Skip to content
Unitive Knowledge Society
Search

Accents are optional; quotes find an exact phrase.

Unmoved mover

Aristotle’s first cause: eternal, unchanging thought that moves the cosmos as an object of love.

Also: prime mover

Greek philosophy and Neoplatonism

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that the eternal motion of the heavens requires a first mover that is itself unmoved: pure actuality, thought thinking itself, which moves all things not by pushing but as the object of their desire. Medieval philosophers identified it with God.