Paulus Vallius (Paolo Valla, Paulus Valla, Paulus de la Valle, Paulus de Valle) (1561-1622) was an Italian Jesuit logician.
Life He was born in Rome.Corrado Dollo, Giuseppe Bentivegna, Santo Burgio, Giancarlo Magnano San Lio, Galileo Galilei e la cultura della tradizione (2003), p. 90.
He was a lecturer at the Collegio Romano in the 1580s. He first taught De elementis, from 1585 to 1587, and then the three-year philosophy course from 1587 to 1590. After that he taught at Padua.John W. O'Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Johann Bernhard Staudt, Steven J. Harris (editors), The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (2006), p. 317 and p. 327.
His notes on the Posterior Analytics, generally Thomist, were used by Galileo. This occurred around 1588-1590, and it was through Vallius that Galileo learned the work of Jacopo Zabarella.H. F. Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (1994), p. 282. It is now accepted that Vallius is the source of two logical treatises by Galileo.William A. Wallace, Galileo's Pisan studies in science and philosophy, p. 32 in Peter K. Machamer, The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (1998).
Vallius was plagiarized by Ludovico Carbone, in his 1597 Additamenta ad commentaria doctoris Francisci Toleti in logicam Aristotelis, which were Additions to the logic of Franciscus Toletus.John W. O'Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, T. Frank Kennedy, Steven J. Harris (editors), The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (2006), p. 320.
Works He published Logica, in two volumes, at Lyon in 1622. In it he sided with Benedictus Pereyra against Giuseppe Biancani. The issue was mathematical proof in physics, where Pereyra denied mathematics an essential status.Paolo Mancosu, Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Practice in the Seventeenth Century (1996), p. 13 and p. 19.
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