Aristotle: Place

The concept of kosmos did not play the leading role in Aristotle’s physics that it did in Pythagorean, Atomistic, Platonic, or Stoic physics. Although Aristotle greatly influenced the history of cosmology, he does not himself recognize a science of cosmology, a science taking the kosmos itself as the object of study with its own phenomena to be explained and its own principles that explain them. The term kosmos played an important role in two aspects of his predecessor’s accounts that Aristotle (...) rejected: first, cosmogeny and kosmopoiia, generation or creation of the kosmos; second, diakosmêsis, arranging of a plurality of kosmoi. Aristotle was extremely critical of accounts involving kosmopoiia and diakosmêsis and he developed general dialectical strategies against them. In emphatically distinguishing his view from all his predecessors (including Plato), he uses the terms ho ouranos (the heaven), to holon (the whole), and to pan (the totality) in preference to ho kosmos (the kosmos or world). There is usually no harm in speaking loosely of ‘Aristotle’s cosmology’ when referring to his concept of the order of nature and the ouranos. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s theoretical philosophy offers something very different from those of his predecessors for whom kosmos was a keyword. (shrink)

Attempts to find perennial elements in Aristotle’s cosmology are doomed to failure because his distinction of sub- and supra-lunary realms no longer holds. More fruitful approaches to the contemporary importance of Aristotelian cosmology must focus on parities of reasoning rather than content. This paper highlights the striking parallels between Aristotle’s use of symmetry arguments in cosmology and instances of Noether’s First Theorem in contemporary physics. Both observe simple motion, find symmetries in that motion, argue from those symmetries to notions of (...) conservation, and then conclude to cosmological structure. These parallels reveal an enduring relevance for Aristotelian cosmology that does not depend on positing an enduring content to his cosmological claims. (shrink)

Although Aristotle's contribution to biology has long been recognized, there are many philosophers and historians of science who still hold that he was the great delayer of natural science, calling him the man who held up the Scientific Revolution by two thousand years. They argue that Aristotle never considered the nature of matter as such or the changes that perceptible objects undergo simply as physical objects; he only thought about the many different, specific natures found in perceptible objects. Against this (...) view, this book argues that Aristotle offers a systematic account of matter, motion, and the basic causal powers found in all physical objects. It argues that Aristotle not only sees all perceptible objects as sharing certain basic physical properties, but he also holds that perceptible objects have these physical properties because they are ultimately made from physical matter of one kind or another. Finally, it argues that for Aristotle the basic properties of matter, including the basic properties of the material elements, cannot be understood teleologically. (shrink)

I examine the reasons Aristotle presents in Physics VIII 8 for denying a crucial assumption of Zeno’s dichotomy paradox: that every motion is composed of sub-motions. Aristotle claims that a unified motion is divisible into motions only in potentiality (δυνάμει). If it were actually divided at some point, the mobile would need to have arrived at and then have departed from this point, and that would require some interval of rest. Commentators have generally found Aristotle’s reasoning unconvincing. Against David Bostock (...) and Richard Sorabji, inter alia, I argue that Aristotle offers a plausible and internally consistent response to Zeno. I defend Aristotle’s reasoning by using his discussion of what to say about the mobile at boundary instants, transitions between change and rest. There Aristotle articulates what I call the Changes are Open, Rests are Closed Rule: what is true of something at a boundary instant is what is true of it over the time of its rest. By contrast, predications true of something over its period of change are not true of the thing at either of the boundary instants of that change. I argue that this rule issues from Aristotle’s general understanding of change, as laid out in Phys. III. It also fits well with Phys. VI, where Aristotle maintains that there is a first boundary instant included in the time of rest, but not a “first in which the mobile began to change.” I then show how this rule underlies Aristotle’s argument that a continuous motion cannot be composed of actual sub-motions. Aristotle distinguishes potential middles, points passed through en route to a terminus, from actual middles. The Changes are Open, Rests are Closed Rule only applies to actual middles, because only they are boundaries of change that the mobile must arrive at and then depart from. On my reading, Aristotle argues that the instant of arrival, the first instant at which the mobile has come to be at the actual middle, cannot belong to the time of the subsequent motion. If it did, the mobile would already be moving towards the next terminus and thus, per Phys. VI 6, would have already left. But it cannot have moved away from the midpoint at the very same moment it has arrived there. This means that the instant of arrival must be separated from the time of departure by an interval of rest. I show how Aristotle’s reasoning applies generally to rule out any continuous reflexive motion or continuous complex rectilinear motion. On my interpretation, however, the argument does not apply to every change of direction. When, as in the case of projectile motion, multiple movers and their relative powers explain why the mobile changes directions, distinct sub-motions are not involved. Aristotle holds that such motions cannot be continuous, not because they involve intervals of rest, but because they involve multiple causes of motion. My interpretation of the Changes are Open, Rests are Closed Rule allows us to make better sense of Aristotle’s argument than any previous interpretation. (shrink)

I offer a comparison between Plato’s discussion of χώρα in the Timaeus at 48A–53C and Aristotle’s discussion of τόπος in Physics Book IV, arguing that the two accounts have more in common than has been suggested by Continental scholars. Τόπος and χώρα both signal what I call the impasse of place as the question of that which cannot be reduced to either the sensible or the intelligible, and which (un)grounds such categories. Identifying this impasse reveals Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of (...) “place” as strikingly dissimilar from the Newtonian category of Absolute Space; and it also suggests new ways of thinking the relationships between bodies, motion, place and nature. (shrink)

Irigaray’s engagement with Aristotelian physics provides a specific diagnosis of women’s ontological and ethical situation under Western metaphysics: Women provide place and containership to men, but have no place of their own, rendering them uncontained and abyssal. She calls for a reconfiguration of this topological imaginary as a precondition for an ethics of sexual difference. This paper returns to Aristotelian cosmological texts to further investigate the topologies of sexual difference suggested there. In an analysis both psychoanalytic and phenomenological, the paper (...) rigorously traces a teleological and oedipal narrative implicit in the structure of the Aristotelian cosmos, in which desire for the mother is superseded by love for the father. Further, the paper argues that this narrative is complicated by certain other elements in the Aristotelian text—aporias involving the notion of boundary and the relationship between space and time, the fallenness of the feminine, and the ineliminably aleatory qualities of matter. The paper concludes that such elements may provide material for disrupting this teleology of gender, opening onto not merely an ethics of sexual difference, but providing space and place for a proliferation of non-normative, queer, transgender and intersex modes of sexed and gendered subjectivity. (shrink)

Space, Time, Matter, and Form collects ten of David Bostock's essays on themes from Aristotle's Physics, four of them published here for the first time. The first five papers look at issues raised in the first two books of the Physics, centred on notions of matter and form, and the idea of substance as what persists through change. They also range over other of Aristotle's scientific works, such as his biology and psychology and the account of change in his De (...) Generatione et Corruptione. The volume's remaining essays examine themes in later books of the Physics, including infinity, place, time, and continuity. Bostock argues that Aristotle's views on these topics are of real interest in their own right, independent of his notions of substance, form, and matter; they also raise some pressing problems of interpretation, which these essays seek to resolve. (shrink)

Benjamin Morison, On Location: Aristotle’s Concept of Place, Oxford University Press, 2002, 202pp, $45.00, ISBN 0199247919.

“A boundary [peras] is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.” Martin Heidegger -/- Place, as Aristotle defines it, is to be sharply distinguished from merely geometrical space. Places, unlike geometrical spaces, are not indifferent to that which they contain. Indeed, they seem to have a kind of power. For unless something interferes, things gravitate naturally toward places that suit them. This power that Aristotle attributes to (...) place is obvious not only in the case of elemental bodies, but much more so in the case of animals, whose very existence depends upon their inhabitation of a suitable place. A fish out of water soon ceases to be a fish, and, in general, living substances can only preserve and maintain themselves given the stable existence of several characteristic environmental conditions. That is why it is surprising that standard readings of Aristotle on the concept of place have focused almost exclusively on its explicit treatment in the Physics, and have largely failed to address his usage of the concept of place in other writings. -/- My aim in this essay was to elucidate the conception of place at work in Aristotle's biological treatises. A consideration of the role played by place in Aristotle’s biological treatises assists in retrieving a richer and more complex conception of place than is indicated by a tradition of commentators who have looked primarily or exclusively to his explicit comments on the subject in the Physics. It reveals that the Aristotelian approach is not merely of antiquarian interest but can be a valuable resource for recent thinkers – in the context of environmental philosophy, phenomenology, feminist theory and the social sciences – who are working on issues centered around the philosophy of place. (shrink)

Place, as Aristotle defines it, is to be sharply distinguished from merely geometrical space. Places, unlike geometrical spaces, are not indifferent to that which they contain. Indeed, they seem to have a kind of power. For unless something interferes, things gravitate naturally toward places that suit them. This power that Aristotle attributes to place is obvious not only in the case of elemental bodies, but much more so in the case of animals, whose very existence depends upon their inhabitation of (...) a suitable place. A fish out of water soon ceases to be a fish, and, in general, living substances can only preserve and maintain themselves given the stable existence of several characteristic environmental conditions. That is why it is surprising that standard readings of Aristotle on the concept of place have focused almost exclusively on its explicit treatment in the Physics, and have largely failed to address his usage of the concept of place in other writings. -/- The aim of this essay is to elucidate the conception of place at work in Aristotle's biological treatises. A consideration of the role played by place in Aristotle’s biological treatises assists in retrieving a richer and more complex conception of place than is indicated by a tradition of commentators who have looked primarily or exclusively to his explicit comments on the subject in the Physics. It reveals that the Aristotelian approach is not merely of antiquarian interest but can be a valuable resource for recent thinkers – in the context of environmental philosophy, phenomenology, feminist theory and the social sciences – who are working on issues centered around the philosophy of place. (shrink)

A review of Helen Lang's monograph on Aristotle's physics.

In the Physics, 4.3.211b5-9, 212a2-6, Aristotle argues that place is “the limit of the surrounding body, at which it is in contact with that which is surrounded.” He then continues.

Kant asserts that we cannot represent to ourselves the non-existence of space. In his discussion of the Ontological Argument he maintains that there is nothing whose non-existence is inconceivable. He thus seems to contradict himself. If the non-existence of space is unthinkable, so is the non-existence of a part of space — a place. Indicating a particular place, we might say "There are no objects there", but it would be nonsense to say "There doesn't exist". We can say, as Aristotle (...) saw, "There is a place where there was water and where there is now air"; but to do so is to bind an adverbial variable with a quantifier, not to attach "exists" to the name of a place. To assert of a place, or of space, that it exists or that it does not exist would be nonsense, and the unthinkable in that sense is not something whose negation is, as Kant thought, a necessary truth. (shrink)