A Defense of Galileo

...than the heretics; nor were those who are Catholic prohibited from publishing books. Among these shines Johannes Kepler, the Imperial Mathematician, who defends this opinion in his Dissertation on the Starry Messenger of Galileo original: dissertatione super nuncio Galilei. Published in 1610, this was Kepler's immediate public support of Galileo's telescopic discoveries.; and William Gilbert, the Englishman, most skillful, in his book on magnetic philosophy Referring to De Magnete (1600), where Gilbert argued the Earth is a giant magnet and rotates on its axis., along with countless other Englishmen, whom I shall not mention. Likewise, Giovanni Antonio Magini, the mathematician of Padua, who from the year 1581 until the present year 1616, protests in his ephemerides Tables providing the predicted positions of celestial bodies over time. that he embraces the calculations of Copernicus and Reinhold Erasmus Reinhold, whose "Prutenic Tables" (1551) were the first major astronomical tables based on Copernicus’s heliocentric model., and he defends their positions and grumbles against those who think otherwise in many letters.

5. Likewise, the Reverend Father Clavius, a Jesuit, in the final edition of his works, after he had observed that Mercury and Venus wander in a circle around the sun—even though he had previously held the contrary view with the followers of Aristotle—admonished astronomers to look for another system of the heavens. Considering this instruction, a recent mathematician, Fictus Apelles The pseudonym "The Mock Apelles," used by the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650) when he first published his discovery of sunspots to avoid potential conflict with his order., in his observations of solar "little clouds" original: nubecularum solarium. These are what we now call sunspots; their movement proved the sun rotates and was not a "perfect," unchanging sphere as Aristotle claimed., is drawn toward the opinion of Galileo and Copernicus.

6. Furthermore, we shall show at the end that this opinion of Galileo is most ancient—both regarding the motion of the earth and the sun remaining in the center, as well as the celestial systems and their waters and elements—and indeed that it originated from Moses himself. Even Pythagoras, a Jew by race although born in a Greek city (according to the testimony of St. Ambrose), brought this very idea to Italy and Greece, and taught it at Croton in Calabria. It was attacked with empty arguments by Aristotle, without mathematical demonstration, based on a certain moral and rustic conjecture; just as he also despised the books of Moses, because he could not grasp their depth, hidden reasons, and mysteries through his own logic. This can be gathered from the records of St. Ambrose and Pico della Mirandola. Thus, Galileo vindicates our ancestors from the insults of the Greeks. That Numa Pompilius, the student of Pythagoras and the wisest king of the Romans, held the same opinion is testified not only by Ovid but by many historians. Although others like Pliny deny it, he truly narrates that Pythagoras was judged the wisest of philosophers by a decree of the Roman Senate when they dedicated a statue to him (at the command of the Delphic oracle, which ordered them to dedicate and erect a statue to the wisest of the Greeks). Therefore, those who attack the method of philosophizing and the dogmas of Galileo seem to do an injustice to Italy, to Moses, and to Rome, and [they prefer] Aristotelian [ideas] to Pythagorean ones now...