Abstract

The focus of this paper is on the critical analysis of Aristotle’s Unmoved Prime Mover thesis carried out by Pseudo-Justin, a (possibly) fifth-century philosopher who devoted a whole treatise to undermining some of the basic tenets of Aristotle’s cosmology. In section 2 I provide the bulk of Pseudo-Justin’s criticism, and argue that at least part of his most important objections are reasonable, inasmuch as they are made on the basis of Aristotelian assumptions and conceptual categories. While developing Pseudo-Justin’s objections to Aristotle, I refer to some of the crucial passages in Aristotle’s Physics VII-VIII and Metaphysics XII where the theory of the Unmoved Prime Mover is developed and explained. In his Confutatio Pseudo-Justin only cites passages taken from Aristotle’s Physics and De caelo. But in order to clarify Pseudo-Justin’s arguments, I shall be quoting and commenting on some passages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. My main concern in this essay is with the argumentative and conceptual framework within which the debate between Pseudo-Justin and Aristotle takes place.