Abstract

The question of who the “Bozzio” attacked and ridiculed by Galileo in the poem “Against the Aristotelians” may have been, is not an entirely trivial one. It is well known that Galileo was a foe of the Aristotelians. But it is not well known exactly which Aristotelians were the object of his wrath. Nor is it clear whether he wished to reject the whole content of the tradition we generally label “Aristotelian", or only a part of it, viz., the part devoted to the physics of Aristotle. That the physical theory taught by the professors of Aristotle in the Italian universities of the sixteenth century was almost wholly sterile and lacking in nearly everything but an antiquarian interest to us, cannot be doubted by anyone who has taken the trouble to examine some of the works on natural philosophy of the period.