First of all, that’s wildly overstated, extrapolating from a mythologized version of the Galileo incident. (Galileo got house arrest for deliberately saying that Copernicanism was positively proven—it hadn’t been, yet; it took Kepler, Newton, and Halley to do that—and that anyone who disagreed with him was obviously a fool. And for saying that after he’d been specifically warned not to. Copernicus’s book had been openly on the bookshelves for a century before Galileo decided that getting up the Pope’s nose was more fun than doing the actual science, and, afterwards, it was almost immediately freed up except for eight sentences that were interpreted as suggesting, like Galileo, that heliocentrism was obviously true. The next time the Index was revised after that, Copernicus was removed from censorship completely.
In fact, Aristotle had only been respectable in the West for a few centuries before that. When Neil deGrasse Tyson suggested that ironclad devotion to Aristotle prevented observers in Europe from registering the nova of 1054, medieval historians were screaming with laughter; in 1054, Aristotle was about as celebrated in Western Europe as John Quincy Adams. (The worst of it was that he did it in an article about popular misconceptions.)
But, more fundamentally, the West was in agreement that learning the truth was a good thing. Al-Ghazali’s teachings, on the other hand, had planted in Islam the idea that theology was wicked, because it was putting shackles on God’s wrists, and when that thought got generalized, whether Al-Ghazali intended it or not, all forms of study beyond memorization of the Quran came under suspicion.
Popular misconceptions, if that is what they are, are reflected in Bertrand Russell’s History of Philosophy (1945), FWIW.
Cite requested. I’m not trying to be a wise guy: I’m genuinely interested in the rise of Aristotle in Western intellectual history. Eg was Aristotle’s rep advanced unduly by Aquinas (c 1250)?
In 1054, most of Aristotle simply wasn’t available in Latin. A few of his works were known, but he was, in the Western imagination, nothing yet like Dante’s “maestro di color che sane”. As he began to be rediscovered (mainly in Arabic versions at first), he became controversial; Aquinas’ great achievement was the reconciliation of Aristotle’s writings with the Catholic faith. See The Recovery of Aristotle in Wikipedia.
But all that was later. The suggestion that Aristotle was the dead hand ruling over Western Science in 1054 is just spurting-milk-out-of-your-nose funny.