Philosophy 290-9

This seminar will consist in a close reading of Book VIII of Aristotle’s Physics. The culmination of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, Physics VIII argues that, necessarily, the motion of the ordered universe is eternal, and that this eternal motion demands that we posit a first unmoved mover of the ordered universe. In the course of making this argument, Aristotle touches on many issues crucial to his natural philosophy, including: whether and how animals move themselves; why the elements should still be considered to be moved by something external to them, even though they seem to initiate motion spontaneously; why locomotion is explanatorily prior to other kinds of motion; and what are acceptable and what unacceptable stopping points in the search for ultimate explanations of the natural order. In addition to considering these (and other) issues, we will also be interested in considering the relation between Aristotle’s project in Physics VIII and the apparently similar, even partially overlapping, theological project of Metaphysics Λ. We will be reading the text in C.D.C. Reeve’s English translation, alongside relevant secondary literature.