Tractatio de Praecognitionibus et Praecognitis and Tractatio de Demonstratione, and: The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (review)

6o8 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:4 OCTOBER 1992 It should be noted that in its later phase Muslim philosophy considered metaphysical poetry to be cognitive. It became the most important language for both philosophical mysticism and ontology. For example, the greatest masterpieces of Islamic metaphysical mysticism are written in poetry, e.g., Rumi's Mathnawi and Divan-i Shams as well as Shabasteri's Golsham-i Raz. Thousands of pages of critical philosophy written in the analytical style have been produced discussing the metaphysical import of these poems . In a similar vein Sabazawari (1798-1878) presented the basic themes of metaphysics in a few hundred carefully constructed poems. Subsequent philosophers centered their views on ontology as analytic commentaries on this collection of poems. Avicenna himself wrote a book of poems on the nature of medicine, in Arabic, which was not his mother tongue. This fact surely verifies that the Persian philosopher considered at least some poems to be cognitive, as they expressed facts about medicine. From preMuhammad times, when the Kaaba was used as the center of poetical festivals, to the Persian epics of Fredousi's The Book of Kings and the love poems of Lali and Majnun, poetry has been the most significant dimension of Arab and Iranian cultures. It should be noted that even though the aesthetics of poetry in Islam extends beyond its logical works, this logical corpus is extensive. This fact is evident from the list of one hundred and sixty names of logicians who wrote in Arabic and Persian from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries.s With the exception of a few writers such as Averroes, these texts are not commentaries on the Greek writers. For example, it is obvious that Dahiyat's title is misleading since it contains numerous references to explicitly non-Greek elements . The field of Islamic philosophy owes much appreciation to Black and Kemal, whose works, along with those of Dahiyat and Butterworth, provide a thorough grounding of the aesthetics in the Islamic organon. PARVIZ MOREWEDGE Baruch College,CUNY Galileo Galilei. Tractatio de Praecognitionibus et Praecognitis and Tractatio de Demonstratione . Transcribed from the Latin Autograph by William F. Edwards. Introduction , Notes, and Commentary by William A. Wallace. Saggi e testi, 22. Padova: Editrice Antenore, 1988. Pp. lxxxix + 329. Paper, NP. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, ed. and trans. The GalileoAffair: A DocumentaryHistory. California Studies in the History of Science. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, t989. Pp. xvi + 382. Paper, $13.95. There may be no one in the entire history of science about whom more has been written than Galileo Galilei. The Galileo Bibliography for the period 1942-64 alone includes 1,74o items. So it might seem as though there cannot be much more to say! Fortunately, when Antonio Favaro compiled the great National Edition of Galileo's works a century ago (189o-19o9), he did not include quite everything, thus leaving an opening for later scholars that they have just recently begun to exploit. One fruitful sCL NicholasRescher, TheDevelopmentofArabicLogic(Pittsburgh, 1964). BOOK REVIEWS 609 line of research begins from three loose sheets of paper on which columns of figures and a few diagrams are jotted, evidently some notes Galileo made during his trials with the inclined plane in Padua prior to his move to Florence in 1610. Thanks to the efforts of Ron Naylor, Stillman Drake, Winifrcd Wisan, and David Hill, these sheets have been decoded, and seem to testify to an experimental verification, during those early years, of the parabolic path of projectile motion. This, if accepted, would lead to a fundamental revision of the standard account of the origins of the "New Science" of mechanics. William Wallace has been mining another larger vein. Galileo left behind a number of notebooks written in Latin, evidently dating from the earliest days of his teaching career. Favaro published two of these, one on motion, now usually called De morn a~lu~a to distinguish it from the mature De motu, the core of the Two New S~'nr.es of 1638, and the other a commentary on some topics drawn from Aristotle's physical treatises. The first of these has been much studied: the gap...