Stress in the Book of Nature: The Supplemental Logic of Galileo's Realism

This essay looks at the genealogy of Galileo's famous topos of the "book of nature" written in geometrical characters and open in front of anyone willing to read it. It shows that what has been traditionally read as an emblem of Galileo's method and mathematical realism was, in fact, the result of Galileo's difficult confrontation with another divine book: the Scripture. I argue that, behind the effect of transparency one experiences when reading Galileo's description of his topos, the book of nature was actually ridden with aporias -- aporias that can be traced to the relation of supplementarity between the Scripture and the book of nature.