LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Galileo: Florence
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Galileo's new found fame gained him an appointment as court mathematician in Florence. This freed him from teaching duties and gave him more opportunity to carry out research and writing. By December 1610 he had observed the phases of Venus which further confirmed his faith in the theories of Copernicus.
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Back in Florence, Galileo spent 3 years vainly searching for a suitable teaching position. He was more successful in furthering his grasp of mathematics and physics. He produced two treatises which, although circulated in manuscript form only, made his name well known. One was La bilancetta (The Little Balance), describing the hydrostatic principles of balancing; the other was a study on the center of gravity of various solids. These topics, obviously demanding a geometrical approach, were not the only evidence of his devotion to geometry and Archimedes. In a lecture given in 1588 before the Florentine Academy on the topography of Dante's Inferno, Galileo seized on details that readily lent themselves to a display of his prowess in geometry.
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Galileo moved on to the University of Padua. Though he enjoyed the city itself, finding good friends with whom he could party, by 1593 he found himself in desperate need of additional cash. His father had died, so Galileo was the head of his family, and personally responsible for his family. Debts were pressing down on him, most notably, the dowry for one of his sisters, which was paid in installments over decades (a dowry could be thousands of crowns, and Galileo's annual salary was 180 crowns). Debtor's prison was a real threat if Galileo returned to Florence.
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Galileo's support for the heliocentric theory got him into trouble with the Roman Catholic Church. In 1633 the Inquisition convicted him of heresy and forced him to recant (publicly withdraw) his support of Copernicus. They sentenced him to life imprisonment, but because of his advanced age allowed him serve his term under house arrest at his villa in Arcetri outside of Florence.
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In 1574, Galileo's family moved to Florence. The next year, Galileo attended the Benedictine Monastery of Santa Maria di Vallombrosa, and he studied Latin, Greek, music, logic, and religion. Galileo's education prepared him to study at a university.
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The philosophical thread that runs through Galileo's intellectual life is a strong and increasing desire to find a new conception of what constitutes natural philosophy and how natural philosophy ought to be pursued. Galileo signals this goal clearly when he leaves Padua in 1611 to return to Florence and the court of the Medici and asks for the title Philosopher as well as Mathematician. This was not just a status-affirming request, but ... a reflection of his large-scale goal. What Galileo accomplished by the end of his life in 1642 was a reasonably well articulated replacement for the traditional set of analytical concepts connected with the Aristotelian tradition of natural philosophy. He offered, in place of the Aristotelian categories, a set of mechanical concepts that were accepted by almost everyone who afterwards developed the ‘new sciences’, and which, in some form or another, became the hallmark of the new philosophy. His way of thinking became the way of the scientific revolution (and yes, there was such a ‘revolution’, pace Shapin 1996 and others, cf.
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