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| Detail of The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio, 1509, showing Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| The fifth of Thomas Aquinas' proofs of God's existence was based on teleology (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The unmoved mover (Ancient Greek: ὃ οὐ κινούμενον
κινεῖ,[1] ho ou kinoúmenon kineî, "that which moves without being moved") or prime mover (Latin: primum movens) is a philosophical concept described by Aristotle as a primary cause or "mover" of all the motion in the universe.[2] As is
implicit in the name, the "unmoved mover" moves other things, but is
not itself moved by any prior action. In Book 12 (Greek "Λ") of his Metaphysics,
Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful,
indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: itself
contemplating. He equates this concept also with the Active
Intellect. This Aristotelian concept had its roots
in cosmological speculations of the earliest Greek "Pre-Socratic" philosophers and became highly influential and widely drawn
upon in medieval philosophy and theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example,
elaborated on the Unmoved Mover in the quinque viae.
Aristotle argues, in
Book 8 of the
Physics and Book 12 of the
Metaphysics, "that there must be an
immortal, unchanging being, ultimately responsible for all wholeness and
orderliness in the sensible world".
[3] In the
Physics (VIII 4–6) Aristotle finds "surprising
difficulties" explaining even commonplace change, and in support of his
approach of explanation by
four
causes, he required "a fair bit of technical machinery".
[4] This "machinery" includes
potentiality
and actuality,
hylomorphism,
the theory of categories, and "an audacious and intriguing argument, that
the bare existence of change requires the postulation of a
first cause, an unmoved
mover whose necessary existence underpins the ceaseless activity of the world
of motion".
[5] Aristotle's "first
philosophy", or
Metaphysics ("
after the
Physics"),
develops his peculiar stellar theology of the
prime mover, as πρῶτον
κινοῦν ἀκίνητον: an independent divine eternal unchanging immaterial substance.
[6]
http://nickny79.hubpages.com/hub/The-Unmoved-Mover-in-Aristotles-Metaphysics
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