Galileo and the Rhetoric of Relativity

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.