Aristotle's Views

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 bu

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o (as the conclusion presupposes the premisses); that this was the essence of the thing; and because it is better thus (not without qualification, but with reference to the substance in each case) (Physics 338-9). Inevitably, another implication of motion is causation; after all, the process of change--division, addition, alteration--had to come from some source. Aristotle cites four causes of motion, which may sometimes converge, and declares "it is the business of the student of nature to know about them all, and if he refers his problems back to all of them, he will assign the `why' in the way proper to his science--the matter [material], the form [formal cause], the mover [efficient cause], and that for the sake of which [final cause]" (Physics 338). This methodology of causation appears throughout the Aristotelian philosophical system, and he says that causation occurs in both natural and artificial motion. Causation should not be confused with motivation, although in artificial motion, psychological motives may well be present. It is better identified with the "thinkability" of a rational universe. The manifestation of causes of motion in nature are most aptly explained in On Generation and Corruption in reference to the c

Category: Philosophy - A