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Galileo and the Jesuits revisited
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
INTRODUCTION
On the second day of the Two New Sciences the three interlocutors Sagredo, Simplicio, and Salviati suspend their learned conversation on forces of fracture and resistance to indulge in yet another digression among many that have become well known as characteristic marks of Galileo's texts. Sagredo, the aristocratic amateur of natural philosophy and mathematics addresses Simplicio, the Aristotelian philosopher, with the following remark:
What shall we say, Simplicio? Must we not confess that the power of geometry is the most potent instrument of all to sharpen the mind and dispose it to reason perfectly, and to speculate? Didn't Plato have good reason to want his pupils to be first well grounded in mathematics? (133)
Simplicio, portrayed in this not very polemical text as an openminded scholar, graciously responds:
Truly I begin to understand that although logic is a very excellent instrument to govern our reasoning, it does not compare with the sharpness of geometry in awakening the mind to discovery.
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