In chapter 1 of "On the Heavens" Aristotle defines body, and then
notoriously ruptures dynamics by introducing a fifth element,
beyond Plato's four, to explain the rotation of the heavens, which,
like nearly all Greeks, Aristotle took to be real, not apparent.
Even a member of his school, Xenarchus, we are told, rejected his
fifth element. The Neoplatonist Simplicius seeks to harmonise Plato
and Aristotle. Plato, he says, thought that the heavens were
composed of all four elements but with the purest kind of fire,
namely light, predominating. That Plato would not mind this being
called a fifth element is shown by his associating with the heavens
the fifth of the five convex regular solids recognised by geometry.
Simplicius follows Aristotle's view that one of the lower elements,
fire, also rotates, as shown by the behaviour of comets. But such
motion, though natural for the fifth element, is super-natural for
fire. Simplicius reveals that the Aristotelian Alexander of
Aphrodisias recognised the need to supplement Aristotle and account
for the annual approach and retreat of planets by means of
Ptolemy's epicycles or eccentrics. Aristotle's philosopher-god is
turned by Simplicius, following his teacher Ammonius, into a
creator-god, like Plato's. But the creation is beginningless, as
shown by the argument that, if you try to imagine a time when it
began, you cannot answer the question, 'Why not sooner?' In
explaining the creation, Simplicius follows the Neoplatonist
expansion of Aristotle's four 'causes' to six. The final result
gives us a cosmology very considerably removed from Aristotle's.
This text is a transation of Simplicius' commentary on Aristotle's
"On the Heaven 1.1-4".
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