Maurice Finocchiaro (Philosophy) has been notified by the home office of Oxford University Press that it has accepted his proposal for a “trade book” on the Galileo affair. Trade books are aimed at the general public, as distinct from textbooks and academic and technical books aimed at specialized audiences. The book plans to adapt for a general audience the research that Finocchiaro has conducted throughout his career, and the scholarship published in his fourteen books and hundreds of journal articles and book chapters. It deals with the trial of Galileo Galilei by the Roman Catholic Inquisition in 1633, and his condemnation as a suspected heretic for defending the Copernican theory of the earth’s motion. It will tell the story of these events, but also discuss the scientific, philosophical, theological, and general-cultural issues.

It also will tell the story of the controversy that began then and continues to our day. It will discuss the new issues that arose in this ongoing controversy: for example, whether science and religion are incompatible; and what lessons we can learn from Galileo’s methodology and manner of thinking, given that scientists (like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking) came to consider him the “Father of Modern Science.”