Abstract
Aristotle conceives of God as an unmoved mover, the primary cause responsible for the shapeliness of motion in the natural order, and as divine nous, the perfect actuality of thought thinking itself, which, as the epitome of substance, exercises its influence on natural beings as their final cause. These two aspects of God reflect the two defining aspects of Classical Greek Philosophy: the experience of the intelligibility of the natural order and the search for the first principle(s) responsible for its intelligibility, on the one hand, and the experience of nous both as the capacity to behold nature’s intelligibility and as the source of order in the human soul, soul itself being a source of shapely motion in the natural order. This article comments on each of these aspects of Aristotle’s conception of God, indicating that he finds evidence for his speculative-metaphysical conception in the experience of the rational soul.
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- 1.
Aristotle consistently argues to this fundamental insight in De anima, that rest is the essential attribute of the soul and a principle of its motility and that this principle of rest is in the noetic capacity of ensouled beings (De an. 405b32-407b27, 408a35-408b19, 434a16-18).
- 2.
Han Jonas offers an excellent account of the “dynamic neutralization” involved in distance perception as the present awareness otherness and form. Cf. “Causality and Perception” (26–33) and “Dynamic Neutralization” (145–149) in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Jonas 1966).
- 3.
Even though Aristotle says in his Metaphysics that first-philosophy has to do with eternal and unchanging substance and is thus theology, he does not start with this conception as his hypothesis but, rather, starts with our familiar experience of substances and works out to his more speculative pronouncements. It is only toward the end of the Metaphysics in Book Λ, where he argues for the necessity of an eternal and unchanging substance and calls this substance God. Moreover, contemporary scholars are largely in agreement that Book Λ is not an original book in Metaphysics (Frede and Charles 2001).
- 4.
Although Sara Broadie argues that the virtue of piety is present in Aristotle, she must argue the point because piety is not included in Aristotle’s list of virtues. The piety that Broadie argues for is not the virtue of religious piety found in creation monotheism (Broadie 2003).
- 5.
I am referring mainly to Voegelin’s account of Aristotle’s doctrine of nous as an elaboration of philosophical experience as it is found in “Reason: The Classical Experience” in his Anamnesis (Voegelin 1990).
References
Editions of Aristotle’s Works
Apostle, Hippocrates G. (trans). 1969. Aristotle’s physics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Apostle, Hippocrates G. (trans). 1979. Aristotle’s metaphysics. Grinell: Peripatetic Press.
Apostle, Hippocrates G. (trans). 1981. Aristotle’s on the soul. Grinell: Peripatetic Press.
Jaeger, W. (ed.). 1957. Aristotelis metaphysica. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, Sir David (ed.). 1951. Aristotelis physica. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, Sir David (ed.). 1956. Aristotelis de anima. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Other References
Broadie, Sara. 2003. Aristotelian piety. Phronesis: A Journal of Ancient Philosophy 48(1): 54–70.
Frede, Michael, and David Charles (eds.). 2001. Aristotle’s metaphysics book lambda: Symposium Aristotelicum. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jonas, Hans. 1966. The phenomenon of life: Toward a philosophical biology. Evanston: Northwest University Press.
Voegelin, Eric. 1990. Anamnesis, trans. Gerhart Niemeyer. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
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Olson, R.M. (2013). Aristotle on God: Divine Nous as Unmoved Mover. In: Diller, J., Kasher, A. (eds) Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5219-1_9
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