ABSTRACT
A chief motive of Aristotle in his account of space seems to have been a desire to avoid the view that space is a permanent extension independent of bodies and prior to them. No doubt he wanted to distance himself from Plato's model of space as the receptacle of forms, a role fulfilled in his own philosophy by matter. Nevertheless he started with the admission that a body's place is something distinct from it, and so can be neither its form nor its matter. For in movement a thing changes place, leaving its original place behind. He concluded, roughly speaking, that the place of the body is the inner surface of what contains it. But a body may move even if it does not leave what contains it, like water carried in a bucket. Movement, and so place, is therefore always relative to some container (not necessarily the immediate container) regarded as motionless. The water in the bucket moves because the bucket moves in the air. The notion of empty space as a possible container Aristotle rejected as absurd by a series of arguments vitiated, from the point of view of the New Philosophy, by their reliance on the supposed explanatory force of his own theory of natural motion and the proper places of the four elements within the lunar sphere.2
