which is a delight to handle, will give speedy assistance to the informed specialist and be a reliable manual for the novice or general reader. I found only two typographical errors: ‘discreet’ for ‘discrete’ (p. 18) and ‘preceeding’ for ‘preceding’ (p. 11). Anne M. Scott English, Communication and Cultural Studies The University of Western Australia Drake, Stillman, Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science, selected and introduced by N. M. Swerdlow and T. H. Levere, 3 vols, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1999; paper, also avail. bound; pp. xxiii, 473; 380, 392; RRP US$180.00 (bound), US$60.00 (paper); ISBN 0802075851 (v. 1), 0802081649 (v. 2), 0802081657 (v. 3) Feeling completely inadequate to the task of reviewing this three-volume work of 1,000 pages on a scientist, I can simply summarise it for those who wish to explore further, and suggest a few ways in which it might interest researchers in the humanities. Stillman Drake published sixteen books and 100 papers on Galileo, and judging from these three volumes, he appears to be unrivalled in the field. The whole scientific context of Galileo’s life and works is invoked in detailed and wide-ranging ways. Essays begin with the biographical, and we find, for example, that Galileo brushed with authorities from early in his career, and not just with the religious establishment. There are also engrossing accounts of his trial and his tempestuous relationship with the Church of the day. We are given details about bibliographical and textual studies, his scientific method in the context of philosophical systems of the time, and his specific contributions to astronomy. Volume 2 gets down to fairly specialised accounts of Galileo’s work in theories of tides, inertia, acceleration and mathematics. Volume 3 returns to more general accounts which might interest the curious lay-person, raising historical and philosophical questions. Reviews 215 Parergon 20.1 (2003) A running topic which will interest those in the humanities is Galileo’s use and concept of language, and it is raised in several essays. Two deal with the ways in which printing helped to spread science beyond the universities in the early modern world. Another essay examines the way in which, in the days before accurate clocks, Galileo used music to divide time into intervals less than a second. His father and brother were professional musicians, so he grew up with this way of ‘measuring time’, and he was completely conscious of what he was doing, carrying out experiments in the precision of musical notation and timing. In terms of the history of ideas in which many of us are sadly limited, Stillman’s essays provide a wealth of fascinating and precise details, concerning, for example, paradigms of movement and stasis which Galileo inherited and developed. His more well known and breathtaking intellectual achievements concerning cosmogony emerge as the product of empirical and tangential research rather than sudden intuitive leaps, thus confirming Kuhn’s later theory of the incremental nature of paradigm shifts. For example, on one group of unpublished material by Galileo, Stillman concludes: ‘at least one group of notes … cannot satisfactorily be accounted for except as representing a series of experiments designed to test a fundamental assumption, which led to a new, important discovery’ (vol. 2, p. 148). Stillman writes with an infectious enthusiasm for his subject, and a clarity based on both expert knowledge and a desire to communicate beyond scientific specialists. While few in the humanities could spare the time or attentiveness to read all three volumes carefully, intensive browsing is rewarding. In fact, given the scientific developments since Galileo, the volume may in fact be of less interest to physicists than to historians and literary scholars. It is certainly an important contribution to the history of early modern ideas. R. S. White English...