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mattinthebooks's review against another edition
2.0
He talks a lot about different kinds of causes and I think we just fundamentally disagree on what is necessary to call something a “cause” of something else. However, one of the better descriptions of the natural world and provides evidence for a primum mobile so thats nice :)
casparb's review
Ok I got through it and I'm glad I read the Presocratics debrief beforehand I'd say that was pretty crucial. But Aristotle isn't exactly sexy so glad he's gone away until Metaphysics. CB was at A and got the F out of there
rkrinzman's review against another edition
challenging
informative
slow-paced
2.25
Makes no sense whatsoever but interesting ideas
anneliesepeerbolte's review against another edition
3.0
Read excerpts for my philosophy class. Interesting ideas regarding how things come to be from change, where everything is based in the subject as the most truthful being. In comparison to Plato's thought on coming to be, I find Aristotle's theory more consumable and personally truthful.
teresavh's review against another edition
3.0
It's a really interesting but sometimes confusing book.
Imagine you travel to another dimension and then someone gives you a book that tells you how everything works. It was something like that. All Aristotle's postulates make sense in a way but you know that isn't so but it makes sense. To understand it you have to forget everything you know about movement and the elements and time and gravity. Remember, there wasn't the concept of gravity back then. It's also very interesting to see the weight geometry had on science, almost or all the physics concepts Aristotle worked on were based on geometry. Also you can see how close was he to understanding Newton's laws of physics, but because he didn't have all the bases he couldn't get there. For me it was very confusing his dissertation on becoming (I should've read it in my native language, Spanish, for a better translation) and the moving and locomotion thing got me kinda dizzy because he repeated a lot.
It was a good book, but I wouldn't recommend it (not that the author cares)
Imagine you travel to another dimension and then someone gives you a book that tells you how everything works. It was something like that. All Aristotle's postulates make sense in a way but you know that isn't so but it makes sense. To understand it you have to forget everything you know about movement and the elements and time and gravity. Remember, there wasn't the concept of gravity back then. It's also very interesting to see the weight geometry had on science, almost or all the physics concepts Aristotle worked on were based on geometry. Also you can see how close was he to understanding Newton's laws of physics, but because he didn't have all the bases he couldn't get there. For me it was very confusing his dissertation on becoming (I should've read it in my native language, Spanish, for a better translation) and the moving and locomotion thing got me kinda dizzy because he repeated a lot.
It was a good book, but I wouldn't recommend it (not that the author cares)
cadonelson's review against another edition
4.0
What even my brain. I have basically accepted the fact that I do not know what infinity, eternal, void, being, coming to be, motion, and time even mean.
c2pizza's review against another edition
2.0
All of the elegance and beauty of modern physics is noticeably missing in the ancient system. The effort made to understand the world is highly impressive in itself even if Aristotle's system did lead to centuries of misconceptions in the field (and still does today considering the widely-used Kalam Cosmological Argument is based of Aristotelian physics), but compared with light bending around stars, black holes ripping matter apart as it crosses the event horizon, or atoms colliding in a particle accelerator, the visual of things going from rest to motion (or from blackness to whiteness) due to an influence from a prime mover is less than inspiring to say the least.