By the same token, for Dewey, logic “is a matter of profound human importance precisely because it is empirically founded and experimentally applied.”'? This was not to deny the role of deductive reasoning in inquiry, as Dewey was quick to point out. On the contrary, it is “a strange notion that because one says that the cognitive value of conceptions, definitions, generalizations, classifications and the development of consecutive implications is not self-resident, that therefore one makes light of the deductive function.”'4 The deductive machinery of logic, says Dewey, is like a locomotive, an agency intermediary between the challenges posed by experience and our struggle to meet them within the realm of experience. Precisely because of its intermediary status, neither primary nor final, its engineering requires the utmost ingenuity.'° The locomotive of deduction is the motor of fruitful inquiry, engineered during “ages of toilsome experience."!6 Thus, it was against the philosophical backdrop pictured by Dewey that Randall set out to explore the processes of reconstruction of Aristotelian logic that, he speculated, led to regressus and to modern scientific method. When he “naturally decided to do some work on the Italian Aristotelians,” a resonance must have reverberated in Randall’s mind between Dewey's ground-breaking approach to logic as an empirically grounded form of inquiry and Ragnisco’s earlier insight that it had been Zabarella who had “fought for the future truth that science will conquer with the advent of Galileo.” On the other hand, Randall could only find scant textual evidence of Galileo’s appropriation of Zabarella’s logical teachings. Randall was, in fact, rather inconsistent in his attempts to indicate the presence of a smoking gun in Galileo’s works that would seal his argument. First, Randall hinted at “a typical statement of Galileo on the joint use of the ‘metodo risolutivo’ and the ‘metodo compositivo,’” allegedly to be found in a work co-authored by Galileo and his pupil Benedetto Castelli.!” Second, Randall noted that the “precise form of the combination of the metodo resolutivo and the metodo compositivo Galileo most frequently employed he called ‘argomento ex suppositione’, and described most explicitly in his letter to Carcaville in 1637”.!8 However, the reference to composition and resolution in the first text alluded to by Randall asthe reference to composition and resolution in the first text alluded to by Randall as representing a typical statement of Galileo is presumably due to Castelli, not to Galileo.!9 This philological point concerning authorship is consistent with the perplexing fact that, as Randall intimated, the sole sustained discussion of the method of composition andresolution to be found in the relevant literature is a late letter by Castelli to Galileo. It should be added that nowhere else in Galileo’s written output do we find evidence of metodo resolutivo and metodo compositivo, though of course this does not mean that Galileo (or even Castelli) would have been unaware of Zabarella’s logical teachings, a circumstance that appears to me to be implausible.”° I will presently comment on Castelli’s illustration of metodo resolutivo and metodo compositivo, as it is interesting per se and, furthermore, quite revealing as a document concerning the workings of composition and resolution, and its alleged relation to regressus. But first I wish to say something about the second reference cited by Randall. In the 1637 letter, written when his Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze was just about to be published, Galileo refers to the theory of free fall presented in the book as an argument ex suppositione, without any hint that this type of argument was related to metodo resolutivo and metodo compositivo. Still, despite the lack of explicit textual evidence, might this passage be read as reporting an instance of the combination of metodo resolutivo and metodo compositivo, which, Randall claims, Galileo most frequently employed? I doubt it, for what Galileo means here is perfectly clear. He states first that he supposes a motion uniformly accelerated towards the center, and second that he demonstrates some properties of such a motion starting from his supposition. Galileo’s argument aims at emphasizing that his mathematical demonstrations do not lose their cogency for their being built upon a supposition, a definition of naturally accelerated motion, precisely as Archimedes’s geo- metrical demonstrations on spirals are perfectly valid, says Galileo, despite the fact that spiral motions are nowhere to be found in nature.”! To my mind, this letter affords no basis for establishing a correlation between Galileo's circumscribed usage of the phrase ex suppositione and the logical methodology of Zabarella.Moreover, we find further disconfirming evidence of a correlation between Galileo, Castelli, and Zabarella, in Castelli’s illustration of metodo risolutivo and metodo compositivo. Above all, we find baffling clues in Castelli’s argumentative strategy, surprisingly suggesting that metodo risolutivo and metodo compositivo would not have been interpreted by him as a logic of inquiry, let alone a regressus, but rather as the rhetoric of demonstrative discourse. Let us see why. The context of Castelli’s letter is the problem of heat and its transmission. Castelli recounted to Galileo that he had set up an experiment to verify that a brick, which had been painted half white and half black and then exposed to the sun, would heat up much more in the black part than in the white part. The context of the experiment was a weird hoax that Castelli and a young student had circulated in Rome. The student was a pupil of a celebrated philosopher whose name Castelli does not mention in the letter. Castelli had suggested to the student in jest that he should ask the philosopher why the white portion of the brick, once exposed to the sun, would heat up more than the black portion. An answer was inevitably found by the unguarded philosopher, as Castelli amusingly reports to Galileo. Yet the phenomenon intrigued Castelli, as he could scarcely believe how much more heat the black portion did absorb than the white one. Thus, he launched into an inquiry as to what the cause of such a strange phenomenon might consist of.”* It is in this complex context that we find Castelli’s pronouncements on metodo risolutivo and metodo compositivo. One would have expected to see the methodology of composition and resolution to be at work here, as the method followed by Castelli in his inquiry, but nothing in thecomplicated story that Castelli narrates to Galileo suggests that composition and resolution played any role. The conscious inquiry processes that Castelli reported to Galileo are based on a Platonic—Socratic procedure of questions and answers that one day Castelli engaged in with a child who per chance had come to visit him. Then, Castelli goes on to state that the whole dialogue with the child, which he recorded in the letter, could be ordered according to metodo risolutivo and metodo compositivo.? Here, Castelli is saying something rather extraordinary. The metodo risolutivo and metodo compositivo have nothing to do with the logic of inquiry. They are rhetorical devices that can be employed for the purposes of better ordering the exposition of a demonstrative discourse. We can make use of metodo risolutivo and metodo compositivo—so Castelli seems to tell us—for reconstructing a process of inquiry such as, in this case, the dialogic procedure with the child. But the logic of inquiry itself consists of the dialogue between Castelli and the child—a far cry from the logical works of Zabarella and the Paduan Aristotelians! In summary, textual evidence of Zabarella’s logical teachings in Galileo’s written output is scant, and may have been misunderstood by Randall. Astonishingly, the only sustained discussion of metodo risolutivo and metodo compositivo that Randall could point to (i.¢., Castelli’s letter on the heat problem) suggests that, if demonstrative regressus, the pinnacle of Zabarella’s logical teachings on scientific method (according to Randall), is to be equated with “method of resolution [metodo risolutivo]” and “method of composition [metodo compositivo],” then its real import is not to be found in the context of actual scientific practice but perhaps in the rhetorical structure of a demonstrative discourse. Thus, my sense is that, for all its ambiguous fascination, the Randall thesis cannot be supported.However, Randall's pioneering work on the sixteenth-century Aristotelians has its own merits, which, in my view, consist primarily in indicating to us a research pathway that can be explored further. Moreover, it is not that Randall's historiography had been undermined by its reliance on Dewey’s vision of a logic of inquiry as the sediment of centuries of empirical toil. In fact, I think that there is much in the practices of early modern science that can be fruitfully approached within the framework of Dewey’s inspiring vision. For instance, it would be rewarding to read Castelli's narrative of discovery in terms of Dewey’s logic of inquiry. But I also think that Randall’s historiography conflated inquiry with deductive logic, and in so doing it narrowed the scope of Dewey's theory of reconstruction in philosophy.” I would argue that a “reconstruction” of the Randall thesis might be fruitfully undertaken, though this, of course, would remain for future work. A move in this direction might consider replacing Randall’s reductionist historiography with Dewey’s theory of logic as inquiry and placing it in the social-economic context of early modern Europe. In outline, such a reconstruction would have to recognize that learning from experiment, a techno- logical process that, in my view, differentiates early modern science from earlier forms of inquiry, is always affected by an intricate network of values and of social and economic relations that transcend mere empiricism. Deductive logic is itself the manmade product of such an intricate network. Regressus was part and parcel with the early modern tendency towards logical instrumentalism, the idea that logic serves as an instrument, a tool for forging cognitive ‘commodities.’ Logical instrumentalism evolved as an adaptation to the proliferation of competing social technologies such as (to cite a few) the credit letter, realistic cartography, traveling for socially committed purposes, as opposed to traveling for leisure, and contractual codes of conduct. Their spread forged new social relations and values thata 11 12 13 14 15 Sy Ney pe . Dewey 1982, p. 157. Dewey 1982, pp. 158-159. Dewey 1982, p. 159. Dewey 1982, p. 165. Dewey 1982, p. 165. At the turn of the twentieth century, Giovanni Vailati had already pointed out that the “characteristic difference between Aristotle’s ideas and those of the founders of modern science about the function of deduction in scientific research lies precisely in how little importance has been given [by him] to deduction as an instrument of explanation and anticipation of experience, compared to the large amount of trust put in it as a means of proof and ascertainment [by the founders of modern science]” (Vailati 2010, p. 30; original in: Vailati 1911, p. 124). Dewey 1982, p. 159. Randall 1961, p. 56. Randall 1961, p. 67. The passage alluded to by Randall, reported in Galilei 1890-1909, IV, p. 521, appears to have been authored by Castelli. See Antonio Favaro’s comments, in Galilei 1890-1909, IV, pp. 5-16. Randall 1961, p. 56. Galilei 1890-1909, XVII, pp. 90-91. Galilei 1890-1909, XVII, pp. 150-155, 156-169. “Hora, applicando tutto questo al proposito nostro, dico che si doveressimo contentare di quanto si é detto di sopra per bocca di quel fanciullo. Imperoché, ordinando tutto il discorso prima col metodo risolutivo e poi compositivo .. .”. Galilei 1890-1909, XVII, pp. 160. A telling example of Randall’s historiographic outlook is afforded by his reading of Giovanni Marlaini’s work on the proportions of motion. Randall claims that the Milan doctor Giovanni Marliani “brings experimental proof to bear on the quantitative side, describes the rolling of balls down an inclined plane to measure their velocities and acceleration, and narrates experiments with pendulums” (Randall 1961, pp. 22-23). In reference to Marshall Clagett’s monograph on Marliani (Clagett 1941), Randall adds, “[i]Jn my judgment, formed after reading the writings of Marliani in 1932, Mr. Clagett fails to do justice to the originality of Marliani, or to his anticipation of Galileo’s experimentalism” (Randall 1961, p. 23, footnote 1). Clagett, more guardedly, had simply suggested that Marliani’s reasoning was “based on experimentation” (Clagett 1941, p. 140). However, what Marliani describes in the passages alluded to by Randall and Clagett is a thought- experiment at best, for he makes no reference whatsoever to his (or anybody else’s) carrying outPiccolomini, Alessandro. 1547. In mechanicas quaestiones Aristotelis, paraphrasis paulo quidem plenior. Rome: Apud Antonium Bladum. Poppi, Antonino. 1972. La dottrina della scienza in Giacomo Zabarella. Padua: Editrice Antenore. Ragnisco, Pietro. 1885/86. “Giacomo Zabarella il filosofo: Una polemica di logica nell’Universita di Padova nelle scuole di B. Petrella e di G. Zabarella”, Atti del R. Istituto Veneto, ser. 6, iv, pp. 463-502. Randall, John Herman, Jr. 1926. The making of the modern mind. A survey of the intellectual background of the present age. Boston, New York [etc.]: Houghton Mifflin. . 1940. “The development of scientific method in the school of Padua”. Journal of the History of Ideas 1, pp. 177-206. —. 1961. The school of Padua and the emergence of modern science. Padua: Editrice Antenore. ——. 1976. “Paduan Aristotelianism reconsidered”. In: Mahoney 1976, pp. 275-282. Risse, Wilhelm. 1964. Die Logik der Neuzeit. Band 1 1500-1640. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag. Skulsky, Harold. 1968. “Paduan epistemology and the doctrine of the one mind”. Journal of the History of Philosophy 6, pp. 341-361. South, James B. 2005. “Zabarella, prime matter, and the theory of regressus”. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 26, pp. 79-98. Spranzi, Marta. 2011. The art of dialectic between dialogue and rhetoric: The Aristotelian tradition. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Strébée, Jacques-Louis. 1556. M. Tul. Ciceronis De partitionibus oratoriis dialogus, lacobi Strebaei commentariis ultimo ab ipso recognitis., et enarrationibus Bartholomaei Latomi, itemque scholiis Christophori Hegendorphini, illustratus. Paris: Apud Viduam Mauricii a Porta. Toscanella, Orazio. 1566. Il Dialogo della partitione oratoria di Marco Tullio Cicerone. Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari. Vailati, Giovanni. 1911. Scritti diG. Vailati (1863—1909). A cura di M. Calderoni, U. Ricci, G. Vacca. Leipzig/Florence: Barth-Seeber. . 2010. Logic and pragmatism. Selected essays by Giovanni Vailati. Edited by C. Arrighi, P. Canta, M. De Zan, P. Suppes. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Valla, Giorgio. 1531. In Ciceronis Partitiones, Commentaria. Paris: Ex Officina Rob. Stephani. .