Vancouver Sun The Globe and Mail Montreal Gazette "Galileo's Mistake has the lazy ease of a multi-course Italian dinner, at once relaxing and enriching". Robert Wiersema, Quill & Quire B. J. Hodgson, PhD, Trent University Faculty of Philosophy of Wade Rowland by CKNW Radio (Vancouver), CBC's Tapestry with Don Hill, CBC's The Arts Today with Eleanor Wachtel about Galileo's Mistake in Real Audio and MP3 format Purchase Galileo's Mistake online |
Galileo's Mistake: The Archaeology of a Mythby Wade Rowland
Pub. Date: October 2001
Veteran literary journalist Wade Rowland takes one of the modern world's most influential myths - the epic confrontation of physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) with the Church of Rome - and turns it on its head.
Rowland argues that at the dawning of the Scientific Revolution in the early 1600s, Galileo's mistake was to insist that science provides the truth about nature. The Church fought back against this challenge to its authority by declaring that science provides only models for reality and that the ultimate truth is accessible only through metaphysical or spiritual insight.
Although the 1633 trail centred on Galileo's telescopic observations of the night sky, Rowland argues persuasively that this was merely the public face put on a much more profound issue: what is truth and how can we know it? Galileo's ultimate recantation, Rowland argues, must be understood in this light.
Couched in the engaging style of travel narrative, this provocative reexamination deconstructs the myth that Galileo was a freethinker waging war against a reactionary and anti-intellectual Church. Using the Socratic method of examining arguments, Galileo's Mistake moves seamlessly through Galileo's life and his ideas about the nature of reality. By no means an apologist for the Church, Rowland skillfully and persuasively identifies the source of the ontological crisis that plagues us today: the unquestioned authority of science in determining the nature of reality.
Read Chapter One Excerpt of Galileo's Mistake
Purchase Galileo's Mistake online
Read an interview of Wade Rowland by CIUT's Rick Vassallo
Listen to an interview of Wade Rowland by CKNW Radio (AM 980) in Vancouver - October 24, 2001 in Real Audio format
He is the author of a dozen other books including Ockham's Razor, a philosophical travel narrative set in France, and Spirit of the Web, a popular history of communications technologies that was selected as Required Reading for 1997 by The Globe and Mail. He lives with his family near Port Hope and is a principal in an Internet-based corporation.
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