Galileo’s Logical Treatises: A Translation, with Notes and Commentary, of his Appropriated Latin Questions on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics Book II

This two volume set includes Galileo’s Logical Treatises and Galileo’s Logic of Discovery . The problem of Galileo’s logical methodology has long interested scholars. In Galileo’s Logical Treatises the author offers a solution that is backed by documentary evidence. His analysis starts with an early notebook Galileo wrote at Pisa, appropriating a Jesuit professor’s exposition of the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle, and ends with one of the last letters Galileo wrote, stating that in logic he had been a Peripatetic all his life. The author unearths the logic course from which the notebook was excerpted, then proceeds to show how its terminology and methodology continue to surface in Galileo’s later writings in which he founds his new sciences of the heavens and of local motion. Hard as it is to believe, what is possibly Galileo’s most important Latin manuscript was not transcribed for the National Edition of his works and so has remained hidden from scholars for centuries. In Galileo’s Logical Treatises William A. Wallace translates the logical treatises contained in that manuscript and tries to make them intelligible to the modern reader. He prefaces his translation with a lengthy introduction describing the contents of the manuscript, the sources from which it derives, its dating and how it relates to Galileo’s other Pisan writings. This set should be of interest to Galileo scholars and logicians, philosophers, historians and anyone interested in the epistemic roots of modern sceince.