| In spite of the proliferating scholarship on Galileo?s life and work, no monographic study of the international diffusion of the Galilean science of motion in the pre-Newtonian decades has yet been produced. I intend to use the three years of the Veni Grant to write a book-length study on the diffusion of the Galilean theories of free fall and of projectile motion before the publication of Newton?s Principia (1687). In the first part of this book I will offer a chronology and a geographical map documenting the diffusion of Galileo's mechanics. There, I will provide the reader with a systematic description of the channels through which this new science was brought to the attention of the learned, that is to say, of epistolary contacts, literal translations, popularizing works, and university textbooks. In the second part of the book, I propose to analyze the theoretical debates surrounding the validity of the new science of motion. I intend to organize this part of my study along three lines. The first will follow the numerous attempts undertaken to prove or disprove the Galilean laws on empirical grounds. The second line of approach will concern the mathematical arguments used for and against the new science and especially the many attempts to find methods of proof alternative to those used in the Discorsi. Thirdly, I wish to analyze those theories that tried to fill the gap left open by Galileo by offering a causal account of accelerated motion. I hope that when intertwined, these three lines of analysis will illustrate with historical accuracy also the variety of voices within the two opposing camps of friends or foes of Galilean mechanics and the often strange entanglement of mathematical, causal, and empirical reasoning which characterized the ongoing debate. Keywords: History of science--seventeenth-century; Galileo Galilei; mechanics; mechanical philosophy. |
