Aristotle The Prime Mover Analysis

It goes without saying, νοῦς is an inherently difficult subject to discuss, more so when we are contemplating the notion of divine thought and perfection. In the above excerpt from Book 12, we are presented with the problems of divine thought along with the rational solutions. Aristotle is absolutely determined that the Prime Mover is the very being of νοῦς, and with this in mind he systematically dismantles the counterarguments, but in doing so he seems to encounter a new problem. The more Aristotle denies human-like common characteristics of intellect—from the “sleeping” intellect of autonomous action, to the intellection of knowledge, the epistemological appreciation of the act of understanding rather than the understood thing itself, or …show more content…
Thus, since God-thought is evidence of perfection, since it is the most noble thing, the thinking and the νοητόν of the Prime Mover (which is the Prime Mover) are necessarily both beyond the best human thought and, of course, beyond humanistic base thinking. One might ask Aristotle, why can’t the Prime Mover choose to have base thoughts or to think on nonsense— to quote Lewis Carroll, why can’t the Prime Mover think of six impossible things before breakfast? Of course, one must remember that the nature of divine thought, in order to be divine, does not choose to think less than perfection, and recalling Aristotle’s earlier arguments on change, we know that change is eternal, so there is no reasonable way to describe a first change that was itself not produced from