Amicus Galilæus sed Magis Amica Veritas

Abstract

In the early 1960s, scholars attributed to Galileo an extensive set of annotations in the margins of a copy of the 1546 Latin translation of Philoponus’ commentary on Aristotle’s Physics by Guglielmo Doroteo (c.1526–1571). This chapter establishes that the annotations are not Galileo’s. It provides overwhelming evidence drawn from an annotated copy of the Latin translation of Aristotle’s Parva Naturalia, edited in 1523 by Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (1456–1531). The analysis is structured like a medieval quaestio: whereas the arguments quod sic show that the handwriting of the annotations and of Galileo’s manuscripts might well be one and the same, the arguments quod non offer compelling evidence to the contrary.