BOOK REVIEW Review of Maurice A. Finocchiaro: Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs Springer, Dordrecht, 2010, ISBN 978-90-481-3200-3, xliii + 350 pp, USD $131.45 Peter Slezak Published online: 16 September 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Defending Copernicus and Galileo is an important addition to Maurice Finocchiaro’s significant corpus of writings, translations and edited works dealing with Galileo (Finoc- chiaro 1980, 1989, 1997, 2005, 2008). The new book is a sequel to his earlier (2005) compendious Retrying Galileo 1633–1992, and it is an accessible, comprehensive account of the two Galileo affairs referred to in the subtitle—the original affair culminating in the trial in 1633, and the second affair—the subsequent centuries of analysis and controversy. That is, despite the symmetry of the title, the book is primarily about Galileo and his defense of Copernicus. Finocchiaro partially traverses the ground of the earlier work but the meticulous analysis of many still-debated issues fills a different niche. Finocchiaro is undoubtedly correct in observing (p. xix) that in the vast commentary since the seventeenth Century, ‘‘we have a historiographical or meta-historical labyrinth in which it is easy to get lost unless one uses some tentative guidelines.’’ The new book serves admirably as a guide, although some of the technical distinctions intended as thread through the labyrinth may seem unnecessary since his account is clear and helpful on its own without the elaborate analytical apparatus. As we will see presently, this apparatus of fine distinctions serves not only as an expository device, but also an evaluative or advocacy purpose. Finocchiaro’s distinction between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ affairs may be convenient for some purposes but, of course, in practice the only reality for us is the vast literature of primarysources and commentary that constitute the ‘‘subsequent affair.’’ That is, we have no independent access to the first affair except through the second one—the historians’ documents and their many interpretations. For the scholar of history, one might say with Derrida, il n’y a pas de hors texte. In his new book, Finocchiaro not only surveys the many subtle issues of an expository or exegetical nature, but also takes up the case for Galileo against the many critics on the central question of whether Galileo’s condemnation was right (p. xx) and ‘‘whether the Inquisition had acted justly in prosecuting him’’ (p. xx). Finocchiaro provides an exceptionally rich and detailed analysis of the vast enterprise of Galilean scholarship and commentary that bears on the many facets of these questions. P. Slezak (&) School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia e-mail: p.slezak@unsw.edu.au 123 Sci & Educ (2011) 20:71–81 DOI 10.1007/s11191-010-9297-0