Philosophy of Science

Physics

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Aristotle

c. 350 BC

Aristotle's Physics is not physics in the modern sense but the philosophical investigation of nature — of things that exist by their own principle of motion and rest. In eight books Aristotle works out the conceptual foundations of natural science: the four causes, the doctrine of matter and form, the analysis of motion and change, the nature of place and void, and the structure of time as the number of motion according to before and after. The work concludes with the argument that all motion requires an Unmoved Mover, connecting natural philosophy to first philosophy. The Physics shaped the understanding of nature for two millennia and defined the questions that Newton and Galileo would eventually answer otherwise.