This book enters into the point of view of the ancient world in order to explain how they saw the world, and to show what arguments were used by Aristotle to support this view. Lang demonstrates a new method for reading the texts of Aristotle by revealing a continuous line of argument running from the Physics to De Caelo, and analyzes a group of arguments that are almost always treated in isolation from one another to reveal their elegance and coherence. She establishes the case that we must rethink our approach to Aristotle's physical science and Aristotelian texts.

This book enters into the point of view of the ancient world in order to explain how they saw the world, and to show what arguments were used by Aristotle to support this view. Lang demonstrates a new method for reading the texts of Aristotle by revealing a continuous line of argument running from the Physics to De Caelo, and analyzes a group of arguments that are almost always treated in isolation from one another to reveal their elegance and coherence. She establishes the case that we must rethink our approach to Aristotle's physical science and Aristotelian texts.

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

Exploration of Aristotle's philosophy of nature in the light of scholarly insights.

This examination of Aristotle's concept of natural substance and its implications for change, process, agency, teleology, mathematical continuity, and eternal motion illustrates the conceptual power of Aristotle's metaphysics of nature along with its scientific limitations and internal tensions.

What is the relation between time and change? Does time depend on the mind? Is the present always the same or is it always different? Aristotle tackles these questions in the Physics, and Time for Aristotle is the first book in English devoted to this discussion. Aristotle claims that time is not a kind of change, but that it is something dependent on change; he defines it as a kind of 'number of change'. Ursula Coope argues that what this means is that time is a kind of order (not, as is commonly supposed, a kind of measure). It is universal order within which all changes are related to each other. This interpretation enables Coope to explain two puzzling claims that Aristotle makes: that the now is like a moving thing, and that time depends for its existence on the mind. Brilliantly lucid in its explanation of this challenging section of the Physics, Time for Aristotle shows his discussion to be of enduring philosophical interest.

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.