Journal of the History of Philosophy

520 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:3 jULY 1995 H. W. Blom's analysis of Burgersdijk's moral and political views shows them to be more valuable as gauges of their fields than his logical views--and far more responsive to debates in the early Dutch Republic. While Burgersdijk and his interpreters have viewed him as merely providing expositions of Aristotelian views, Biota shows just how far he strayed from the master in these areas. M. Feingo|d's contribution traces the widespread impact of Burgersdijk's textbooks on the English-speaking world, from private libraries through British and Irish universities to colonial Harvard and Yale, until Burgersdicius eventually faded from most university curricula in the mid-eighteenth century. This short book presents Burgersdijk as an astute pedagogue with a finger on the pulse of his time in important areas of philosophy and pedagogy. For persons familiar with the broad outlines of early modern philosophy, what is especially striking is the reappearance of Aristotelianism as a critically reappropriated possibility following the disappointment with Ramism. Even as a pedagogue, Burgersdijk was neither hidebound , nor insulated from the political issues of the day, nor intellectually insular. Witness this Calvinist's use of Su~rez (and Vives), and his interaction with Jacopo Zabarella, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola~ Machiavelli, and Bodin. This book deserves a wide readership among early modernists of almost every stripe. MICHAEL H. SHANK Universityof Wisconsin-Madison Thomas Campanella. A Defenseof Galileo,theMathematicianfrom Florence.Translation by Richard J. Blackwell. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, t994. Pp. xi + 157. Cloth, $97.95. Annibale Fantoli. Galileo:ForCopernizanismandfor the Church.Translation by George V. Coyne, S.J. Studi Galileiani, Vol. 3- Rome: Vatican Observatory Publications, t994. Pp. xix + 54o. Paper, $2 t .96. The fascination that the trial of Galileo exercises over the Western mind never wanes, as the two books reviewed here demonstrate anew. Annibale Fantoli's Galileo, which originally appeared in Italian in 1993, is a worthy addition to the row of books interpreting the trial that fill a shelf in every major library. Fantoli, who was once a Jesuit, never wavers in his empathy with Galileo and the cause of modern science vis-A-vis Biblical literalism. One of the most important parts of the book, in keeping with that half of the subtitle which announces Galileo as a champion of the Church, is the final chapter on the Galileo affair from the end of the trial to our own day. Here Fantoli details the harm that the trial has inflicted on the Church over the space now of nearly four centuries and the Church's reluctance, built apparently into its very structure, to face up to the issue and acknowledge the error and injustice it committed. At the same time Fantoli remains a loyal son of the Church, who writes in sorrow rather than in anger, and John Paul II, with his recent acceptance of the Church's responsibility, emerges as one of his heroes. The book is then a judicious assessment, sympathetic to both sides though unhesitating in itsjudgment, which makes its way carefully through BOOK REVIEWS 521 the entire record and through extant scholarship, giving a full account of the trial as it appears in the written evidence. I need to add, however, that I am not wholly satisfied with the work. Its shortcoming, in my view, is its excessive caution, which leaves Fantoli apparently unable to consider that the written evidence may not contain the whole story. In a perceptive footnote that discusses Biagioli's recent GalileoCourtier, he agrees that patronage was an important aspect of Galileo's life, but not another word in the book considers how patronage might have impinged on the trial. Galileo was a man with a mission from God to reveal the order of the cosmos, in Fantoli's view; his aspirations for his personal career, which seem to me to be writ large in his actions but do not appear as explicitly in the written record, do not enter Fantoli's story. Nor do similar considerations as they affected others appear . Much hinges on the licensing of the D/a/ogue in 1630. In Fantoli's...