The unfinished mechanics of Giuseppe Moletti

"In his Dialogue on Mechanics, Giuseppe Moletti made the most explicit and thoroughgoing attempt to determine the geometrical principles of Aristotelian mechanics, to establish its Euclidean foundations, and so to realize in fact the subalternation of mechanics to geometry. Having done this in the First Day, he then set out in the Second to extend mechanics generally to explain all motions through the analysis of their forces and resistances. In the process he anticipated Galileo in asserting that all heavy bodies, whatever their weights, fall with equal speeds, and he realized that the same resistance that makes a body hard to move also makes it hard to stop - which is almost the law of inertia." "The Unfinished Mechanics of Giuseppe Moletti offers a look at the transformation of Aristotelian mechanics into a mathematical science in the generation before Galileo."--BOOK JACKET.