God and Cosmos in Plato's Politicus 269c–270a and Aristotle

What is it about?

Since the god in the myth in Plato's Statesman, uniquely in Plato, shares three significant features with Aristotle’s prime mover, causing movement, being ontologically independent and explicitly called a god, here I investigate other possible similarities. In summary (i) I oppose Ostenfeld’s claim that this god is the world-soul’s ‘circle of the same’ from the Timaeus, evaluating whether the Politicus’ god might not literally be meant to rotate (as similarly Skemp and Robinson have argued is the case for divine intellect in Laws Bk X), (ii) suggest reasons to think that he contemplates the forms (following Perl’s defence of this interpretation of Sophist 248e-249a, just as Aristotle’s god correspondingly contemplates himself), and argue (iii) that the cosmos in the myth might be meant to be everlasting, and (iv) that the same god is also the demiurge, maintaining the world’s natural order by causing its movement. Finally (v) I argue that, by experimentally abstracting from the myth’s motif of alternating periods, an apparently consistent, although obscure, position results, that, like Aristotle’s god, he causes movement teleologically while transcending the cosmos. These results are meant merely as consistent interpretive possibilities available to Aristotle, but they do suggest how closely in the conception underlying the myth’s cosmo-theology Plato might have anticipated many of Aristotle’s distinctive ideas, and what nevertheless the latter clearly could not accept from Plato.

Featured Image