Il realismo platonico di Galileo

Gattei, Stefano

La Matematica nella società e nella cultura, Série 1, Tome 7 (2014) no. 2, pp. 247-264

Résumé

Until a few decades ago, Galileo’s thought was widely recognized as having a decidedly Platonic mark. However, as years went by the consensus around such reading has gradually waned. On the one hand, new readings of his works highlighted links with other philosophical and scientific traditions, such as Aristotelianism and (more recently) Archimedeanism. On the other, such studies called attention to the problematic nature of the very appeal to such historiographic categories. At the heart of the present work is the idea that Platonism understood as a philosophical category, and not as a philological one is an unavoidable ingredient for a proper reading of Galileo’s contribution. More specifically, his is a Platonism with a physical and mathematical character, which assumes that physical bodies do have an intrinsically mathematical nature. From this point of view, Galileo’s repeated appeal for the mathematization of physics, which would play a key role for the birth of modern science, is properly put into context and may acquire a more substantial meaning.