Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverheim Trust. Online at

www. History of Philosophy. Net. Today's episode, for a limited time only,

John Philoponus.

Modern day scientists estimate that the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years. That's a very long time.

You could watch every movie Buster Keaton made, even the talkies, and still be left with about 13.6, 999, billion years to kill.

In fact, given 13.7 billion years, I could probably just about finish

this series of podcasts on the history of philosophy, well if I pick up the pace a bit.

And yet, as staggeringly large as this amount of time may be, it is as nothing compared to the

age of the universe according to Aristotle. You could double it, triple it, or for that matter

multiply it by 1 billion and get no closer. For Aristotle the universe has

already existed for an infinitely long time and will never stop

existing. Moreover, the universe has always been pretty much the way it is now.

It has always been spherical with an outer sphere of fixed stars at the edge, containing

more nested spheres with planets seated upon them, and at the center the region of air,

earth, fire, and water inhabited by humans, plants, and animals, all of which are likewise eternal in species.

Aristotle's commitment to an eternal universe was so emphatic that no ancient

philosopher seriously questioned it. Convenient doubts about Aristotle's

confidence would be raised only later by medieval thinkers like Mymonides and Thomas Aquinas.

So for ancient thinkers, the question was rather, what about Plato?

Some middle-platinists, notably Plutarch and Atticus, read Plato's dialogue

Timaeus as endorsing a beginning in time for the universe, and were happy to say that on this

point Plato was right and Aristotle wrong.

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