Because Galileo thought the way some of his predecessors thought and
also anticipated the thinking of some of his successors, his views are of
special interest in understanding scientific method. He sought respectable
authority for his way of establishing conclusions in the writings of
ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians, and there are, too,
connections between his ideas and those of his more immediate
predecessors and contemporaries in Italy. But he also helped to develop
the role of experiment, particularly as a useful means for discovering
and exploring new connections in nature, and partly because of this we
detect in him ideas and methods which were further developed by his
successors. There is no doubt that his claims about what is true and
why it is true were particularly influential in the seventeenth centuryHis ideas played an important part in the early development of scientific
method although, as we shall see, the differences between Galileo’s
views and those familiar to us are at least as significant as the
similarities.