Giorgio de Santillana

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Giorgio Diaz de Santillana , internationally also George D. Santillana (born May 30, 1902 in Rome , † 1974 in Beverly , Massachusetts ), was an Italian-born American philosopher of science and science historian.

De Santillana studied physics in Rome (graduating in 1925), philosophy in Paris and then until 1929 physics in Milan . Then he was brought to Rome by the mathematician Federigo Enriques to set up a department for the history of science as his assistant at the university. In 1935 he taught in Paris and Brussels and in 1936 went to the USA , where he was an instructor in philosophy of science at the New School of Social Research . After teaching at Harvard , he came to MIT in 1941 , where he became Assistant Professor in 1942, Associate Professor in 1948 and Professor of History of Science in 1954. In 1954 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

De Santillana believed that the roots of Western science were already to be found with the pre-Socratics and in even older times, only handed down in myths, the subject of his book with Hertha von Dechend "Hamlet's Mill" (1969). It investigates the thesis that the myths of ancient peoples (such as the Egyptians, Greeks and Babylonians) contain astronomical observations (such as the 26,000-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes ). In an article entitled "Galilei and Oppenheimer" in "The Reporter" in 1957, he drew parallels from the McCarthy committees to the Galileo case .

Fonts

  • The Crime of Galileo. London, Heinemann 1955, Time Life Books 1981
  • Leonardo da Vinci. 1956
  • The Origins of scientific thought from Anaximander to Proclus, 600 BC to 300 AD London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1961
  • Editor: Renaissance Philosophers- the age of adventure. Boston, Houghton Mifflin 1957 (selection of writings by Renaissance philosophers, annotated by Santillana)
  • Reflections on Men and Ideas. MIT Press 1968
  • with Hertha von Dechend: Hamlet's mill. An essay on myth and the framework of time. Berlin: Kammerer und Unverzagt, 1993. ISBN 3-926763-23-X (English original: Hamlet's Mill. An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth. Boston, Gambit, 1969. Full text online )
  • with Edgar Zilsel: The Development of Rationalism and Empiricism (= International Encyclopedia of Unified Science . Volume 2, No. 8). University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1941; 6th edition 1967.
  • with Federigo Enriques: Storia del pensiero scientifico. Bologna 1932
  • Prologue to Parmenides. University of Cincinnati 1964

literature

  • Obituary by Nathan Sivin, Isis, Vol. 67, 1976, pp. 439-443

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Santillana, Giorgio de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Santillana, Giorgio Diaz de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher and historian of science
DATE OF BIRTH May 30, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Rome
DATE OF DEATH 1974
Place of death Beverly