This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the philosophical treatise Peri kosmou (often known by the Latin title De mundo), written in approximately the 1st century AD (a much-disputed date) and preserved among the works of Aristotle. The chapter introduction emphasizes the literary polish of the work, and the remarkable way in which it draws accurately upon a late hellenistic understanding of geography, the earth sciences, and cosmology in order to sustain its open-minded, but fundamentally Aristotelian and anti-Stoic, theological position and stimulate readers to immerse themselves more deeply in its philosophy.

Locke’s knowledge of medicine, and of the main Galenist principles, indicates the type of ideas he was familiar with at an early age. Scholars have analysed the reception in the European political tradition of the Pseudo-Aristotle’s Oeconomia up to Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, where the household unites economy and politics as a kingdom. The chapter evaluates in a novel manner, in the context of the seventeenth-century liberalism, the tradition of texts that deal with the materialist anthropology of needs, including the Pseudo-Galen’s Yconomia, in which household and humanity originate in the existence of needs. In these texts the state is the sum of individuals united through the materialist principle of human needs with an arbiter entrusted to resolve disputes about reciprocal transactions.

This third chapter presents the nine selected authors and their mirrors. They are: (1) Pseudo-Aristotle, Kitāb al-Siyāsa fī tadbīr al-riyāsa (Sirr al-asrār) (Arabic); (2) Pseudo-Māwardī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk (Arabic); (3) al-Thaʿālibī, Ādāb al-mulūk (Arabic); (4) Yūsuf Khāṣṣ Ḥājib, Kutadgu bilig (Karakhanid Turkish); (4) Kaykāʾūs b. Iskandar, Qābūsnāmeh (Andarznāmeh) (Persian); (6) al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar (Arabic); (7) Niẓām al-Mulk, Siyar al-mulūk (Persian); (8) Ghazālī (Pseudo-Ghazālī), Naṣīḥat al-mulūk (Persian); (9) al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk (Arabic).

Lewis suggests an interpretation of the text which aims to identify the author’s views on the role of heat in animals and to answer question such as (i) What are the roles of heat in the composition and functions of the animal body? (ii) By what means and with the aid of which substances or structures does heat perform its roles? (iii) What is the relation between heat and the soul and heat and pneuma? (iv) Is there an “innate heat” in the body?