On the Elements: Aristotle's Early Cosmology (review)

Book Reviews On the Elements: Aristotle's Early Cosmology. By A. P. Bos. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972. Pp. 154. $12.25) Aristotle's cosmology has been one of the favorite topics in the debate about the development of his thought ever since this discussion was started by Werner Jaeger's famous book in 1923. Among the cosmological writings the De Caelo especially invites such discussion because it seems to have been one of the manuscripts which Aristotle used time and again as lecture-notes, making additions which are sometimes difficult to reconcile with the rest of the text. There are, e.g., passages which exclude (cf. I, 9, 279a 30ft.; II, 3, 286a9ff.; 287b15) and others which assume an unmoved mover as the supreme cosmological principle (cf. II, 6, 288a29ff.); and while at times Aristotle seems to be giving a mechanistic account of the motion of the heavenly bodies we also find him attributing soul and life to them (cf. II, 2, 285a30, etc.). But while there is general agreement among those scholars who believe in an evolution of Aristotle's thought about the lack of unity in his doctrine, there is very little agreement about the actual stages of Aristotle's cosmology, from a possible early Platonic system down to the theory of a multitude of unmoved movers as in Met. A 8. In fact it seems, as Bos points out in chapter I of his book, as if the critical approach to the text of the De Caelo only leads to the effect that more and more passages are explained as later additions--whether by Aristotle himself or after his death by the notorious redactor who struggled desparately to smooth down the breaches in Aristotle's lecture-notes. In view of this unsatisfactory state of the discussion, Bos attempts to arrive at a new synthesis by pointing out two clearly distinguishable parts in the De Caelo which represent two different stages in Aristotle's thought. Through a careful analysis of the text and a comparison with other Aristotelian writings he hopes to prove that orignially De Caelo I, 1-3 and III had formed a unitary treatise which contained Aristotle's early doctrine of the five elements, the aether (material of the heavenly spheres and stars) and the four "sublunary" elements, fire and air, water and earth. This treatise Bos supposes to have come from a period when Aristotle first took a critical attitude toward certain Platonic doctrines (pp. 126, 131)---at a time when Plato perhaps was still alive and possibly even responded in the Laws to Aristotle's criticism of the Timaeus. For Bos, "On the Elements" preceded the De philosophia (pp. 122ff.), and may have been part of Aristotle's earliest work on physics, a "m0~ tp6o~c0;" of which other parts have been preserved as Books I and II of the extant Aristotelian Physics (pp. 101ft.). 1 Only much later was this writing on the elements inserted into the manuscript on cosmology, expanded and split for convenience' sake into two separate parts (p. 106). Such is the general outline of Bos's interpretation. The difficulties of his task are obvious; for even the sympathetic reader will hardly be able to follow his argumentation with anything but the attitude "in dubio contra reum." For though there are undeniably close connections between I, 1-3 and III, the question remains whether there are sufficient reasons which compel us to assume that the rest of Book I and Book II must be later additions and may not rather have been composed at the same time as the part dealing with the elements.2 1 As evidence for its existence Bos takes the beginning of the Physics where Aristotle announces that he would be occupied with knowledge "where there are principles or causes or elements." The original work "On nature," according to Bos contained precisely these three parts: one book on "archai," one on "aitiai," and one on "stoicheia" (see pp. 103ft.). 2 Book IV seems to be relatively independent and may indeed have been added later by Aristode. [227] 228 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY As his starting point Bos takes the introduction to Book III (298a24-b8), which...