Hi, I'm

there in the history to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyof philosophy.net. Today's episode, trial and error, Calaleo and the Inquisition.

They say that history is written by the victors, and that goes double for the history of science.

Doctors who believed in the four humors and used cupping or leeches to drain blood.

Biologists who believed in spontaneous generation.

Cosmologists who believed in a pervasive substance called phlogiston, anatombs who tried to divine personality traits

based on the shape of the head. All are routinely considered to have been backward and ignorant,

holding fast to theories that had insufficient empirical support and stubborn in the face of evidence

that would have undermined those theories. The verdict is even more severe when it comes to

those who actively tried to suppress ideas that turned out to be true. No example leaps to mind

more readily than the Catholic Church's decision to move against Copernicanism.

Copernicus himself came nowhere close to seeing his theory condemned,

dying some decades too early for that.

So it was left to Galileo Galilei to become a martyr for Heliocentrism.

He was born in 1564, 21 years after Copernicus's death,

and was a fairly old man by the time he was placed

on trial by the Inquisition in 1633. A lot of time had passed between the first proposal

of Heliocentrism and the church's most dramatic attempt to stamp it out. As I've mentioned in previous

episodes, this was in part because Copernicus's astronomy won relatively

few adherents in the decades following the publication of his path-breaking work on the revolutions.

It was not just counterintuitive. Do you feel like the Earth is spinning under your feet?

But also subject to technical objections, like the lack of perceived parallax in the fixed stars.

...