Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 445 Pseudo-Dionysius by John Sarrazin and suggests that this same translator may have earlier produced the anonymous translationova of Aristotle's PosteriorAnalytics (lO38 ). Charles Burnett reconstructs Chartrian manuscripts on medicine (MSS 16o, 171), astrology (MS ~13), practical astronomy (MS 214), and education in the quadrivium (MS 498, the second volume of Thierry's Heptateuchon). He prints some portions of these and related texts. (We are able to confirm that the Johannitius commentary in Helmingham Hall MS 58 reproduces that in the destroyed Chartres MS 171, the first folio of which was preserved in photostat by Loren MacKinney; compare Burnett, t59. ) In a very brief discussion, Gillian Evans considers a few examples of John's use of Boethian arithmetical doctrine. Finally, Rodney Thomson offers a highly speculative account of the composition of the Entheticus de dogmatephilosophorum, describing it as a "semi-private statement of John's own philosophical principles" (~95). The alterations recorded in extant manuscripts, Thomson argues, show the evolution of John's thought in the years after 1x55. As a whole this valuable collection of essays admirably suggests the richness of John of Salisbury's career and authorship. Some of the authors (e.g., Guth, Kerner, and Struve) may have offered more comprehensive treatments of their subjects elsewhere . Jeauneau's paper has already appeared in the Revue des ~tudesaugustiniennes a9 (1983): 145-74, while a monographic version of Peter von Moos's study of John's exempla is to be published separately (under the title Geschichteals Topik:Das rhetorische Exemplum bei Johannes von Salisbury). But the anthology will remain a compelling argument for John's place in any history of medieval philosophy--and not only as a biographical source. FRANCIS R. SWIETEK Universityof Dallas MARK D. JORDAN University of Notre Dame William A. Wallace. Galileo and His Sources. The Heritage of the CoUegioRomano in Galileo's Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Pp. xiv + 371. $42.5~9 Readers of this excellent volume will find Wallace's usual painstaking scholarship, some imaginative detective work in tracking down clues concerning Galileo's early writings, and interesting new light cast on how Galileo brought himself to think in the terms that characterize his mature scientific work. Finally, the author reflects anew on issues that resulted in Galileo's trial and inquisition. The book opens with a close study of two early manuscripts of Galileo: MS 27, referred to as the Logical Questions, containing material based on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, and MS 46, the Physical Questions, based on Aristotle's De caelo and De generatione. The second manuscript was the subject of Wallace's Galileo'sEarly Notebooks : The Physical Questions (1977). In conjunction with MS 7a, De motu, Wallace offers a new theory about the dating of this material which has significant implica- 446 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY a5:3 JULY 1987 tions for the development of Galileo's early scientific thinking, about which our knowledge has been skimpy. Rejecting Favaro's identification of the Logical Questions as a juvenile work done when he was about fifteen and a student at the monastery of VaUombrosa (a view which led Favaro to exclude most of it from the National Edition of the Opere), along with his identification of the Physical Questions as notes taken when Galileo was a student at the University of Pisa, Wallace thinks the first three were written between 1589 and 1591 in preparation for his first teaching post, at Pisa. The intellectual significance of this is that both manuscripts seem to reflect strongly the interpretation of Aristotle's scientific method that had developed into a tradition at the Jesuit CoUegioRomano beginning some thirty years earlier. Although the Aristotelian scholars of Pisa and Florence, like most elsewhere, saw mathematics and geometry as foreign to science (since it did not provide completely certain demonstrations of causes through syllogistic deductions) and entirely inappropriate to reasoning about physical matters (since the latter is concrete while the former is irremediably abstract), the Jesuit teachers in Rome thought otherwise after the vigorous defense of mathematics as a science mounted by Christopher Clavius there in the 158os. That opened the possibility of applying Aristotle's views about the deductive character...