Abstract

For authors Jean Dietz Moss and William A. Wallace, we can better understand Galileo’s choice of argumentation by examining the intellectual climate of the era and the academic training that helped form Galileo’s literary and scientific genius. In their book, Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Time of Galileo, Moss and Wallace contend that in the late Middle Ages dialectic and rhetoric were distinct areas of learning, but in the late Renaissance period of Galileo’s time, the boundaries of these two arts were shifting. Concepts of argumentation that were popular among the intellectual elite of northern Italy undoubtedly influenced Galileo’s writings and the subsequent judgment of his works.