Talk:Aristotelian theory of gravity

This article should be expanded and moved to Aristotelian physics. Aristotle's theory of "gravity" was not treated separately from his theory of physics generally. The core concepts (as I remember, I may be a bit hazy) were 1)natural place, applied to terrestrial objects and caused things to move up and down based on their elemental composition and mass, 2)natural motion, which applied to the heavens and was constant circular motion about the center of the universe, and 3)violent motion, which caused an object to move in a straight line until the quantity of motion was depleted, at which point it stopped moving straight forward and fell straight down. Galileo was addressing all three of these things in his reformulation of the laws of motion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ragesoss (talk • contribs)

Also, one should consider Apostle's reading of Aristotle, which holds that Aristotle was indeed correct about his view on gravity, and rather the Thomistic philosophy misunderstood, because of bad translation.

Fall to center of earth?
Is there support for Aristotle using the term "center of the Earth"? This presents not only a spherical view of the Earth (which, yes, had already been suggested by others), but also would account for people being able to walk "upside-down" on the "other side" of the Earth - my reading suggests people had great difficulty with Antipodes, believing one would "fall off" in such nether-places --JimWae 20:37, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Aristotle's Physics (Book I, chapter 2, 193b:30) Aristotle Questions whether or not the Earth and cosmos are Spherical. For much the rest of the text Aristotle seems to operate on the idea that, at the very least, the cosmos are spherical. This probably extends to the earth as well (I've not yet finished it, so I'm not quiet sure, but most of the language in the translation I have only makes sense given the earth as a sphere.)--Stillwell (talk) 12:48, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Aristotle, like all the ancient greeks, knew that the Earth was round. He mentions well worn arguments for this--- namely that you can see further from a tower, or equivalently that you can see a tower from further away, or a ships mast before the ship. The dependence of the distance you can see on the height of the tower is $$D=\sqrt{hR}$$, the geometric mean of the height h of the tower and the radius R of the Earth, and a few measurements from towers allows you to estimate the radius of the Earth.Likebox (talk) 22:23, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

It does not follow directly from the Earth being spherical that objects would fall to its centre - that requires the presumption that things fall BECAUSE of some attraction to the Earth. One could believe the earth to be a sphere & still believe that one could fall off it --JimWae (talk) 23:33, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I see your point, but it was my impression that Aristotle thought that the Earth was round because it was agglomerated on the center of the universe in a uniform way, all the "Earth" element fell to the center and made a sphere. So he didn't think that the Earth attracted heavy objects, rather that the Earth was sitting right where all heavy objects would most like to be. This leads to the no-falling-off condition.Likebox (talk) 08:03, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

"Aristotelian Gravity" makes no sense
It seems to me that this article has a mistaken title and should be merged with other Aristotelian articles. There was no theory of gravity when Aristotle was alive, and hence there is not Aristotelian theory of gravity. This is not to say that Aristotle did not try to provide reasons why objects fell to the earth, rather, this is to say that his reasons had nothing to do with gravity defined as the force of attraction between all masses in the universe. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.245.232.197 (talk) 05:55, 14 December 2007 (UTC)