Rhetorical Triangle In The Assayer By Galileo Galilei

“The Assayer” is a text written by Galileo Galilei in 1623. I intend to analyze a section from Galileo’s “The Assayer.” My analysis will cover the text’s five elements of the rhetorical triangle. The five elements of the rhetorical triangle include the speaker, occasion, audience, message, and purpose. The speaker in “The Assayer” is Galileo himself. Galileo was born in Italy and lived from 1564 until early 1642. He had multiple interests in life including astronomy, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and teaching. Galileo is responsible for many observations in nature that had lasting implications on physics. Galileo was frequently resented by the church for many of the scientific and philosophical ideas he proposed. He was even put on trial because of his idea that the Earth revolved around the sun. One Jesuit priest who frequently

Many sensations such as color, taste, smell, and sound mean nothing without animate bodies to experience and have an interaction with these sensations. He believes that without an animate body, things such as fire would not have any meaning other than a word. In this example, he explains how fire gives an animate body the sensation we call heat. The fire is a collection of tiny bodies or atoms and the way these bodies interact when they are sensed by our body is what we know as heat. Galileo explains “apart from shape, number, motion, penetration, and touching, there is [not] any other quality in fire, if there is, that is heat” (63). The qualities of shape, number, motion, penetration, and touching are factual and cannot be disproven. However, fire without someone to interact and have a sensation with it cannot prove that heat exists. As Galileo says, “all that would be left of heat would be a mere word”