Aristotle argues in On the Heavens 1.5-7 that there can be no infinitely large body, and in 1.8-9 that there cannot be more than one physical world. As a corollary in 1.9, he infers that there is no place, vacuum or time beyond the outermost stars. As one argument in favour of a single world, he argues that his four elements: earth, air, fire and water, have only one natural destination apiece. Moreover they accelerate as they approach it and acceleration cannot be unlimited. However, the Neoplatonist Simplicius, who wrote the commentary in the sixth century AD (here translated into English), tells us that this whole world view was to be rejected by Strato, the third head of Aristotle's school. At the same time, he tells us the different theories of acceleration in Greek philosophy.

Aristotle believed that the outermost stars are carried round us on a transparent sphere. There are directions in the universe and a preferred direction of rotation. The sun moon and planets are carried on different revolving spheres. The spheres and celestial bodies are composed of an everlasting fifth element, which has none of the ordinary contrary properties like heat and cold which could destroy it, but only the facility for uniform rotation. But this creates problems as to how the heavenly bodies create light, and, in the case of the sun, heat. The value of Simplicius' commentary on On the Heavens 2,1-9 lies both in its preservation of the lost comments of Alexander and in Simplicius' controversy with him. The two of them discuss not only the problem mentioned, but also whether soul and nature move the spheres as two distinct forces or as one. Alexander appears to have simplified Aristotle's system of 55 spheres down to seven, and some hints may be gleaned as to whether, simplifying further, he thinks there are seven ultimate movers, or only one.

This companion to J. O. Urmson's translation in the same series of Simplicius' Corollaries on Place and Time contains Simplicius' commentary on the chapters on place and time in Aristotle's Physics book 4. It is a rich source for the preceding 800 years' discussion of Aristotle's views. Simplicius records attacks on Aristotle's claim that time requires change, or consciousness. He reports a rebuttal of the Pythagorean theory that history will repeat itself exactly. He evaluates Aristotle's treatment of Zeno's paradox concerning place. Throughout he elucidates the structure and meaning of Aristotle's argument, and all the more clearly for having separated off his own views into the Corollaries.

One of the arguments in Aristotle's On the Heavens propounds that the world neither came to be nor will perish. This volume contains the pagan Neoplatonist Simplicius of Cilicia's commentary on the first part of this this important work. The commentary is notable and unusual because Simplicius includes in his discussion lengthy representations of the Christian John Philoponus' criticisms of Aristotle along with his own, frequently sarcastic, responses. This is the first complete translation into a modern language of Simplicius' commentary, and is accompanied by a detailed introduction, extensive explanatory notes and a bibliography.

In The Lagoon, acclaimed biologist Armand Marie Leroi recovers Aristotle's science. He revisits Aristotle's writings and the places where he worked. He goes to the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos to see the creatures that Aristotle saw, where he saw them. He explores Aristotle's observations, his deep ideas, his inspired guesses--and the things he got wildly wrong. He shows how Aristotle's science is deeply intertwined with his philosophical system and reveals that he was not only the first biologist, but also one of the greatest.

The loss of a real and heartfelt belief in God—and by “real” I mean an experience that is both steady and moving, ethereal though down-to-earth, sentimental but never trite—comes from an earlier more foundational loss, namely that of an ardent and directed desire for heaven, and more specifically, that paradisal longing for the resurrected life. This book seeks to recover the neglected nature of heaven, degraded into something “out-there” and unknown, degraded further into a vague wish for immortality and the often empty words of consolation. Or even worse, the almost comic book reduction of heaven to an earthly social(ist) paradise, the immanentization of the Christian eschaton. The vague “better place,” which is meant well, often means nothing at all, or worse than that can hamper us when approaching and engaging the mystery of grief. This book will address and interrogate various questions about the nature of the afterlife—on the status of guilt, forgiveness, friendship, love, embodiment, sexuality—and propose various paths to answers. We are talking about that sacred innermost promise: the hope of paradisal reunion most secret and yet most universal, never abstract and shapeless, but embodied and individual. We must wonder whether our casual forgetting of this estuary of human hope, the resurrected life, has caused us to lose ourselves in such a way that we do not even know what we have lost.