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Drake on Galileo
a
Maurice A. Finocchiaro
a
Department of Philosophy , University of
Nevada-LasVegas , Las Vegas, NV, 89154-5028,
USA
Published online: 05 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Maurice A. Finocchiaro (2002) Drake on Galileo, Annals of

Science, 59:1, 83-88, DOI: 10.1080/00033790010028656

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 Annals of Science, 59 (2002), 83–88

Essay Review

Drake on Galileo

Stillman Drake, Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science,
selected and introduced by N. M. Swerdlow and T. H. Levere. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1999. Three volumes. Volume I, 476 pp.; US$75.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-8020-0626-4/US$24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0-8020-7585-1 . Volume II, 376 pp.; US$65.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-8020-4343- 7/US$22.95 ( pbk), ISBN 0-8020-8164-9 . Volume III,
379 pp.; US$65.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8020-4344- 5/US$22.99 (pbk), ISBN
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0-8020-8165-7 . Three volume set, US$180.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8020-4716- 5/US$60.00

(pbk), ISBN 0-8020-8288-2 .

Reviewed by
Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada-Las
Vegas, Las Vegas, NV 89154-502 8, USA

Stillman Drake was born in Berkeley, California, in 1910 and died in Toronto,
Canada, in 1993. After earning an AB degree in philosophy from the University of
California, Berkeley, and then a mathematics teaching certiŽ cate, from 1934 until
1967 he worked as a Ž nancial consultant mostly in San Francisco. During this period
he developed an interest in the life and work of Galileo and began making scholarly
contributions, which became increasingly more frequent and substantial as time
went on. The main products of this Ž rst phase of Drake’s career were an English
translation of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1953,
Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo in 1957, the co-translation1 of The Controversy
on the Comets of 1618 in 1960, and the translation of Ludovico Geymonat’s bio-
graphy of Galileo in 1965.2 In 1967 Drake was appointed full professor at the
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of
Toronto, a position he held until his formal retirement from teaching and transition
to Emeritus status in 1979. During this formal academic phase of his life, his
publications included Galileo Studies (1970), a translation of Galileo’s Two New
Sciences (1974 ), and Galileo at Work: His ScientiŽ c Biography ( 1978). Drake’s active
scholarship continued after his formal retirement, during which period his books
included Cause, Experiment and Science (1981 ), Telescopes, Tides and Tactics (1983 ),
and Galileo: Pioneer Scientist (1990). It was also during this last stage that Drake
received his greatest scholarly honours: the International Galileo Prize for the
History of Italian Science in 1984 and the History of Science Society’s Sarton Medal
in 1988.
Besides these and other books, Drake also published a total of about 130 papers,
not counting shorter pieces such as book reviews. The very Ž rst paper appeared in

1 The co-translator and co-editor was C.D. O’Malley.

2 Ludovico Geymonat, Galileo Galilei: a Biography and Inquiry into His Philosophy of Science, trans.
by Stillman Drake (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965) .

Annals of Science ISSN 0003-3790 print/ISSN 1464-505X online © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk /journals
DOI: 10.1080/00033790010028656
 84 Essay Review

1933; the Ž rst signiŽ cant one in 1957; the last one in 1993. Drake’s papers have now
been collected in three volumes.3 The collection reprints eighty papers, making up
about 80% of the total number of pages of the 130 papers. The main criteria of
editorial selection were the relative autonomy and the scientiŽ c or historical impor-
tance of a given paper. However, there are some exceptions to these criteria. Drake’s
ten entries (including the one on Galileo) in the Dictionary of ScientiŽ c Biography
were excluded on the grounds that they are easily available. Also, Drake’s introduc-
tion to the 1967 reprint of Thomas Salusbury’s Mathematical Collections and
Translations (London, 1661 –65) was not included for being too long.
One can hardly fault these criteria of selection or their reasonable application
by the editors. Similarly, the grouping and arrangement of the papers in the three
volumes are useful and judicious. The three volumes are subdivided into nine parts,
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the last two of which are only indirectly related to Galileo but still important. Part
ix in Volume III consists of four papers dealing with issues in the philosophy of
science and language, especially the ideas of American philosopher Alexander Bryan
Johnson, whom Drake admired greatly. Part viii in Volume III groups Ž fteen papers
on various aspcts of the history of science from antiquity to the seventeenth century:
for example, the theory of proportions in Book 5 of Euclid’s Elements, the connection
between music and science in the Renaissance and the early modern period, and the
development of impetus theory.
The parts that treat explicitly Galileo may be highlighted as follows. Part i in
Volume I is general and biographical. It consists of ten papers on such topics as the
scientiŽ c personality of Galileo, the way he combined mathematics, astronomy, and
physics, and his trial by the Inquisition. Part ii in Volume I contains Ž ve ‘bibliograph-
ical and textual studies’, dealing primarily with the dating and chronological ordering
of Galileo’s research notes. Part iii of the same volume groups four papers on
Galileo’s scientiŽ c method and philosophy of science. Part iv in that Ž rst volume
reprints ten important papers on Galileo’s astronomy.
In Volume II, part v includes eight valuable papers on the Dialogue Concerning
the Two Chief World Systems, discussing such topics as the titling, preface, and
organizing theme of the book, the passage on semicircular fall and the question of
‘circular inertia’, the anti-Copernican argument based on vertical fall, and the theory
of tides. Part vi of Volume II is easily the most substantial one in so far as it consists
of nineteen papers on motion, mechanics, and the Two New Sciences; here we have
Drake’s epoch-making analyses of Galileo’s contributions to the laws of inertia, of
free fall, and of the pendulum.
Finally, besides containing the previously mentioned parts viii and ix, Volume
III has a group of four papers on Galileo’s instruments, labelled part vii. They deal
with the telescope and with Galileo’s mechanical computing device, the so-called
compass.
Given the historiographical stature of Stillman Drake, the perennial scientiŽ c
signiŽ cance of Galileo’s work, and the importance of Drake’s contributions to the
understanding of Galileo, I have no hesitation in saying that the editors and the
press have performed a valuable service to the history of science by collecting and
publishing these important papers.
Let us now turn to more interpretive and critical issues. Drake’s most important

3 Stillman Drake, Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science, 3 vols, selected and
introduced by N.M. Swerdlow and T.H. Levere (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999) .
 Essay Review 85

result was to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that Galileo was an ingenious,
skilful, and indefatigabl e experimenter who pioneered the art of experimentation as
a method of inquiry and discovered and established many facts about falling bodies
by this procedure. This result is in part a vindication of an earlier traditional view
of Galileo as empirical-minded, but Drake added reŽ nement to the interpretation
and brought to a new level the evidence supporting it. One reŽ nement which Drake
himself liked to emphasize was that Galileo’s experimentation was intimately tied
to quantitative measurement; this immediately involves mathematization, and so
such experimentation is really a way of combining observation and mathematics.
Also, the new level of supporting documentation that Drake provided consisted of
two interrelated processes. One was the painstaking study of Galileo’s notes, which
are usually on single sheets of paper full of diagrams, numbers, tables, and abbrevi-
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ated words; this is a task very much like deciphering a hieroglyphic. The other was
the actual repetition of Galileo’s experiments with the equipment available to him
to see whether his results could be reproduced; in Drake’s hands, they often were.
Although Drake was not the Ž rst or only scholar to stress such hieroglyphic analysis
of cryptic notes and such reproduction of experiments, he mastered these techniques
better than anyone else and with their help arrived at signiŽ cant conclusions about
Galileo’s work.
This result by Drake also represents a conclusive refutation of the more recent
widely accepted view (stemming from Alexandre Koyré)4 to the eVect that Galileo’s
physics was constructed a priori, that he seldom conducted experiments, and that
the experiments mentioned in his writings are usually thought experiments. On the
other hand, it should also be mentioned that it would not be exactly right to equate
Drake’s result with the claim that Galileo’s method was an empiricist one. In fact,
Drake himself usually (although not always) refrained from inferring this further
claim, but others were not so careful. The reason for resisting this inference (and
thus distinguishing ‘empirical’ from ‘empiricist’) is that experimentation of the kind
practised by Galileo also involved planned observation, active intervention, and
manipulation of instruments, and all these things involve thinking and theorizing.
Thus we may say that Galilean experimentation involved not only quantiŽ ed obser-
vation but also reasoned observation, and so combined not only observation and
mathematics but also observation and reasoning.
A second characteristic trait of Drake’s work was the readiness to defend Galileo
from his many destructive or negative critics and the tendency to show that Galileo
was usually right. For example, many scholars claim that for Galileo inertial
motion was circular, and hence his concept of inertia was incorrect from the point of
view of modern physics. Another interpretation alleges that Galileo’s theory of the
tides is scientiŽ cally worthless because he held that tides are caused by the Earth’s
Copernican motions, whereas since Newton we know that they are caused by the
gravitational attraction of the Moon (and of the Sun). Another example is that
Galileo seems to have held that on a rotating Earth terrestrial bodies could not be
extruded by centrifugal force regardless of how fast the Earth would be rotating;
many regard this proposition as simply physically false, and Galileo’s mathematical
proof in its support as a piece of sophisticated sophistry. Finally, before coming to
believe the correct principle that the speed of free-falling bodies increases directly

4 See, for example, Alexandre Koyré, Etudes galiléennes (Paris: Hermann, 1939; reprinted 1966 ) and
idem, Galileo Studies, trans. by J. Mepham (Hassocks, UK: Harvester Press, 1978) .
 86 Essay Review

with the time elapsed, Galileo held the incorrect view that such speed increases
directly with the distance fallen, and to refute his earlier mistaken view he gave a
fallacious proof arguing that space proportionality implies instantaneous motion.
Now, in all such cases Drake tried to show that Galileo committed no scientiŽ c
or logical error, or that his critics misinterpret the letter or the spirit of what he was
saying, or that there is a sense in which Galileo was right which the criticism fails
to appreciate.5 When confronted with these arguments by Drake, many scholars get
the impression that Drake was engaged in some kind of apologetics or hero worship.
However, such a reaction would be unfair. For the fact is that in such cases Drake’s
interpretations do exhibit superior textual analysis, do involve very ingenious recon-
structions of Galileo’s thinking and procedures, and do expose the superŽ cialities
and non sequiturs of Galileo’s critics. Thus I am inclined to regard Drake as a great
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practitioner of the principle of charity. This principle requires that one should be
charitable toward one’s primary author, not in the sense that one should presume
that he is always right, but rather that attributions of errors should be a last resort;
one should always try to Ž nd Ž rst an interpretation that not only has a textual basis
but that also makes sense of the primary text; if one can construct such an interpreta-
tion, that should be the preferred one. Only when an error-free interpretation is not
possible should we accept an error-attributin g one. When viewed in this light,
Drake’s tendency towards favourable evaluations of Galileo is not only defensible
but fruitful and insightful.
A third recurring theme in Drake’s papers is that of the anti-philosophical
Galileo, namely an interpretation of Galileo’s work as an illustration of the con ict
between science and philosophy. In part Drake sees Galileo as anti-philosophical
whenever Galileo is proceeding in an empirically minded manner; here Drake makes
the connection by equating philosophy with a priorist reasoning and by opposing
the empirical frame of mind to a priorist reasoning. Both the equation and the
opposition are in my opinion oversimpliŽ cations, and as such untenable.
In part Drake interprets the content of Galileo’s main discoveries as clashing
with philosophy. For the case of Galileo’s law of fall, Drake detects an anti-
philosophical element in Galileo’s refusal to seek the cause of acceleration in free
fall. Here Drake’s account presupposes the identiŽ cation of philosophy with the
search for causes and gains some support from the practice of Peripatetics in
Galileo’s time. It also gains support from Descartes’s approach to physical inquiry,
which required appropriate foundations of the type that he felt he could provide
but which Galileo had not provided.6 However, Drake’s account is questionable.
First, although it is certainly true that Descartes was highly critical of Galileo
in so far as his theory of motion lacked foundations, the foundations Descartes was
envisaging were metaphysical. Now it is indeed true that Galileo’s work lacked
metaphysical foundations, and so it was implicitly anti-metaphysical , but meta-
physics is not all there is to philosophy, and thus we only have a con ict between
science and metaphysics, not between science and philosophy. This point is extremely
important because there happen to be other branches of philosophy in which Galileo
5 See, for example, Drake, Essays, Vol. 2, papers 4, 5, 7, and 8 in part v, and papers 1, 2, 6, 7, 10,
11, and 14 in part vi.
6 See, for example, the letter by Descartes to Mersenne, of 11 October 1638, containing Descartes’s
comments on the Two New Sciences, which he had just read; in Galileo Galilei, Le Opere de Galileo
Galilei, 20 vols, National Edition by A. Favaro et al. ( Florence: Barbera, 1890–1909; reprinted in 1929–39
and 1968), Vol. XVII, 387; also in René Descartes, Oeuvres, 13 vols, ed. by Charles Adam and Paul
Tannery (Paris: Cerf, 1897–1913), Vol. II, 380.
 Essay Review 87

was constantly engaged, namely methodology, applied epistemology, and applied

logic.7
In regard to Galileo’s declining to search for the cause of acceleration in free
fall, the diYculty with Drake’s account lies elsewhere. We may agree that the search
for causes is an essential part of natural philosophy, so that if one were avoiding
causal inquiry altogether as a matter of principle, then one would be avoiding
philosophy. However, Galileo’s rejection of causal investigation is contextual. In the
relevant passage in the Two New Sciences,8 Galileo is declining to seek the cause of
the phenomenon that in free fall the (Ž nal, instantaneous) velocity is directly propor-
tional to the time elapsed. However, at least since 1604 he had been seeking the
cause of the fact that the distance fallen increases as the square of the time; taking
this law of squares as the eVect to be explained, time-proportional speed provides
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the immediate cause that accounts for it.9 Moreover, in astronomy, Galileo’s work
was even more obviously and explicitly causal; many of the new phenomena rendered
visible by the telescope were for him eVects whose cause pointed in the direction of
the Earth’s motion. Also, Galileo’s lifelong search for the cause of the tides is
something that Drake himself otherwise described in several papers, although he
never admitted that it refuted the acausal interpretation to which he paid constant
lip service.
This brings us to one Ž nal anti-philosophical theme, namely that for Drake the
root cause of Galileo’s trial was not the con ict between science and religion but
that between science and philosophy.10 Here Drake liked to stress that it was
professors of philosophy who created most of the trouble for Galileo. In particular,
the Ž rst to publicly raise biblical and other religious objections against Galileo were
the philosophers Ludovico delle Colombe in 1610 –11 and Cosimo Boscaglia in 1613.
Drake sees such philosophers as having been instrumental in convincing the Church
authorities to condemn Copernicanism in 1616. ‘In brief, the whole aVair into which
the Church was drawn, and which was destined to cause it so much embarrassment,
was originated not by theologians, but by professors of philosophy.’11
There seem to be two diYculties with such an account. Drake speaks and acts
as if the chronological origin of an event is the eVective cause of it, and in so doing
he comes close to committing the so-called ‘genetic fallacy’. Clearly, the anti-
Copernican decree of 1616 may have originated with the arguments and activities
of such philosophers, but since what they were focusing on was the alleged con ict
between the Earth’s motion and biblical statements, the key issue was this con ict,
and obviously it was the Bible versus Copernicanism issue that set in motion the
machinery of the Inquisition. The operative factor was thus the latter, even if
the occasion may have been the enmity between philosophers and mathematicians.
Furthermore, given that we (following Drake) are talking about the earlier phase
of the Inquisition proceedings in 1616 (as distinct from 1633), and given that the
Index decree of 1616 condemns Copernicanism as contrary to the Bible, then we

7 See Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Galileo and the Art of Reasoning (Boston, MA: Reidel, 1980), 27–45,
103–41.
8 Galilei, Opere, Vol. VIII, 202–03; or Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences, trans. Stillman Drake
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974) , 158–59.
9 For more details, see for example, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, History of Science as Explanation
(Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1973) , 86–116.
10 See Drake, Essays, Vol. I, part i, paper 10, 153–66. However, see also Stillman Drake, Galileo
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
11 Drake, Essays, Vol. I, 156.
 88 Essay Review

cannot ignore the long history of theological objections to Copernicanism. In fact,

immediately after the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, in 1543 –46,
the Master of the Sacred Palace in Rome, Dominican friar Bartolomeo Spina,
arrived at the conclusion that Copernicus’s book should be censured, but he died
(in 1546 ) before this could be accomplished. And in 1546 –47 Giovanni Maria
Tolosani, a Dominican friar in Florence, wrote a theological refutation of
Copernicus’s view, but his plan to publish it did not come to fruition because of his
own death in 1549. Unfortunately, Drake never paid the proper attention to these
facts, which were discovered during a period overlapping with his own career.12
In conclusion, Drake’s papers were signiŽ cant enough to make these three
volumes very welcome. That signiŽ cance lies in bringing to a new higher level the
reŽ nement and the documentation of the experimental aspect of Galileo’s work, and
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in the sophisticated and largely eVective defence of Galileo’s work from the superŽ -
cialities and misunderstandings of his many negative critics. To these merits we
cannot add that of having demonstrate d the science versus philosophy con ict in
Galileo’s work; on this third theme we shall have to say that Drake’s papers are
more challenging and controversial than solid or insightful.13

12 See Eugenio Garin, ‘A Proposito di Copernico’, Rivista critica di storia della Ž losoŽ a, 26 (1971),
83–87; idem, ‘Alle origini della polemica anticopernicana’, in Colloquia Copernicana, Vol. 2 (Studia
Copernicana, Vol. 6 ) ( Worc€aw: Ossolineum, 1973), 31–42; Miguel A. Granada, ‘Giovanni Maria
Tolosani e la prima reazione romana di fronte al ‘‘De revolutionibus’’ ’, in La diVusione del copernicanesimo
in Italia, 1543–1610, ed. by Massimo Bucciantini and Maurizio Torrini (Florence: Olschki, 1997), 11–35.
13 The author acknowledges the support of the National Science Foundation, Program in Science and
Technology Studies (grant no. SBR-9729117) , for the period during which this essay was written.