Colloquium 2: Only in a Good Cosmos: The Prime Mover as Cause of Cosmic Order

In this paper, I offer a new account of how the Prime Mover explains the good order of the sublunary world: the Prime Mover explains why sublunary things are as good as they are by nature, and in particular why sublunary things have the natural capacity to act in ways that constitute imitations of the Prime Mover. I develop this proposal on the basis of the household analogy Aristotle offers in Λ 10, and argue that we find supporting evidence for it in De Anima II 4, Generation and Corruption II 10 and Generation of Animals I , where Aristotle uses the divine to explain certain (good) aspects of the natures of sublunary things in just the way my reading of the household analogy leads us to expect.