Ernest Moody: Galileo and Nominalism

Abstract

The death of Ernest A. Moody in December of 1975 deprived the academic world of one of its foremost medievalists and intellectual historians, a person to be ranked surely with Pierre Duhem and Anneliese Maier for the many difficult texts he made available to scholars and for the novelty of the insights with which he continually stimulated them. Fortunate it was that just six months before his death the University of California Press saw fit to publish his collected papers, together with an autobiographical preface that explained his intellectual odyssey, why and when he wrote what he did from beginning to end, and how he finally evaluated the results of all his labors.¹ This series of papers, together with Moody’s three books,² stand as a monument to the man’s impressive scholarship; they also afford those of us who knew and admired his work the opportunity to reflect on his achievement and to offer a critique of his central theses.