From Florence to Naples, between XVIIth and XVIIIth century: fortunes and misfortunes of the disciples of Galileo and Newton

Abstract

The essay is an historical reconstruction of the roots of the new modern science made by the disciples of Galileo and Newton. The connection between the science of Galileo and the experimental philosophy of Newton was clear and already present in the mind of the Italian scholars who lived between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often forced to operate in a cultural climate is not easy, because of censorship restrictions and inquisitorial the then Italian society. Neither helped them political and institutional fragmentation of the ancient Italian states. Yet, amidst the echoes of deism Spinoza and in contact with the intellectual ferment of the crisis of European conscience at the end of the seventeenth century, natural philosophers of the peninsula managed, between Florence and Naples, to save Galileo's scientific legacy to hand, through the great synthesis Newtonian, the spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment reform, not without many second thoughts and problems of practical difficulties in academic areas.