In Katja Krause, Luis Xavier López-Farjeat, and Nicholas A. Oschman (eds), Contextualizing Premodern Philosophy: Explorations of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin Traditions, pp. 29-55. London: Routledge, 2023.
Enrico Berti and Sarah Broadie, among others, have questioned the (still) dominant reading of Ari... more Enrico Berti and Sarah Broadie, among others, have questioned the (still) dominant reading of Aristotle, which is also the (still) dominant reading of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroes: the first cause is an exclusively final cause. Berti fingers Alexander as the first to articulate in detail the “final cause only” reading, which is rendered possible by the introduction of celestial souls⸺whose causality, for Berti, blocks our seeing the prime mover as a true efficient cause. I argue by contrast: (1) Aristotle affirms celestial souls. (2) According to newly discovered texts, Alexander holds the prime mover to be an efficient cause. (3) Our scholarly difficulties result, in part, from an excessively narrow reading of what it means to be an efficient cause, for Aristotle. (4) I offer a rereading of Metaphysics Lambda, and I explain why Averroes, following Alexander, was correct in seeing the prime mover as a sort of efficient cause of the intellect of the celestial soul. The result is an altogether more satisfying and sophisticated defense of an “efficient cause reading” than has heretofore been offered.
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