Pseudo-Aristotle: De Mundo (On the Cosmos): A Commentary

Description

De mundo is a protreptic to philosophy in the form of a letter to Alexander the Great and is traditionally ascribed to Aristotle. It offers a unique view of the cosmos, God and their relationship, which was inspired by Aristotle but written by a later author. The author provides an outline of cosmology, geography and meteorology, only to argue that a full understanding of the cosmos cannot be achieved without a proper grasp of God as its ultimate cause. To ensure such a grasp, the author provides a series of twelve carefully chosen interlocking analogies, building a complex picture in the reader's mind. The work develops a distinctly Aristotelian picture of God and the cosmos while paying tribute to pre-Aristotelian philosophers and avoiding open criticism of rival schools of philosophy. De mundo exercised considerable influence in late antiquity and then in the Renaissance and Early Modern times.

Pavel Gregoric is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb, working on ancient, Renaissance and early modern philosophy. He has published Aristotle on the Common Sense (2007), and is a co-editor of the volume Encounters with Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind (2020) and a contributor to Hackett's forthcoming new translation of Aristotle complete works. George Karamanolis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. He has published Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry (2006) and The Philosophy of Early Christianity (2013), and edited Studies on Porphyry (with Anne Sheppard, 2007) and The Aporetic Tradition in Ancient Philosophy (with Vasilis Politis, Cambridge, 2017).