Abstract

Jan Patočka's “Galileo Galilei and the End of the Ancient Cosmos” was initially published in the popular science journal Vesmír, 33 (1954), no. 1, pp. 27–29. The year before, there had been published in the same journal, under the general heading “On the Development of the Ideas of Natural Science,” a series of Patočka’s articles, including “The First Critics of Aristotelianism” [Vesmír 32 (1953), no. 7, pp. 254–256]; “The Breakdown of Aristotle’s Dynamics and the Prelude to Modern Mechanicism” (ibid., no. 8, pp. 285–287); “Intermezzo on the Threshold of Modern Science: Cusanus and Comenius” (ibid., no. 9, pp. 322–325). This series had been introduced by yet another text: “Aristotle’s Philosophical Natural Science” [Vesmír 32 (1953), no. 3, pp. 102–105]. A last short essay on the theme of the birth of modern natural science—“On the Significance of Francis Bacon of Verulam” [Vesmír 40 (1961), no. 5, pp. 152, 155, and no. 6, pp. 186–188]—followed several years later. These texts were all subsequently revised to a greater or lesser extent and included in the book Aristoteles, jeho předchůdci a dědicové (Aristotle, His Forerunners and Successors), Prague: NČSAV, 1964.