Western philosophy: from antiquity to the middle ages by James N. Jordan

Introduction

The key issue is the contamination of cosmology and biblical Greek, the passage from antiquity to the Middle Ages brings the clash between two cultures have always been present in the Mediterranean, first affirmed by the Latin culture to the eastern end of Western (with the expansion of 'Roman Empire), the other an important element in place of the crisis in the civil structure, social and cultural empire Roman, Judeo-Christian element (Zettel 84).

Discussion

Christianity is considered the most disturbing element of antiquity from which identifies the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages (Rabel 23).

The concept of the world according to Aristotle

The relationship that exists between the six days of creation and the tradition of Hexaemeron (which is the nature of medieval literature which comments on the creation of the world as we said in the Bible)

Comparisons between the creation of Jewish-Christian and Platonic cosmology (two concepts which have some points in common)

The concept of Aristotle's world was a closed world to the concept beyond which there was a vacuum, not empty space but with no essence, no, no. The world is not created. One of the hallmarks of ancient conceptions is the lack of the concept of creation in the Judeo-Christian sense. Even in the case of the Platonic notion, that the world was done in stages, from the creator has worked on in stages, to produce the world, the demiurge and the same deity that suggests what to do, are entities that act on something that already exists: the clay of the potter or the brute matter of ancient cosmology (Jordan 23). Aristotle says that the world has always existed a well-ordered, no one has created from nothing, not even a pre-existing unformed matter, atomism then sees the creation of the world from nothing but the aggregation of atoms.

Judaism is the first to conceive this act of creating a precedent by which to be nothing exists apart from the deity, God puts in the world with an instantaneous act without resorting to anything it precedes. The concept is that following the Aristotelian Ptolemaic: Ptolemy added to the heaven of fixed stars, the first mobile. The reason was the fact that the planets moving in the inverse movement of the stars meant that the universe was subject to two simultaneous movements (east to west for the diurnal and from west to east movement of precession of equinoxes and especially of the planets). The first piece of furniture according to Ptolemy justified the diurnal motion (east-west) of all the spheres, while the sphere of fixed stars sdoppiava making the movement of the planets moving in reverse. The first mobile and eighth heaven (heaven of the fixed stars) in Ptolemy have a purely technical to justify a move that would be assigned simultaneously to the heaven of fixed stars (Jordan 28). Christianity adds to the world of Ptolemy the empyrean and enter the world no longer in a vacuum ...