LAUSR

The Florentine mathematician and philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) has been honoured as one of the founding fathers of the modern scientific revolution. Although such a view corresponds to a widely used description of the intellectual heritage of Galileo, one exciting – but least recognized – aspect of Galileo’s work is his interest in and challenge to biblical hermeneutics. The aim of this article is to explore whether and how Galileo’s reflections on biblical hermeneutics, as instantiated in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (1615), may offer us a way to think his scientific worldview together with the Holy Scriptures. On this basis, I discuss what I call “conjectural epistemology” in order to review Galileo’s contribution to the elucidation of a negative theology.