Aristotle's Physics is one of the least studied "great books"--physics has come to mean something entirely different than Aristotle's inquiry into nature, and stereotyped Medieval interpretations have buried the original text. Sach's translation is really the only one that I know of that attempts to take the reader back to the text itself. -- Leon Cass, University of Chicago
The eighth book of Aristotle's Physics is the culmination of his theory of nature. He discusses not just physics, but the origins of the universe and the metaphysical foundations of cosmology and physical science. He moves from the discussion of motion in the cosmos to the identification of a single source and regulating principle of all motion, and so argues for the existence of a first 'unmoved mover'. Daniel Graham offers a clear, accurate new translation of this key text in the history of Western thought, and accompanies the translation with a careful philosophical commentary to guide the reader towards an understanding of the wealth of important and influential arguments and ideas that Aristotle puts forward.
Argues that Aristotle's writings about the natural world contain a rhetorical surface as well as a philosophic core and shows that Aristotle's genuine views have not been refuted by modern science and still deserve serious attention.
This book provides a comprehensive and in-depth study of Physics I, the first book of Aristotle's foundational treatise on natural philosophy. While the text has inspired a rich scholarly literature, this is the first volume devoted solely to it to have been published for many years, and it includes a new translation of the Greek text. Book I introduces Aristotle's approach to topics such as matter and form, and discusses the fundamental problems of the study of natural science, examining the theories of previous thinkers including Parmenides. Leading experts provide fresh interpretations of key passages and raise new problems. The volume will appeal to scholars and students of ancient philosophy as well as to specialists working in the fields of philosophy and the history of science.
This book considers the concepts that lay at the heart of natural philosophy and physics from the time of Aristotle until the fourteenth century. The first part presents Aristotelian ideas and the second part presents the interpretation of these ideas by Philoponus, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, John Buridan, and Duns Scotus. Across the eight chapters, the problems and texts from Aristotle that set the stage for European natural philosophy as it was practiced from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries are considered first as they appear in Aristotle and then as they are reconsidered in the context of later interests. The study concludes with an anticipation of Newton and the sense in which Aristotle's physics had been transformed.
The Physics is one of Aristotle's masterpieces--a work of extraordinary intellectual power which has had a profound influence on the development of metaphysics and the philosophy of science, as well as on the development of physics itself. This collection of ten new essays by leading Aristotelian scholars examines a wide range of issues in the Physics and related works, including method, causation and explanation, chance, teleology, the infinite, the nature of time, the critique of atomism, the role of mathematics in Aristotle's physics, and the concept of self-motion. The essays offer fresh approaches to Aristotle's work in these areas, and important new interpretations of his thought.
For many centuries, Aristotle's Physics was the essential starting point for anyone who wished to study the natural sciencesThis book begins with an analysis of change, which introduces us to Aristotle's central concepts of matter and form, before moving on to an account of explanation in the sciences and a defence of teleological explanation. Aristotle then turns to detailed, important, and often ingenious discussionsof notions such as infinity, place, void, time, and conintuity. He ends with an argument designed to show that the changes we experience in the world demand as their cause a single unchanging cause of all change, namely God.This is the first complete translation of Physics into English since 1930. It presents Aristotle's thought accurately, while at the same time simplifying and expanding the often crabbed and elliptical style of the original, so that it is very much easier to read. A lucid introduction and extensivenotes explain the general structure of each section of the book and shed light on particular problems.
