Physics

Introduction

Aristotle's Physics is not physics in the modern sense but a philosophy of nature: of all things that have within themselves a principle of motion and rest. He analyses nature and art, chance and necessity and the four causes, gives his famous definition of motion as the actuality of what is potential as such, and examines the infinite, place, the void, time and continuity, answering the paradoxes of Zeno. The book ends with an argument for a first mover. Until Galileo and Newton it was the basic framework in which Europe understood the natural world.