Aristotle Prime Mover Quotes

(For those who like to quote Aristotle’s wisdom when appealing to his “Prime Mover” argument for the existence of God, let us remember that he also claimed that women had a different number of teeth than men, presumably without bothering to check.) Everything

It’s often the case that brilliant ancient ideas are discarded by science, especially when they have any religious connotations. What ought to be done instead is to repurpose and reformulate these ancient ideas mathematically. So, for example, Aristotle’s Prime Mover can be recast as a Fourier frequency domain at the center of a Fourier spacetime domain. The Prime Mover is immaterial and outside space and time (it’s a Singularity), and controls the material world of spacetime. The latter is an ontological hologram projected by the former.

Pletho, a neo-pagan, had an ulterior motive in pitting Plato against Aristotle. As an opponent of the proposed union between the Latins and the Greeks, he hoped to demolish the intellectual edifice of the Roman Catholic Church, which he quite rightly recognized had been raised, thanks to Aquinas and others, on Aristotelian foundations. Upending the traditional philosophical hierarchy, he depicted Aristotle as an atheist while stressing Plato’s piety. He pointed out that for Aristotle the Prime Mover—the primary cause of all motion in the universe—existed in only one celestial sphere, which undermined the Christian idea of a god who dwells in all things. He rebutted Aristotle’s attack on Forms by saying it was tantamount to denying the existence of eternal substances. Finally, Aristotle may have paid lip service to various divinities, but, Pletho claimed, he was ultimately an atheist. Plato, on the other hand, understood God as “the universal sovereign existing over all things … the originator of originators, the creator of creators.

Aquinas’s God is not Aristotle’s Prime Mover. He is a beneficent Creator and creative Architect, a composite figure from Scripture and Plato’s Timaeus. However, Aquinas’s God shares one important characteristic with Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover: He is the ultimate source of all movement and change. “Whatever is done by nature must be traced back to God as its first cause.”25 In fact, we live in a world blessed by the very act of creation. Quoting Aristotle again, “Nature creates nothing in vain”—and neither does God.

Perhaps science was a retarded child because its parent was philosophy rather than engineering, because, we might say, it put Aristotle above Archimedes.