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BOOK REVIEWS 101 allels that of Hume. However, it is with respect to the explanation of how one arrives at the idea of "necessary connection" that al-Gha~li contended that events are necessarily connected in nature because of God's will. In the concluding chapter on al-Ghaz~li, Sheikh dwells at length on the influence of al-Ghazfili on Jewish and Christian Scholastic philosophers, as well as on the obvious parallels between the views of al-Ghazfili and those expounded in modern philosophy. Among the significant parallels that Professor Sheikh discusses are the ones between al-Gha~li and Pascal, Descartes, and Kant respectively. Sheikh concludes his discussion on al-Ghazfili by suggesting that "an intensive study of al-Ghazfili's works in the contemporary age would certainly bring a new impetus within the Islamic world at least, to two rather divergent movements of our thought, viz, philosophical analysis and religious empiricism , paradoxical though it may seem" (p. 173). In fine, Professor Sheikh's Studies in Muslim Philosophy is a scholarly contribution to Islamic medieval philosophy. This book will make an excellent textbook for a course on Islamic philosophy. Furthermore, it can be used as a supplementary textbook in a course on medieval philosophy. ROBERTELIASABU SHANAB University o/ Benghazi, Libya Galileo's Intellectual Revolution: Middle Period, 1610-1632. By William R. Shea. (New York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1972. Pp. xii q- 204. $1.98) On the conviction that the early (I 564-1610) and late (1632-1642) periods of Galileo's life and scientific career have received their measure of scholarly attention, the former from Antonio Favaro and the latter from several recent investigators, William Shea here concentrates on the middle period from 1610 to 1632 during which, as Mathematician and Philosopher to the Grand Duke of Tuscany in Florence, Galileo carried out a series of studies culminating in his famous Dialogue Concerning the Two Great World Systems. It was a prolific period in terms both of positive results achieved and of controversies provoked . A convinced Copernican since 1597, now armed with the telescopic evidence announced in his Starry Messenger, Galileo came to Florence prepared to do battle on two fronts with his Aristotelian opponents. On the astronomical-cosmological front, he attacked Aristotle by proving that the recently observed sunspots in fact lay on or very near to the surface of the sun and rotated with it, and he defended Copernicus by insisting against all evidence that comets were meteorological phenomena very close to the surface of the earth. In a vain attempt to forestall the condemnation of Copernicanism in 1616, he devised a theory of the tides which he felt offered physical proof of the earth's double motion. On the metaphysical-epistemological front, he argued fervently for the intrinsically mathematical structure of the physical universe and, hence, for the primacy of the quantitative properties of matter such as location, motion, shape, and size, which the Aristotelians took to be secondary accidents, at best irrelevant to the understanding of physical reality. Against the raw empiricism of the Aristotelians, he counterpoi6ed a sophisticated experimentalism designed to test abstract mathematical principles by confronting their measurable implications with an equally measurable physical world. Viewing the two fronts within the context of a single strategy, Shea guides the reader through the major battles: the 1611 debate with Lodovico Colombo over floating bodies (chapter II), the 1612-1613 argument with Christoph Scheiner over the nature and location of sunspots (chapter III), the 1618 controversy with Orazio Grassi concerning comets (chapter IV), and, finally, the fight carried on in the Dialogue with all Aristotelians over 102 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the Copernican system as a whole (chapters V-VII). Although Shea treats the technical issues in some detail, he strives in each chapter to use them as a source of methodological insight. For he takes the essence of Galileo's intellectual revolution--and of the intellectual revolution he helped to provoke in the seventeenth century--to have been methodological. It lay not in the replacement of one system of cosmology and physics by another, but in the triumph of mathematicism over essentialism, of architectonics over classification, of quantitative experimentalism over qualitative empiricism. Through...

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