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Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 6:07 pm
I found an article online about sublunar and supralunar physics. What does it say? Right where I left off: “The excerpt clearly points to different domains of physical investigation. The first subject relates to physis (nature), or the multitude of realities that contain within themselves the origin of their changes. Physis belongs to the sublunar world. This world extends from Earth to the region just beneath the Moon and consists of four elements: earth (a body that is cold and dry), fire (hot and dry), air (hot and moist), and water (cold and moist). Each element is defined by possessing two of the four primary qualities or properties — being moist, dry, cold, or hot — but only four combinations of these are possible. Furthermore, each element has its own natural motion and natural place. Fire moves upward and finds its place at the upper limit of the cosmos. Earth naturally occupies the lowest position and strives toward the center of the Universe. The place of air and water is in between.
The elements transform into one another in a specific order (earth into water, water into air, air into fire), because if the elements did not interact with each other, each would remain in its own place, and motion would disappear from the sublunar world. Furthermore, every body, by virtue of being composed of elements, possesses natural rectilinear motion directed either upward, toward the periphery of the universe, or downward, toward the center occupied by the Earth. The physics of the sublunar world consists in studying mutual actions and experiences of action that cause qualitative changes, transitions into something else, and the formation of new bodies; these types of motion are always determined and directed by the realization of form. The treatise On Generation and Corruption, as well as the “chemistry” presented in the fourth book of Meteorologica, describes such interactions of elements. In this way, Aristotle explains regular or irregular phenomena — the Milky Way, comets, fiery apparitions, and everything that happens in the atmosphere, such as winds, lightning, and storms, as well as earthquakes caused by similar reasons. To provide a general explanation for the many phenomena observed in the world, Aristotle resorts to the concept of moist and dry “exhalations.”
Thus, a close connection is preserved between physis in the Pre-Socratic sense and physis of the sublunar world: nature is always that from which everything arises and into which everything returns; it is the arena of constant transformations of the elements. For Aristotle, physis does not exhaust all of Being,
The elements transform into one another in a specific order (earth into water, water into air, air into fire), because if the elements did not interact with each other, each would remain in its own place, and motion would disappear from the sublunar world. Furthermore, every body, by virtue of being composed of elements, possesses natural rectilinear motion directed either upward, toward the periphery of the universe, or downward, toward the center occupied by the Earth. The physics of the sublunar world consists in studying mutual actions and experiences of action that cause qualitative changes, transitions into something else, and the formation of new bodies; these types of motion are always determined and directed by the realization of form. The treatise On Generation and Corruption, as well as the “chemistry” presented in the fourth book of Meteorologica, describes such interactions of elements. In this way, Aristotle explains regular or irregular phenomena — the Milky Way, comets, fiery apparitions, and everything that happens in the atmosphere, such as winds, lightning, and storms, as well as earthquakes caused by similar reasons. To provide a general explanation for the many phenomena observed in the world, Aristotle resorts to the concept of moist and dry “exhalations.”
Thus, a close connection is preserved between physis in the Pre-Socratic sense and physis of the sublunar world: nature is always that from which everything arises and into which everything returns; it is the arena of constant transformations of the elements. For Aristotle, physis does not exhaust all of Being,