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Aristotle postulated that an actual infinity was impossible, because if it were possible, then something would have attained infinite magnitude, and would be "bigger than the heavens." However, he said, mathematics relating to infinity was not deprived of its applicability by this impossibility, because mathematicians did not need the infinite ...
Bahasa Indonesia; Íslenska; Italiano ... Infinity is something which ... underlay all of early Greek philosophy and that Aristotle's "potential infinity" is an ...
Aristotle, alive for the period 384–322 BCE, is credited with being the root of a field of thought, in his influence of succeeding thinking for a period spanning more than one subsequent millennium, by his rejection of the idea of actual infinity.
Aristotle [A] (Attic Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, romanized: Aristotélēs; [B] 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, and the arts.
Aristotle here says the only type of infinity that exists is the potentially infinite. Aristotle characterizes this as that which serves as "the matter for the completion of a magnitude and is potentially (but not actually) the completed whole" (207a22-23).
Initially, Aristotle's interpretation, suggesting a potential rather than actual infinity, was widely accepted. [1] However, modern solutions leveraging the mathematical framework of calculus have provided a different perspective, highlighting Zeno's significant early insight into the complexities of infinity and continuous motion. [ 1 ]
Temporal finitism is the doctrine that time is finite in the past. [clarification needed] The philosophy of Aristotle, expressed in such works as his Physics, held that although space was finite, with only void existing beyond the outermost sphere of the heavens, time was infinite.
Aristotle criticized Anaxagoras' theory on multiple grounds, among them the following: [1] [3] Animals and plants cannot be infinitely small according to Aristotle; thus the relatively homogeneous substances of which they are composed (e.g., bone and flesh in animals, or wood in plants) could not be infinitely small, either, but must have a ...