1. Elements of the doctrine of the cosmic Soul in the doctrine of the Mind.
If we recall what has been said above about the general Platonic triad, and about the necessity of considering Aristotle also from the point of view of this triad (since he is also a Platonist), then after the problem of the One and the Mind, we should now have to speak of the cosmic Soul in Aristotle. As for the cosmos, for Plato and Aristotle it is only the eternal realization of the One, the Mind and the Soul. It is self-evident that in Aristotle the cosmos also turns out to be the best and most beautiful work of art and the embodiment of the most divine beauty. However, Aristotle still has some differences from Plato, which must be mentioned at once.
The fact is that if we avoid individual hints, then Aristotle's doctrine of the cosmic Soul can be said to be absent. On the other hand, however, his Mind is endowed with all those properties which the pure Platonists attributed specifically to the Soul. Aristotle's mind is not only cosmic and supracosmic thinking, not only cosmic and supracosmic speculation, not only self-sufficient contemplation and "thinking thinking." It is no less treated as the "first mover" (to proton cinoyn).
Aristotle writes dozens, if not hundreds, of passages about this. The Cosmic Mind as the prime mover is Aristotle's favorite idea; if he reproaches Plato and the "supporters of ideas" in general, it is only that their kingdom of ideas is too immovable and too isolated from the cosmos and from all the movements that take place in the cosmos. Theoretically, such reproaches of Aristotle are completely impotent and helpless, being based only on those passages in Plato's works where the dialectics of ideas is given in an independent form and where the question of the influence of ideas on the world and of ideas as a principle of motion is not raised. In fact, Plato, as we have often seen above, regards his ideas precisely as the principle of motion, precisely as generative models. Therefore, Aristotle's objections to Plato, correct in themselves, apply only to various doctrines about the isolated existence of ideas, about their complete inactivity, deadness and abstraction, that is, they do not apply to Plato at all. On the other hand, Aristotle himself is by no means guilty of an isolated understanding of the cosmic Mind, and he never tires of saying that this Mind, being itself immobile, moves absolutely everything that exists. In Aristotle, he is the prime mover; and in this thinker he is endowed, in addition to purely mental functions, also with those functions of the Platonic Soul, which in Plato himself was put forward precisely as the principle of universal motion. Thus, the concept of the cosmic Soul is not at all absent in Aristotle, but all its essential functions are transferred to the Mind. And that is why Aristotle has so many arguments about the Mind as the prime mover, and that is why Aristotle's ontological aesthetics, which has its culmination in cosmology, is also full of these arguments about the prime mover, without which the cosmos would not have become for him the most perfect work of art, as it is interpreted by Plato.
2. The basic transcendental argument concerning the prime mover.
Among the many very heterogeneous proofs of the identity of the mind with the prime mover, the first place is undoubtedly occupied by what we have more than once called the transcendental theory in relation to Plato and Aristotle himself. The meaning of this theory is very simple: if there is something less, it means that there is something more; if something exists in particular, it means that it exists somewhere and somehow in general; if there are parts of an object, it means that the object also exists as a whole; And if an object either exists or does not exist, being either weak, or only potential, or only dependent on other objects, then this means that there is also an object that is infinite both in its indestructible integrity, and in its strength and power, and in its energy, and in its independence from any objects, and in its eternal ability to set everything that exists in motion. that is, according to its eternal energy. Strictly speaking, with slight variations, Aristotle gives only this general proof of the eternal energy of the cosmic Mind. The details of this doctrine are no longer particularly important for the history of ancient aesthetics.
The most important argument here is to be found in Aristotle, as in Plato (IAE, Vol. II, p. X 898d - 899 c), in the condemnation of the method of bad infinity, when we explain one motion by another, another by a third, a third by a fourth, etc. Since no end can be found in such an explanation for the explanation of this motion, it is simply meaningless. We will get a true explanation of motion only when we ascertain something that no longer needs anything else for its explanation, and when it moves by itself:
"If it is necessary that everything that moves should be set in motion by something, or by that which is set in motion by another, or by that which is not moved; and if that which is moved by another must necessarily be the first mover, which is not moved by another, and if it is the first, then there is no need for the other (for it is impossible that the mover and moved by another should continue to infinity, since there is no first for the infinite), if, therefore, everything that moves is set in motion by something, and the first mover is not moved by another, then it must move from itself" (Phys. VIII 5, 256a, 13-21).
"There is a fixed prime mover, since the movable, namely something moved, either stands immediately before the first immovable one, or before the moving one, but bringing itself into a state of motion and rest, in both cases it follows that the primary mover is in all cases of motion motion" (258b4-9).
"Since everything that moves must necessarily be set in motion by something, namely, if there is a movement, then by another moving, and that by another, and so on, it is necessary to recognize the existence of the first mover and not to go to infinity" (VII 1, 242a16-21).
3. Different shades of the main argument and especially the physical-teleological argument.