FILOSOFIA

Whenever we talk about the beginning of modern science, we remember the scientific revolution that began with the work of Copernicus and the emblematic "Galileo case". Galileo was summoned twice to the court of the Inquisition and in the final judgement; he was forced to recant his belief in the movement of the earth around the sun. I call this inquisitorial process "emblematic", as many have wanted to present it as one of the most notorious episodes of the contradiction between reason and faith, between science and religion, between ideological dogmatism and critical thinking. We have talked a lot about the opposition to scientific ideas in the seventeenth century by a Church rooted in the stubborn defence of the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian cosmology. It is true that modern experimental science was developed from the seventeenth century within a controversial framework with the paradigms inherited from the past. It is true that the history of scientific thought underw...