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Galileo Studies (European Philosophy and the Human Sciences)

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Koyre was one of the first historians to study the history of science philosophically, and he applies Husserl's insights on the "geometrization of space" to Galileo, supplying an historical supplement to Husserl's intuitive history. The transition of science from the "closed world to the infinite universe" is fascinating, and in the treatment of Galileo Koyre tells the story from the vantage of sublunar motion, artillery and bricks and bows and arrows. The supplanting of the distinction between "natural" and "violent" motion by motion per se and the geometrization of space is the destruction of the universe with a center circled by the visible divinities. The history of science is usually told as a story of idle theory replaced by experimentation, but Koyre shows that because the new science is based on an undemonstrable principle (inertia) and action at a distance, experimentation is superfluous: Galileo already knows the answers to the questions he puts to nature. Moreover, the introduction of force, which can only be demonstrated by equations (I've seen motion and distance, but never force), is not the triumph of observation but its supplanting. Koyre, by the way, was a teacher of Kuhn and Kojeve, who both turned Koyre's ideas into slogans and became world famous.