MOHAN MATTHEN AND R. J. HANKINSON ARISTOTLE'S UNIVERSE: ITS FORM AND MATTER* The Aristotelian universe was finite; ours is infinite. "['he Earth was at the centre of that older model; it has no special position now. Man, says Alexandre Koyr6 (1958, p. 1), has "lost his place in the world". The scientific revolution has brought forth "the destruction of the Cos- mos, the disappearance.., of the conception of the world as a finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole". It was perhaps inevitable, certainly understandable, that early cos- mology would tackle questions like these, about the relationship of humanity to God, and the place of humans in the ontological order of the universe. In the seventeenth century, the thought that if humans are not placed at the centre of the universe they can lay no claim to special status in the 'great chain of being' may have done something to delay the end of geocentrism. The proponents of heliocentrism were not innocent of this sort of concern either. As Koyr6 says: The displacement of the earth from the centrum of the world was not felt to be a demotion. Quite the contrary: it is with satisfaction that Nicholas of Cusa asserts its promotion to the rank of noble stars, and as for Giordano Bruno, it is with burning enthusiasm - that of a prisoner who sees the walls of his jail crumble - that he announces the bursting of spheres that separated us from the wide open spaces and inexhaustible treasures of the ever-changing, eternat and infinite universe. (Ibid., p. 43) It is hardly surprising that it has become a part of the iconology of modern science that early cosmology was more myth than science. It was Aristotle's universe that was transmuted into the hierarchy of beings that Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano found so confining. And so it is reasonable to ask: Did theocentric or antropomorphic conceptions play any role in Aristotle's thinking about the universe? The answer, unsurprisingly, is that they did: following in the tradition of Pythagoras and Plato, Aristotle does pay attention to the perfection of the celestial motions, to the animatedness and divinity of the stars, to the role of the divinity that resides beyond the celestial orbs. And in De Caelo II, he makes extensive use of degrees of perfection to explain some of the structural features of the universe. Nevertheless, there is a distinctly empirical train of thought in Aristotle's cosmology, and it is with this Synthese 96: 417---435, 1993. © 1993 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.