ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE more and more megalomaniac and Wnally proclaimed himself divine Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes led the opposition to the king’s demand, in 327, that Greeks should prostrate themselves before him in adoration He was falsely implicated in a plot, and executed The magnanimous and magniWcent man who is the hero of the earlier books of the NE has some of the grandiose traits of Alexander In the EE, however, the alleged virtues of magnanimity and magniWcence are downgraded, and gentleness and dignity take centre stage.7 Aristotle’s Cosmology The greater part of Aristotle’s surviving works deal not with productive or practical sciences, but with the theoretical sciences We have already considered his biological works: it is time to give some account of his physics and chemistry His contributions to these disciplines were much less impressive than his researches in the life sciences While his zoological writings were still found impressive by Darwin, his physics was superannuated by the sixth century ad In works such as On Generation and Corruption and On the Heavens Aristotle bequeathed to his successors a world-picture that included many features inherited from the Presocratics He took over the four elements of Empedocles, earth, water, air, and Wre, each characterized by the possession of a unique pair of the properties heat, cold, wetness, and dryness: earth being cold and dry, air being hot and wet, and so forth Each element had its natural place in an ordered cosmos, and each element had an innate tendency to move towards this natural place Thus, earthy solids naturally fell, while Wre, unless prevented, rose ever higher Each such motion was natural to its element; other motions were possible, but were ‘violent’ (We preserve a relic of Aristotle’s distinction when we contrast natural with violent death.) In his physical treatises Aristotle oVers explanations of an enormous number of natural phenomena in terms of the elements, their basic properties, and their natural motion The philosophical concepts which he employs in constructing these explanations include an array of diVerent notions of causation (material, formal, eYcient, and Wnal), and an analysis See my The Aristotelian Ethics, 233 87