ABSTRACT
As Aristotle sees things, we do not need to seek out puzzles. They are, as he says, right in front of us. If we look into the night sky, we readily wonder whether the universe is infinite in space or somehow bounded. Questions about spatial limits readily give way to questions about time and order. Does the universe have a beginning in time, perhaps because it is the handiwork of a surpassingly great being whose intentional actions and purposes explain its order and regularity? Or do the regularities of nature owe simply to brute laws, without there being any further explanation of their necessity? Or, then again, are we already mistaken in presuming that there are regularities in nature? Perhaps the
laws we take ourselves to perceive as given by nature are in fact imposed by us, in a desperate attempt to find meaning and regularity in a world of undifferentiated and purposeless disarray.
