ABSTRACT
Galileo was a filosofo geometra in the tradition of Leonardo Da Vinci, Niccolo Tartaglia, Girolamo Cardano and Giovanni Battista Benedetti. Craftsman, engineer, architect, sculptor, painter, physicist, anatomist, biologist, mechanician, and visionary, Leonardo united these individual pursuits as parts of a transcendent whole in the Platonic philosophy that was so popular in the Renaissance. The Renaissance and the global voyages, followed by the Reformation and Scientific Revolution, created a secular and individualist turn of mind that was as alien to 18th and 19th century Muslims as it was to 12th and 13th century Latin Christians. Copernicus hesitated to publish his revolutionary astronomy. Copernicus preserved the eccentric as the center and merely exchanged the positions of earth and sun so that the center of the universe became the center of the circle around which the earth orbited the sun, namely the eccentric, thereby retaining an essential element of Ptolemy's geocentric system.
