Rhetoric & Dialectic in the Time of Galileo (review)

"The setting for this book is Northern Italy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a time when arguments were more than entertaining verbal duels, where they might mean death or imprisonment for the orator or the author" (3). It defines the background in which the case of Galileo takes place, while delving into the scientific constitution of rhetoric and dialectic, the disciplines that formed the proper basis of the debate on Galileo. By presenting the general disciplinary scene and introducing and translating important parts of works by Ludovico Carbone and Antonio Riccobono, the authors—who are well-known experts on the Renaissance and Galileo—give a broad perspective on the scholastic teaching of dialectic and rhetoric in the late Italian Renaissance. The texts presented are paradigmatic witnesses to a culture in which Cicero and Quintilian, the Jesuitical ratio studiorum, and the Paduan Aristotelians were the most important elements.

Carbone (Costacciaro near Perugia 1545–Venice 1597) studied at the Collegium romanum and was a secular priest and professor in Perugia. He wrote treatises and compendia about theology, logic, rhetoric, grammar, law, the spiritual life and other issues. Moss and Wallace quote an unpublished document that attests to his exact date of birth. In the past years, Wallace has been dedicating several studies to a possible connection between Carbone and Galileo, given that some of their passages seem to coincide literally. In fact, Wallace has discovered that they shared a common source, namely a set of lecture notes by the Jesuit professor Paolo Vallius. The authors do not deal with other important influences of Carbone, because they are outside the aim of the book, which are nonetheless of interest. It is especially worth mentioning that Carbone compiled a compendium of Aquinas's Summa theologiae, which Christian Wolff used when he quoted the Doctor Angelicus. It was recently published at Hildesheim by Olms (as volumes 75.1–2 of the third section of Wolff's Werke) and occasioned some articles. Among the works of Carbone that Moss and Wallace have partially translated are the Introduction to Logic (Section 1), the Art of Speaking (Section 3) and the treatises On Invention (Section 5), and On Divine Rhetoric (Section 6). The complete translation of Carbone's Tables of Cypriano Soarez's Art of Rhetoric offers also the occasion to include part of this influential text of the Spanish Jesuit. In his Tables, Carbone probably refers to the second edition of the work of Soarez, a version that already contains the revision of the text made by Perpinian, who was a pupil of Soarez and himself a teacher of Carbone.

Galileo also came in contact with works by Riccobono (Rovigo 1541–Venice 1599), who studied at Padua and in Venice, became doctor iuris, and taught humanities in Rovigo and Venice. He was also a translator and stood in contact with the Jesuits. Exact records of a direct link between him and Galileo are accurately documented by Moss and Wallace. Riccobono's Latin version of Aristotle's Rhetoric, whose goal was essentially pedagogical,became the leading one at the end of the sixteenth century: in order to demonstrate the importance of Riccobono's efforts, Moss and Wallace offer a comparison between his translation and that of William of Moerbeke. Furthermore, the authors devote an extensive section of the book to Riccobono's Essays on Aristotelian rhetoric (Section 4).

The study of Moss and Wallace constitutes in sum a momentous contribution to the history of ideas that illuminates a meaningful (though still neglected) chapter of the long relationship between rhetoric and dialectic, which goes back to the sophists, Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle. With the case of Galileo, sixteenth-century Northern Italy became the stage of both the renewal and the crisis of Aristotelianism, especially in relation to dialectic as the logic of the probable. The contemporaries condemned Galileo's presentation of his astronomical theory for being asserting with absoluteness, and therein...