The purpose of this research is to examine the views contained in Aristotle's Physics, On Generation and Corruption, and On the Heavens, with a view toward showing not only how they became the basis for discussion of problems concerning motion, physical change, and the heavens in the classical period, but also how, toward the high medieval period, these views became subject to reexamination. The plan of the research will be to set forth the scheme of Aristotle's ideas in these areas, and then to discuss how they became vulnerable to systematic attack during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Aristotle's cosmology connects the natural universe with the moral universe inasmuch as it reasons from discrete observations toward first, most simplified principles of nature, thence to the simplest principles of the life impulse, and thence toward a moral cosmology. From the perspective of the technology of the twentieth century it is easy to dismiss the geocentric universe or even Aristotle's facile disposal of the atomic theory as without merit. But if one concentrates, not on what Aristotle fails to do that is consistent with twentieth-century science but on what he actually does within the terms of his own discourse, the examination of why his natural philosophy had stature becomes more fruitful, and it becomes possible to salvage what is valuable in his ontology and to understand that what was overtaken by experiment in that ontology derived, not from imperfect reasoning but from imperfect experimentation and instrumentation. For little in Aristotle's cerebral approach to applied science detracts from the elegance and precision of his logical system in explicating the natural universe.
A system of logic is the fundamental frame of reference for Aristotle's natural philosophy. The three books are logically consistent in themselves and logically consistent with one another. Indeed, they can be read as something of a continuum of p...