New Perspectives on Aristotle's De caelo

This volume is the first collection of scholarly articles in any modern language devoted to Aristotle’s De caelo. It grew out of series of workshops held at Princeton, Cambridge, and Paris in the late 1990’s. Since Aristotle’s De caelo had a major influence on cosmological thinking until the time of Galileo and Kepler and helped to shape the way in which Western civilization imagined its natural environment and place at the center of the universe, familiarity with the main doctrines of the De caelo is a prerequisite for an understanding of much of the thought and culture of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Aristotle's great ambition in his De caelo was to determine the nature and structure of the geocentric universe. This collection of essays addresses key epistemological and methodological issues raised by the numerous arguments that Aristotle offers.

Alan C. Bowen, Ph.D. (1977) in Philosophy, University of Toronto, is Director of the Institute for Research in Classical Philosophy and Science (Princeton). He has numerous publications in the history of science and philosophy, including Cleomedes’ Lectures on Astronomy (with Robert B. Todd).

Christian Wildberg, Ph.D. (1984) in Classics, University of Cambridge, is Professor of Greek Literature and Ancient Philosophy at Princeton University. He has published books and articles on the history of philosophy in antiquity, and on Greek tragedy.