Unmoved mover
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"Before the ocean and the earth appeared— before the skies had overspread them all— the face of Nature in a vast expanse was naught but Chaos uniformly waste. It was a rude and undeveloped mass, that nothing made except a ponderous weight; and all discordant elements confused, were there congested in a shapeless heap." --Metamorphoses, Ovid (trans. Brookes More) |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The unmoved mover (ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, 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. 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. 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.
See also
- Actus et potentia
- Clockwork universe theory
- Cosmological argument
- Syllogism
- Primum Mobile
- The All
- Causeless cause
- Chaos
- Cosmological argument
- Dynamics of the celestial spheres
- Godhead
- Logos
- The One; Monad
