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17 Aristotle's Theology
Get accessStephen Menn is Associate Professor of Philosophy, McGill University, and Professor für Philosophie der Antike und Gegenwart, Humboldt-Universität Berlin. He is the author of Plato on God as Nous (Southern Illinois University Press: 1995, reissued by St. Augustine's Press: 2002), of Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge University Press: 1998, revised paperback edition: 2002), and of The Aim and the Argument of Aristotle's Metaphysics (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). He also has a book in draft entitled Feuerbach's Theorem: an Essay on Euclidean and Algebraic Geometry, and is working on a book entitled Fârâbî's Kitâb al-Ḥurûf and the History of the Many Senses of Being. With Rachel Barney of the University of Toronto he has translated Simplicius' commentary on Aristotle's Physics I.1-2, for the series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, edited by Richard Sorabji (Bloomsbury and Cornell University Press), and with Calvin Normore of McGill and UCLA he is working on a book entitled Nominalism and Realism, from Boethius to Hobbes.
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Published:06 November 2012
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Abstract
When Aristotle speaks of theologikê, he means not the study of a single God, but the study of gods and divine things in general. He never uses the phrase “the unmoved mover” to pick out just one being (or even to pick out the many movers of the heavenly spheres), and that phrase would not express the essence of the beings it applies to. To see what sort of religious interest there might be in such a being, and how the words “god” and “divine” enter into Aristotle's philosophy, it is best to start with what he says about gods and divine things in moral and political contexts. Guided by his criticisms of Plato on the soul's self-motion, Aristotle sets out, in Physics VIII, to give a revised version of Plato's cosmotheological argument in Laws X. This article focuses on Aristotle's theology and his views about gods, the soul, the cosmos, heavens and heavenly bodies, and the first principle or first cause.
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