William A. Wallace
From 1998 through 1999 William A. Wallace was heavily involved with his work as Associate Editor for Science and Philosophy in the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. This involved editing about one hundred and fifty articles in this field, of which he wrote 26 articles himself, mainly because he was unable to locate scholars who were willing and capable of writing entries for the encyclopedia. (Many older and established scholars apparently thought it beneath their dignity to contribute, considering that reimbursement was at the modest rate of only ten cents per word!) The Encyclopedia was published in six volumes by Charles Scribner’s Sons, now affiliated with the Gale Group, in December of 1999. Details are given below.
Apart from his work on the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance Professor Wallace has written articles over the years for an Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution prepared by Wilbur Applebaum. This was finally published in a single volume by Garland in 2000. Details are also given below.
Since 1999 Professor Wallace has worked mainly on a volume, co-authored with Jean D. Moss, Professor Emeritus of English at The Catholic University of America, entitled Rhetoric and Dialectics in the Time of Galileo. The volume assesses the importance of rhetoric and dialectics in northern Italy during the late Renaissance, and includes lengthy English translations of Latin works on these subjects by authors who were personally known to Galileo. The basic work on the volume is now finished, but considerable editing is still required before it can be submitted to a university press for publication.
With interest growing among scholars on the interface between Analytical Philosophy and Thomism, Professor Wallace is also working on a small volume on Thomistic natural philosophy and its relationship to philosophy of science in the present day. The work is to be entitled Physica Thomistica, and will be along the lines of Ralph McInerny’s Ethica Thomistica, which has had to be reprinted recently. The first part, already completed, is a primer of Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on the Physics of Aristotle. The second part will summarize papers Wallace has given at several summer institutes of the University of Notre Dame on “Thomism and Modern Science.”
Recent publications:
Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul Grendler, 6 vols., New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999. Edited some 150 articles on philosophy and science and wrote 26 articles.
“Quantification in Sixteenth-Century Natural Philosophy,” Recovering Nature: Essays in Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Metaphysics in Honor of Ralph McInerny, ed. Thomas Hibbs and John O’Callaghan, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999, pp. 11-24.
“Physics before Galileo,” Physics World (U.K.), December 1999, pp. 15-20.
“Foreword” to Albertus Magnus: On Animals, A Medieval Summa Zoologica, 2 vols., translated and annotated by Kenneth F. Kitchell and Irven M. Resnick, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, pp. xvii-xx.
Review of La Condamnation des livres Coperniciens et sa révocation à la lumière de documents inédits des Congrégation de l’Index et de l’Inquisition by Pierre-Noel Mayaud, in Theological Studies 60.2 (1999), pp. 369-371.
“Dialectics, Experiments, and Mathematics in Galileo,” Scientific Controversies: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives, eds. Peter Machamer, Marcello Pera, and Aristides Baltas, New York and Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2000, pp. 100-124.
“Aristotele e la filosofia della scienza,” in L’attualità di Aristotele, ed. Stephen L. Brock, Studi di filosofia, 21. Rome: Armando Editore, 2000, pp. 53-72.
Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution: From Copernicus to Newton, ed. Wilbur Applebaum. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000.
“Thomas Aquinas and Thomism,” in The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition, ed. Gary B. Ferngren, New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000, pp. 137-140.
“Translators as the traitors of science,” review of Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Culture and Time by Scott Montgomery, in Physics World 13.9 (2000), p. 47
Review of The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories,
by John L. Heilbron, in Theological Studies 61 (2000), p. 389.