Article on other languages:
 |
This article may require copy-editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling. You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available. (April 2008) |
Physics (or "Physica", or "Physicae Auscultationes" meaning "lessons") is a key text in the philosophy of Aristotle. It stands at the head of the current Andronichean order, the long series of Aristotle's physical, cosmological and biological works, and is foundational to them. The work is a collection of treatises or lessons that deals with the most general (philosophical) principles of moving things, both living and non-living, rather than physical theories (in the modern sense) or investigations of the particular contents of the universe. It establishes the basis for any scientist of any age to study the world of change. Change, or movement, or motion (kinesis) is the chief subject of the work. The ancient Greek title of these treatises—τὰ φυσικά—meant "the [writings] on nature" or "natural philosophy".
Contents |
Books
The Physics is composed of 8 books.
Book I
Book I discusses the scientist's approach to nature and the world of changing things and the doctrines of the presocratic natural philosophers, Parmenides in particular. Topics include: remarks on method, a discussion of how some ancestors viewed nature, and the basic elements of change. Change elements include: a property (privation), which is overcome by its opposite (form), with both of them belonging to a subject (substrate: matter in substantial change; substance in accidental change) which persists through the change.
Book II
Book II introduces the term "nature" (Gr. physis) as "nature is a source or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily" (1.192b21). Thus, those entities are natural which are capable of starting to move, e.g. growing, acquiring qualities, displacing themselves, and finally being born and dying. He contrasts natural things with the artificial: artificial things can move also, but they move according to what they are made of, not according to what they are (i.e., any wholeness of their being). The classic example is a wooden bed: if it were buried and somehow sprouted as a tree, it would be according to what is is made of, not what it is. Aristotle contrasts two senses of nature: nature as matter and nature as form or definition.
In chapter 3, Aristotle presents his theory of the four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final[1]). Of particular importance is the final cause or purpose (telos). He contrasts purpose with the way in which nature doesn't usually work, chance (or luck), discussed in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Something happens by chance when all the lines of causality converge without that convergence being purposefully chosen, and produce a result similar to the teleologically caused one. Chance works in the actions of humans (tuche) and in unreasoning agents (automaton).
In chapters 7 through 9, Aristotle returns to the discussion of nature. With the enrichment of the preceding four chapters, he concludes that nature acts for an end, and he discusses the way that necessity is present in natural things.
Book III
Book III begins with the controversial definition of change based on Aristotle's notions of potentiality and actuality.[2] Change, he says, is actualization of a thing's ability insofar as it is able.[3]
The rest of the book (chapters 4-8) discusses the infinite (aperon, the unlimited). He distinguishes between the infinite by addition and the infinite by division, and concludes that the infinite only exists in potency and never actually: "It is not what has nothing outside it that is infinite, but what always has something outside it." (6.206b33-207a1-2)
Book IV
Book IV discusses the preconditions of motion: place (topos, chapters 1-5), void (chapters 6-9), and time (kronos, chapters 10-14). The book starts by distinguishing the various ways a thing can "be in" another. He likens place to an immobile container or vessel: "the innermost motionless boundary of what contains" is the primary place of a body (4.212a20). Unlike space, which is a volume co-existent with a body, place is a boundary or surface.
He teaches that, contrary to the Atomists and others, a void is not only unnecessary, but leads to contradictions, e.g., making locomotion impossible.
Time is a constant attribute of movements and, Aristotle thinks, does not exist on its own but is relative to the motions of things. Time is defined as "the number of movement in respect of before and after", so it cannot exist without succession; but he also seems to say that to exist time requires the presence of a soul capable of "numbering" the movement.
Books V and VI
Books V and VI deal with how motion works. Book V classifies four species of movement, depending on where the opposites are located. Movement categories include quantity (e.g. a change in dimensions, from great to small), quality (as for colors: from pale to dark), place (local movements generally go from up downwards and vice versa), or, more controversially, substance. In fact, substances do not have opposites, so it is inappropriate to say that something properly becomes, from not-man, man: generation and corruption are not kinesis in the full sense.
Book VI discusses how a changing thing can reach the opposite state, if it has to pass through infinite intermediate stages. It investigates by rational and logical arguments the notions of continuity and division, establishing that change -and time, and place, consequently- are not divisible into indivisible parts; they are not mathematically discrete but continuous, infinitely divisible. This implies, in Aristotle's view, that there can be no first stage of change: there is no definite moment when the motion begins. This discussion, together with that of speed and the different behaviour of the four different species of motion, eventually helps Aristotle contrast Zeno on his claim that the existence of motion is absurd, by replying to his paradoxes.
Book VII
Book VII briefly deals with the relationship of the moved to his mover, which Aristotle describes in substantial divergence with Plato's theory of the soul as capable of setting itself in motion (Laws book X, Phaedrus, Phaedo). Everything which moves is moved by another. He then tries to correlate the species of motion and their speeds, with the local change (locomotion, phorà) as the most fundamental to which the others can be reduced.
Book VII has also come to us in an alternative version, not included in the Bekker edition.
Book VIII
Book VIII (which occupies almost a fourth of the entire Physics, and probably constituted originally an independent course of lessons) discusses two main topics, though with a wide deployment of arguments: the time limits of the universe, and the existence of a Prime Mover — eternal, indivisible, without parts and without magnitude. Isn't the universe eternal, has it had a beginning, will it ever end? Aristotle's response, as a Greek, could hardly be affirmative, never having been told of a creatio ex nihilo (for the first appearance of this concept in philosophy, see St. Augustine); but he also has philosophical reasons for denying that motion didn't exist all along, on the grounds of the theory presented in the earlier books of the Physics. Eternity of motion is also confirmed by the existence of a substance which is different from all the others in lacking matter; being pure form, it is also in an eternal actuality, not being imperfect in any respect; hence needing not to move. This is demonstrated by describing the celestial bodies thus: the first things to be moved must undergo an infinite, single and continuous movement, that is, circular. This is not caused by any contact but (integrating the view contained in the Metaphysics, bk. XII) by love and aspiration.
References
- ^ For an especially clear discussion, see chapter 6 of Mortimer Adler, Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy (1978).
- ^ See Sachs 2006 for a good discussion of the etymologies of the words Aristotle uses, as well as the distinction between the words usually translated into English as "actuality" and "activity."
- ^ See Kosman 1969 for an excellent discussion of this extremely dense definition.
Bibliography
Die Aristotelische Physik, W. Wieland, 1962, 2nd revised edition 1970.
English translations of the Physics
- Glen Coughlin (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005).
- Joe Sachs (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
- Robin Waterfield, ed. David Bostock (Oxford University Press, 1999).
- Daniel W. Graham Physics: Book VIII, (Oxford University Press, 1999).
- William Charlton Physics: Books I and II, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
- Edward Hussey Physics: Books III and IV, (Oxford University Press, 1983).
- Hippocrates G. Apostle (Grinnell, Iowa: The Peripatetic Press, 1980).
- P.H. Wicksteed and F.M. Cornford (2 vols.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980).
- Richard Hope (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961).
- W.D. Ross (New York: Clarendon Press, 1936).
- R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye (New York: Oxford University Press, 1930).
- online at Adelaide (divided into books)
- online at MIT (divided into books; not all are complete)
- online at BU (one file)
- at Ancient Greek Online Library (divided into pages)
- in PDF
- Thomas Taylor 1806 (republished by Prometheus Trust, 2000) ISBN 1898910189 9781898910183
Classical and medieval commentaries on the Physics
- Aquinas, Thomas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, trans. Richard J. Blackwell, Richard J. Spath, and W. Edmund Thirlkel (Notre Dame, Indiana: Dumb Ox Books, 1999).
- Averroes, Averroes’ Questions in Physics, trans. Helen Tunik Goldstein. (Boston : Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).
- Ockham, William, Exposition of Aristotle's Physics in William of Ockham: Philosophical Writings, trans. Philotheus Boehner (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett, 1990).
- Philoponus, John, On Aristotle’s Physics, trans. (various) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, 1993–2006).
- Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics, trans. (various) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, 1993–2006).
Modern commentaries and monographs
- Bostock, David, Space, Time, Matter, and Form: Essays on Aristotle's Physics (Oxford University Press, 2006).
- Coope, Ursula, Time for Aristotle: Physics IV.10–14 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
- Judson, Lindsay, ed., Aristotle’s Physics: a collection of essays (New York : Oxford University Press, 1991).
- Kouremenos, Theokritos, The proportions in Aristotle's Phys.7.5 (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002). ISBN 351508178X
- Lang, Helen S., Aristotle’s Physics and its Medieval Varieties (Albany: State University of New York, 1992).
- Lang, Helen S., The Order of Nature in Aristotle's Physics: Place and the Elements (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
- Maritain, Jacques, Science and Wisdom, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954).
- Morison, Benjamin, On Location: Aristotle's Concept of Place (Oxford University Press, 2002).
- Reizler, Kurt, Physics and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940).
- Sachs, Joe, “Motion and its Place in Nature,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006. (accessed 18 October 2008).
- Solmsen, Fredrich, Aristotle's System of the Physical World: A Comparison with His Predecessors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960).
- Smith, Vincent Edward, The General Science of Nature (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1958).
- Wardy, Robert, The Chain of Change: A study of Aristotle's Physics VII, (Cmabridge University Press, 1990).
Journal articles
- Kosman, L. A. “Aristotle’s Definition of Motion,” Phronesis 14, 1969, 40-62.
- Machamer, Peter K., “Aristotle on Natural Place and Motion,” Isis 69:3 (Sept. 1978), 377–387.
External links
