Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. Aristotle distinguishes different senses of self-motion, so that in one sense all living things are capable of self-motion and in another sense they’re not. When I was writing my dissertation I could have told you prec…

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. The Big Bang is not a first mover in Aristotle’s sense (since Aristotle thought the past was infinite). His first mover isn’t something way back in the past that kicks off a series of motions, it’s somethin…

In reply to David Potts. Theophrastus’s view appears to have been like yours: that the celestial sphere could be the cause of its own motion. LikeLike

In reply to sean samis. 1) The orbits of planets around stars, and stars around galactic centers, are not natural motions (in the sense Aristotle uses for “natural” here.) They are the result of continuous alterations to the inertial moveme…

In reply to boydstun. I should say further, however, that just because we could take the angular momentum vector of one galaxy and add it to that of another galaxy and get single resultant value pointing in a certain direction in space, does not mean t…

In reply to Michael Brazier. Actually, there are many examples of “superlunary circular motion”: every observable galaxy is rotating continuously. Their rotations are so well observed and quantified that a discrepancy observed in it has lea…

In reply to Michael Brazier. In our contemporary scientific cosmology, it is unknown what value of total net angular momentum is had by the universe. But it is known that that value is conserved, i.e., a constant. So unless it turns out that that const…