Galileo and the Struggle for the New System of the World

Abstract

The essay by the eminent Russian historian of philosophy, science and art Vassily Pavlovich Zubov (1900–1963), after following the main events in the life of Galileo, demonstrates that Galileo has always been and remains a reformer of science, not a religious reformer. Galileo’s struggle for a new astronomical system against theologians, aristotelian philosophers, astronomers who defended the system of Ptolemy, astrologists and medical doctors, as well as against Jesuit experimenters and observers, was inextricably connected with his struggle for the new physics. The historical achievement of Galileo, according to the author, was above all to put the problem of the motion of the Earth as a physic-mechanical one; thus his mechanical studies laid foundation for Newton’s work on his celestial mechanics.