Galileo Galilei
1564-1642 · Scientific Revolution · Household name
Galileo was a Pisan astronomer and physicist who held that the book of nature is written in mathematics. Only what you can measure in a thing belongs to the thing itself, and a body's real properties are the quantitative ones. Colour and taste live in the perceiver. He stayed a Catholic and taught that scripture and nature come from the same God, so a true reading of one cannot contradict the other.
Signature
The position Galileo is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Truth
- leans Objective
- Knowledge
- Sense Experience / Pure Reason
Positions on the 3 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Mechanistic (25 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Universals
- leans Realism (19 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Truth
- leans Objective (88 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
17 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Galileo refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Perception
- Indirect Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Sense Experience / Pure Reason
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge?