This book provides a comprehensive and in-depth study of Physics I, the first book of Aristotle's foundational treatise on natural philosophy. While the text has inspired a rich scholarly literature, this is the first volume devoted solely to it to have been published for many years, and it includes a new translation of the Greek text. Book I introduces Aristotle's approach to topics such as matter and form, and discusses the fundamental problems of the study of natural science, examining the theories of previous thinkers including Parmenides. Leading experts provide fresh interpretations of key passages and raise new problems. The volume will appeal to scholars and students of ancient philosophy as well as to specialists working in the fields of philosophy and the history of science.

Aristotle's Physics is one of the least studied "great books"--physics has come to mean something entirely different than Aristotle's inquiry into nature, and stereotyped Medieval interpretations have buried the original text. Sach's translation is really the only one that I know of that attempts to take the reader back to the text itself. -- Leon Cass, University of Chicago

Presents a survey of what Arabic philosophers, as commentators of Aristotle's Physics, have contributed to philosophy and science in the Middle Ages. Their influences on each other and the extent of the influences of previous Greek commentators on them, are also examined.

The eighth book of Aristotle's Physics is the culmination of his theory of nature. He discusses not just physics, but the origins of the universe and the metaphysical foundations of cosmology and physical science. He moves from the discussion of motion in the cosmos to the identification of a single source and regulating principle of all motion, and so argues for the existence of a first 'unmoved mover'. Daniel Graham offers a clear, accurate new translation of this key text in the history of Western thought, and accompanies the translation with a careful philosophical commentary to guide the reader towards an understanding of the wealth of important and influential arguments and ideas that Aristotle puts forward.

There has recently been considerable renewed interest in Book 7 of the Physics of Aristotle, once regarded as merely an undeveloped forerunner to Book 8. The debate surrounding the importance of the text is not new to modern scholarship: for example, in the fourth century BC Eudemus, the Peripatetic philosopher associate of Aristotle, left it out of his treatment of the Physics. Now, for the first time, Charles Hagen's lucid translation gives the English reader access to Simplicius' commentary on Book 7, an indispensable tool for the understanding of the text. Its particular interest lies in its explanation of how the chapters of Book 7 fit together and its reference to a more extensive second version of Aristotle's text than the one which survives today.

This book considers the concepts that lay at the heart of natural philosophy and physics from the time of Aristotle until the fourteenth century. The first part presents Aristotelian ideas and the second part presents the interpretation of these ideas by Philoponus, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, John Buridan, and Duns Scotus. Across the eight chapters, the problems and texts from Aristotle that set the stage for European natural philosophy as it was practiced from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries are considered first as they appear in Aristotle and then as they are reconsidered in the context of later interests. The study concludes with an anticipation of Newton and the sense in which Aristotle's physics had been transformed.