What is philosophy? How does it differ from science, religion, and other modes of human discourse? This course traces the origins of philosophy in the Western tradition in the thinkers of Ancient Greece. We begin with the Presocratic natural philosophers who were active in Ionia in the 6th century BCE and are also credited with being the first scientists. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximines made bold proposals about the ultimate constituents of reality, while Heraclitus insisted that there is an underlying order to the changing world. Parmenides of Elea formulated a powerful objection to all these proposals, while later Greek theorists (such as Anaxagoras and the atomist Democritus) attempted to answer that objection. In fifth-century Athens, Socrates insisted on the importance of the fundamental ethical question—“How shall I live?”—and his pupil, Plato, and Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, developed elaborate philosophical systems to explain the nature of reality, knowledge, and human happiness. After the death of Aristotle, in the Hellenistic period, Epicureans and Stoics developed and transformed that earlier tradition. We will study the major doctrines of all these thinkers. Part I will cover Plato and his predecessors. Part II will cover Aristotle and his successors.
The Unmoved Mover
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and His Successors
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From the lesson
Aristotle's Ethics
The motion of the universe is eternal and its cause is an eternal unmoved mover, Aristotle’s god. Our goal in life is to achieve happiness, which comes in two varieties: the human happiness we achieve by exercising the virtues of character, and the godlike happiness we achieve when we grasp eternal truths.
Meet the Instructors
Susan Sauvé MeyerProfessor
Department of Philosophy
[MUSIC]
The unmoved mover of the cosmos.
In book eight of the Physics, when Aristotle asks why there is change
in the cosmos, in particular why there is a continuous cycle of
coming to be in passing away in the sublunary world, he traces back
the causal chain to the movement of the outermost celestial sphere.
He calls this the first heaven in the metaphysics.
That's the cosmological picture we were examining in the last lecture.
The question we now take up is why Aristotle doesn't identify that
outermost sphere, or first heaven, as the first mover of the cosmos.
Recall that he has claimed that there must be some everlasting
first mover of change in the cosmos.
The outermost fear cannot be the first mover,
Aristotle thinks, because it is a moved mover.
That is, if we ask how the outer sphere moves the other spheres,
the answer is that it rotates around an axis and
imparts this motion to the spheres nested inside it.
So it is by being in movement,
that is, moved, that the first heaven moves the other spheres.
Aristotle, by contrast, has insisted that the first mover has to be unmoved.
He says, there must be something that is itself unmoved and
outside of all change, but initiates movement in something else.
A moved mover cannot be the first mover because of another principle
that Aristotle has insisted upon in his discussion of causal chains.
He says, everything that is in motion is moved by something.
Aristotle elsewhere denies that earth, air, fire, and
water can be the first movers of natural changes because they are moved movers,
or as he puts it in the De Anima, co-causes.
The same principle holds for the outer most sphere.
If it causes change by being in motion,
then there must be a further mover that moves it.
And so it can't be the first mover.
Of course, if that further mover is also in motion,
then we have the same problem all over again.
We won't have a first mover, because the move's mover we
just invoked itself must have a further mover and so forth.
Anytime you cite a moved mover, there's another motion
to be explained and hence another mover to be invoked.
In order to bring this sort of causal regress to an end, or rather as Aristotle
sees it, to a beginning, there has to be a mover that is not in motion.
That is, an unmoved mover.
Since this sort of mover does not cause change by means of a motion or
change, then we have our ultimate explanation or first mover.
That is, a mover that is not moved by any further mover.
So that's why Aristotle invokes an unmoved mover to
explain the motion of the outermost sphere.
But what on earth is an unmoved mover?
A very common misconception is that it is an uncaused motion.
But we are in a position to avoid this error, by remembering
what mover and moved mean in this Aristotelian context.
In calling something a mover,
we are using move in the transitive sense as in moving furniture.
A mover is a cause of motion, not a motion.
In classifying a mover as unmoved,
we are using moved as in the distinction between mover and moved.
We are saying that the mover is not a subject of motion.
That is, it is not in motion.
An unmoved mover then is a mover, or efficient cause,
that exerts its causality without being in motion.
Let's consider how this works in the case of the man who is
the first mover of the stone.
Now you might wonder why Aristotle is entitled to call the man the first
mover since he moves the stone by moving his hand.
Doesn't that make him a moved mover?
Aristotle agrees that the hand is a moved mover, but
he claims that the mover of the hand is still not something other than the man.
The man, he explains, is moved but not by the agency of something else.
Although the man moves the stick by means of a motion,
that motion is not due to some further mover.
And so the causal regress stops with the man.
He is the first mover of the stone.
In fact, Aristotle goes on to explain, a self mover,
such as the man, and indeed any other living thing,
is actually a compound of a moved mover and an unmoved mover.
In the case of the man moving the stick, the moved mover is his hand,
and the unmoved mover is his soul.
This is the view of the soul Aristotle develops in the De Anima,
in contrast to those of his predecessors who made the soul a moved mover.
Plato in fact, makes the soul a self mover, but
Aristotle argues that it is preferable to say that the living thing
is moved by itself with the soul as the unmoved mover.
But the important point here is that,
for Aristotle, the unmoved mover of a living thing is its soul.
Now let's get back to the unmoved mover of the cosmos.
Is that a soul too, like Plato's world soul in the Timaeus?
Aristotle never says so in as many words.
Although what he does say about this cosmic unmoved mover invokes
two activities that in the De Anima are attributed to the soul.
In book 12 of the Metaphysics, Aristotle claims that
the unmoved mover of the cosmos moves, that is causes motion,
in the way the object of understanding or desire initiates motion.
Let's think about each of these things, the object of desire, and
then the object of understanding.
The object of desire is a final cause, or
a goal, Aristotle explains.
How could it be an unmoved mover?
Well, think about how your desire to win a race
spurs you to put in extra hours of training.
Winning the race is the object of your desire, and
it moves you to run all those extra training miles.
But winning the race is not moved, it's not something in motion,
in order to bring about this effect.
For winning the race is something in the future, not there to be pushing and
prodding you to run that extra mile.
But how can the first heaven, or outermost sphere, have desires, you might ask.
Is it a soul, or an ensouled creature with the unmoved mover as its object of desire?
That can't be the whole story, however, since Aristotle also tells
us that the unmoved mover of the cosmos is the object of thought.
He explains that, at least in some cases, the object of thought and
the object of desire are the same, since we desire what we think is good.
As he puts it, what is fine is the primary object of wish And
we desire something because it seems fine.
Now, Aristotle here appeals to a theme that he develops in the De Anima
that thinking is the highest of the activities of the soul and
that the knowing mind is identical with its object.
This unity with the object of thought is what our own minds achieve
in those brief moments when we truly understand things.
Aristotle thinks this is when we grasp their forms.
But this is an activity that the gods are capable of engaging
in continuously and uninterruptedly.
On Aristotle's theology, he says,
god is always in the good state that we are in sometimes.
Further, life belongs to the god, for
the actuality of understanding is life, and the god is that actuality.
We say then that the god is the best and everlasting living being.
So that continuous and everlasting life and
duration belong to god, for that is what god is.
And he concludes by saying that this divine intellect
understands what is most divine and most valuable; and
it does not change, metabola, for change would be to something worse,
and it would thereby also be a motion, a kinesis.
So thus, this divine intellect is the unmoved mover of the cosmos.
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