1.2.3

Aristotle's Prime Mover

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Aristotle - The Prime Mover

The Prime Mover is the logical result of the application of the final cause to the whole universe.

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Some things are not changing

  • Remember the movement from potentiality to actuality is going on in all things – in other words, change is happening to them.
  • Most things are changing (being generated and being destroyed), but some things are not changing in that way.
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The motion of heavenly spheres

  • Aristotle thinks here of the heavenly spheres (containing the planets and fixed stars, which were considered to be nested around each other about the earth).
  • These are only undergoing changes in the sense of cyclical motion. They are not (according to Aristotle) being generated or destroyed.
  • This is because their movement is the reality behind time itself. For Aristotle, time cannot be destructible – it is uniform and everlasting.
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The principle of the prime mover

  • The movement of the spheres causes the change in the universe – each sphere causes the one inside it to move until you get to the outermost sphere, which has to be moved by something which is not itself moved (or it would need an explanation for its own movement).
  • This is called the Primum Mobile or the Prime Mover.
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Prime mover: the cause of motion

  • The object of desire moves other things without itself moving (think of how a saucer of milk draws a cat to it) – in this way the prime mover is the cause of the motion of all other things.
  • They are being drawn to it as to their own final end.
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Prime Mover vs Form of the Good

  • Both are linked in the domain of ethics:
    • Prime Mover: through the idea of everything being drawn to its own purpose.
    • Form of the Good: as the means by which everything that exists is known.
  • The Prime Mover is based on arguments that appeal to a posteriori (observed) evidence; the Form of the Good on a priori arguments.
  • They are both ‘ultimates’, which might appeal to non-theistic deists – impersonal sources of reality, arrived at through philosophical speculation rather than faith.
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Rationalism vs empiricism

  • How dependent on our senses are we for knowledge?
    • Empiricists argue that sense experience is the ultimate source of knowledge.
    • Rationalists argue that concepts are independent of sense-experience.
  • Therefore, it is a debate in the field of epistemology (philosophy of knowledge).
  • The empiricist Hume says that ideas do not exist in themselves independently from objects other than as a relation between objects.

Jump to other topics

1Philosophy of Religion

1.1Ancient Philosophical Influences: Plato

1.2Ancient Philosophical Influences: Aristotle

1.3Ancient Philosophical Influences: Soul, Mind, Body

1.4The Existence of God - Arguments from Observation

1.5The Existence of God - Arguments from Reason

1.6Religious Experience

1.7The Problem of Evil

1.8The Nature & Attributes of God

1.9Religious Language: Negative, Analogical, Symbolic

1.10Religious Language: 20th Century Perspective

2Religion & Ethics

3Developments in Christian Thought

3.1Saint Augustine's Teachings

3.2Death & the Afterlife

3.3Knowledge of God's Existence

3.4The Person of Jesus Christ

3.5Christian Moral Principles

3.6Christian Moral Action

3.7Development - Pluralism & Theology

3.8Development - Pluralism & Society

3.9Gender & Society

3.10Gender & Theology

3.11Challenges

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