Was Galileo A Heretic? The Galileo Affair and Why It Still Matters Today | Dr. Nuno Castel-Branco

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Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2022

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

This talk was given on September 27, 2022 at Trinity College Dublin. For more information please visit, thomisticinstitute.org About the speaker: Nuno Castel-Branco is a historian of science and research fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. He completed his Ph.D. in the History of Science at Johns Hopkins University in May 2021. He also received an M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Lisbon (ISTécnico). His current research focuses on the emergence of the new sciences in seventeenth-century Europe through the career of Nicolaus Steno, an anatomist who converted to Catholicism and was beatified by John Paul II. He also studies the development of Jesuit science in early modern Iberia. He has won several awards in Europe and the United States, such as a Fulbright Fellowship and a Huntington Exchange Fellowship at Oxford University. His writings have been accepted for publication in several journals including Early Science and Medicine, Renaissance Quarterly, and Scientific American.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute. For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:12.0	So why did you all come here tonight? Right? Why is an event that almost, that happened almost 400 years ago, still matter today to the point of attracting this all here.
0:23.6	Well, one of the reasons is because all of you probably already have an idea,
0:28.6	even if just a superficial one, about who Galilei was, what he did, and maybe even about how he died.
0:35.6	Given your slight familiarity with the topic
0:39.5	which most likely also relates to your scientific, religious, and other personal
0:44.0	interests, you want to know more about Gallowlo. The problem, however, is that I
0:49.1	bet that some of these ideas that you have about Gallow Little are very different
0:53.2	between themselves.
0:55.0	Truth is, many people think and speak as if they know the basics of the Galileau affair,
1:01.0	even if they have never studied the topic themselves, much less read a book or, you know,
1:06.0	tend to talk like this. But how different can your ideas about Galileo be? Well, if I was giving this talk
1:13.2	a couple decades ago, some people would probably think that the church burned Galileo at the
1:18.4	state. Today, due to important work of historians of science, these ideas not as popular anymore,
1:24.6	especially in university circles. Galileo was indeed not burned at the state, but died rather peacefully in his villa in the outskirts of Florence.
1:33.3	The narrative that underlies such a claim, however, is still alive in different forms.
1:39.3	This narrative which perhaps some of you shared is that of a dramatic, perhaps even violent conflict between Galileau and the Catholic Church.
1:48.0	The story is popular because it serves different purposes whenever it is used.
1:53.0	For instance, it's okay.
1:56.0	For instance, physicist Mario Lidio from Johns Hopkins University where I did my PhD recently
2:02.3	published a book where he used the Galileo affair to speak about modern science deniers.
2:08.6	Tellingly, he described Gallaudot's adversaries as science deniers, among which figured,
	...

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