The Platonization of Galileo’s Physics and Cosmology: From Henry More and Isaac Newton to Husserl and Koyré

In Galilean historiography, a Platonic interpretation of Galileo’s work has been dominant for a long time and is still widespread. Determinants were the Galilean Studies of Alexandre Koyré,1 who had undergone the influence of Edmund Husserl’s philosophical reading, which later merged into the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, the first two parts of which date back to the end of 1936.2 However, this Platonic interpretation of Galileo is not just a mere, great, historiographic error, which has exchanged the role played by the Archimedean mechanical geometry in Galileo with a Platonic perspective that reduces physical reality to mathematical abstract ideas