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unrelentingly explored and researched it, but for having analyzed it
on the basis of immediate and personal perceptive experiences,
without recognizing their relativity, and ultimately, their fallacy. In
galileo, a substantial, deep acknowledgement of human gnoseo-
logic limits coexisted with the conviction that neither art nor sci-
ence would be able to trespass those limits. But he neither stopped
exploring nor admiring inventions, not only in science but also in
the arts. nevertheless, from the first decades of the sixteenth cen-
tury, ‘knowledge’ and ‘comprehension’ began to take different
directions in so far as specialization and autonomy of human disci-
plines became more and more strict.105 One may legitimately say
that the novelty and the modernity of galileo’s style is a form of
reaction against the intimate contradiction and the tension caused
by the hiatus between knowledge and comprehension that formed
an integral part of his personality from his years as a young student.
galileo expresses this hiatus in a very peculiar way: in works from
Considerazioni al Tasso onwards the thread of logic – from begin-
ning to end – is interwoven, in an argumentative tone, with irony.
Indeed, the precise details of the research perhaps become more
important than the final result or the general explanations and con-
clusions. among the authors who succeeded galileo, not many
might be considered as his heirs.106 In Italy, in general, the
galilean ‘lesson’ remains isolated for at least two centuries, over-
shadowed by the specialization of scientific and literary disci-
plines. research (not only scientific research) becomes more and
more technical and sectoral even in style, as the growth of deno-
SIMILarITIES BETWEEn SCIEnTIFIC LanguagE …
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105 In this period scientific works were written not exclusively, but mostly in Latin, and this was
a strong restriction per se. In the literary field, aristotle’s Poetics was rediscovered and rein-
terpreted. The Italian Lodovico Castelvetro (ca. 1505–1571), with his Poetica d’Aristotele
vulgarizzata e sposita (The Poetics of Aristotle in the Vulgar Language) had a fundamental
influence on the development of a tight version of the three unities (time, place and action)
in European drama. Castelvetro also wrote a commentary for the above-mentioned Bembo’s
Prose della volgar lingua. In Italy, writings on poetics had started to be very specialist since
the first years of the XVI century, but from Bembo’s Prose onwards, ‘poetics’ became an
out-and-out autonomous discipline for experts only. ‘universal’ thinkers, responsible for
writing with the same mastery about science, literature, philosophy, religion, or cosmology,
‘intellectuals’ like Marsilio Ficino, niccolò Cusano, Pico della Mirandola, giordano Bruno
and others, seem to have disappeared from the Italian cultural scene.
106 roberto Dati (1619–1675), Francesco redi (1626–1698), and Lorenzo Magalotti
(1637–1712) were all scientists and literati alike. They can be considered as the three major
successors of galileo, though their works never reach the sharpness and elegance of their
master’s.
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