The English Galileo: Thomas Harriot's Work on Motion as an Example of Preclassical Mechanics (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science) (2 Volume Set)

The short series The Historical Epistemology of Mechanics presents the long-term development of mechanical knowledge. The books in this series combine the presentation of a broad selection of relevant sources with in-depth analyses of the long-term development of mechanical knowledge focusing on the early modern period. This series is conceived in analogy to the four-volume series on The Genesis of General Relativity (BSPS 250). The English Galileo, the first book in this series, investigates the shared knowledge of preclassical mechanics by relating the work of Thomas Harriot on motion, documented by a wealth of manuscripts, to that of Galileo and other contemporaries. Harriot and Galileo indeed exploited the same shared knowledge resources in order to approach the same challenging objects. While the paths Harriot traces through the shared knowledge are different from Galileo’s, the work of the two scientists displays striking similarities as regards their achievements as well as the problems they were unable to solve. The study of Harriot’s parallel work thus allows the exploration of the structure of the shared knowledge of early modern mechanics, to perceive possible alternative histories, and to distinguish between individual peculiarities and shared structures of early modern mechanical reasoning. This study has received two distinguished awards, the Junior Scholar Award of the Georg Agricola Society and the Georg Uschmann Award of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. The English Galileothe title of this book draws on the extraordinary prominence of Galileo Galilei in the historiography of the early modern Scienti?c Revolution. At the same time it questions the uniqueness of Galileo (not as a person, of course, but as an early modern phenomenon) by proclaiming another ?gure of his Thomas H- riot. But putting Harriot on a pedestal next to Galileo is not a concern of this book, which is rather motivated by questions of the following How did modern s- ence come about? What were the processes of knowledge and concept transformation that led from premodern to modern science, and, more speci?cally, from preclassical to classical mechanics? Which aspects of these developments rely on the peculiarities of particular historical actors and what aspects re?ect more general characteristics of the knowledge system at the time and its potentials for development? To answer such questions it is obviously necessary to complement the existing studies on Galileos science with studies on the work of his lesser-known contemporaries; and it is imp- tant that these studies are carried out in similar detail to make the different prota- nists work comparable. Without such comparisonthis is the basic assumption of this bookour understanding of the shared knowledge of early modern thinking and the processes of knowledge transformation from which modern science emerged will remain incomplete and biased.