Aristotle's Prime Mover

Religious Studies: OCR A Level, topic 1.2.3

Aristotle - The Prime Mover

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.