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1 year ago in History of Philosophy By Heena
What was Galileo Galilei’s specific stance or contribution regarding the philosophical distinction between primary and secondary qualities?
I'm tracing the intellectual history of mechanism. I know Locke later formalized the distinction, but did Galileo explicitly separate qualities like color and taste (secondary) from size and motion (primary)? If so, in which works, and how did he argue for this, connecting it to his mathematical view of nature?
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By Manish Answered 1 year ago
Galileo provided a crucial early formulation in his 1623 work "The Assayer" (Il Saggiatore). He argued that qualities like taste, color, and sound do not reside in external objects themselves. Instead, objects possess only the primary qualities of size, shape, and motion, which interact with our senses. The secondary qualities, he famously wrote, are mere names we give to sensations produced in "the living body." For example, a tickle is not in the feather but in our response. This distinction was foundational for the mechanistic worldview, as it relegated subjective experience to the mind, allowing the physical world to be described purely in mathematical terms of matter in motion.
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