The Reception of Aristotle’s Physics in Antiquity: Ps-Ocellus and the Doctrine of the Eternity of the World in the Late Hellenistic and Early Post-Hellenistic World (2nd and 1st Century BC)

In one of his typically short but lucid essays, David Furley lists the view that the world is eternal as one of the main ingredients in what he calls the cosmological crisis in antiquity1. By «crisis», Furley means choice. His view is that the history of Greek cosmology is best understood in light of the choice between «two fundamentally and comprehensively different ways of understanding the universe»–in other words, two incompatible cosmological outlooks. Furley calls them «Atomism» and «Aristotelianism». Evidently, he uses the label «Aristotelianism» in a generous way. For one thing, the view that the world is eternal enjoyed success far beyond the narrow boundaries of the Aristotelian tradition.For another,Aristotle defended a specific version of this view. If therefore we want to continue to speak of Aristotelianism in connection with the reception of this view in antiquity, we need to be as clear as possible on the following point: we are using this label to refer to a constellation of different positions. An interesting question for us is how much of Aristotle’s original view is left in these later positions. I will return to this question in due course.