This is a good example of monolingual ignorance. Who is this "we" that don't use Galileo's last name? From reading the article, you could only draw the conclusi

This is a good example of monolingual ignorance. Who is this "we" that don't use Galileo's last name? From reading the article, you could only draw the conclusion that it's everybody. The word "English" is nowhere to be found; all the reasons enumerated in the article have nothing to do with English and everything to do with the Italian conventions of the time as well as the particular customs of Galileo's family. I speak three languages fluently; in two of them, including my native language, the man's called Galilei. He also appears to be normally called Galilei in French (the spelling's a bit different, but it isn't his first name), German, Dutch, Norwegian, a bunch of other European languages I checked randomly. Poles call him Galileusz for some reason. On the other hand, in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (spelled Galileu), English, and perhaps other languages he's known by his first name. All this takes precisely two minutes to discover by clicking on the Wikipedia articles in various languages, and seems to be completely unknown to the author of the article. At best, he explains why Italians have been calling him Galileo; but "we" are not all Italians, surely? To explain why he's Galileo in English, you need to at least be aware that he's Galilei in most other European languages, and build some kind of argument to explain the discrepancy. And merely nodding at the usage in the Italian will not necessarily do. Seems to me that looking at how his name was transmitted in the scientific tracts of his time, mostly written in Latin, would help trace and distinguish the two traditions, if someone was really interested in understanding why "we" call the man Galileo.