A standard presentation of the Scientific Revolution would start with Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric model, continue with the work of Galileo Galilei and Robert Boyle, among others, and culminate with Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation and three laws of motion.

During this period, a radical change in the philosophy underlying how science was to be undertaken and understood took place. The scholarly Aristotelianism of the European Middle Ages was replaced by a mechanical philosophy, in which the universe is simply viewed as matter in motion, and everything, including living creatures and their thoughts, is viewed mechanically.

This radical change in philosophical outlook did not arise accidentally.

Paolo Sarpi, Venetian statesman of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, wrote a number of notes on natural philosophy, collectively known as his Pensieri (Thoughts), which clearly outline this change in outlook, whilst retaining key aspects of Aristotle’s vocabulary.

In this talk, by giving a historical review and examining some of Sarpi’s Pensieri, we will show how he was the key influence on Galileo Galilei’s science, in terms of both approach and findings, as well as on Thomas Hobbes, who played a key rôle in the dissemination of Galileo’s ideas to Europe and in the development of the new mechanical philosophy.

Speaker bio: John Plaice is a computer scientist and software engineer. He holds a BMath from the University of Waterloo in Canada, and a PhD and a Habilitation degree from the University of Grenoble in France. He has taught in Canadian and Australian universities, and worked in private industry as a professional software engineer. He has conducted research and development, both in industry and in academia, in programming language design, semantics and implementation, software configuration, electronic documents, and natural language processing. He is currently studying the limitations of the mechanical model underlying modern science.