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This paper argues that Galileo well fitted in with the neo-Protagorian, person-relative framework that was emerging around him in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in western Europe. For Galileo all knowledge depended crucially and essentially on first person experience, and at the same time this knowledge was objective, not subjective. The paper develops this tension and concludes with some remarks on its educational implications.

In 1590, or thereabouts, Galileo wrote the manuscript De Motu (Galileo 1590). In this text he attempted to demonstrate the errors of Aristotelian natural philosophy and began his lifelong attempt to construct a science of motion. The chief device in De Motu was his wide ranging use of the balance. The balance was a simple machine, familiar to all, that Galileo could describe using principles of equilibrium.