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2 results

  • 11 - On Generation and Corruption II 10

  • from Part I - Introduction and Interpretative Essays
  • Edited by Panos Dimas, Universitetet i Oslo, Andrea Falcon, Concordia University, Montréal, Sean Kelsey, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book:
    Aristotle: <i>On Generation and Corruption</i> Book II
    Published online:
    10 November 2022
    Print publication:
    24 November 2022, pp 216-242

  • Summary

    This essay explores the role that GC II 10 plays in the context of the treatise as a whole. It argues that while the rest of the treatise, up to and including GC II 9, explains generation and perishing by means of material and formal causes, GC II 10 provides the efficient and final causes, and thus brings the project announced at the outset of GC to completion. The essay analyses the arguments for the efficient cause of generation and corruption (identified with the sun’s annual course along the ecliptic) and its final cause (identified with a universal desire for the highest kind of being). For Aristotle, the best approximation to the being of imperishable substance which the sublunary sphere permits, given the nature of its constituents, is perpetual reproduction (for living things) and an endless cycle of reciprocal change (for elements). Finally, the essay illustrates how Aristotle’s fourfold scheme of causal explanations practically applies to generation and perishing in view of what Aristotle claims elsewhere about the unmoved mover and the gradation of being.

  • 2 - Two spheres: modeling the heavens and the Earth

  • Todd Timberlake, Berry College, Georgia, Paul Wallace
  • Book:
    Finding our Place in the Solar System
    Published online:
    18 March 2019
    Print publication:
    28 March 2019, pp 13-48

  • Summary

    The stars move from east to west across the sky each night. The ancient Greeks realized that the apparent movement of the stars would make sense if the stars were stuck on the inner surface of a giant celestial sphere that rotated around the Earth once every sidereal day. The Sun also moves from east to west across the sky, but not quite in the same way as the stars. The Sun’s motion can be tracked using shadows, and it appears to move eastward relative to the sphere of the stars along a path that is tilted relative to the celestial equator. The Sun completes its motion around the celestial sphere in one year, traveling through the constellations of the zodiac along a path called the ecliptic. As an observer moves around on Earth the apparent motions of the stars and Sun change in a way that shows the Earth to be spherical. The stars also display a very slow motion known as the precession of the equinoxes with a period of about 26,000 years.