Talk:On the Universe

Form of the English title

Thank you, AlexanderVanLoon, for your attention to this article!

I myself favor reference by Latin titles in many of these cases. However, at present, anyway, there is a Wikipedia-wide uniformity in using the titles as given in the Revised Oxford Translation for the works of Aristotle, and I wonder, for such a relatively obscure work, whether such a widely-used omnibus work ought not to carry more weight. Anyway, Google Books finds 38,000 hits for Aristotle "de mundo" but 725,000 hits for Aristotle "on the universe", so (recognizing that these numbers conceal various messy realities) I don't think this is very close to a clear-cut case even if we were to consider one work's common title in isolation from the others. Wareh (talk) 19:41, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your correction and explanation. What still isn't clear to me is why some works like Liber de Causis, De Proprietatibus Elementorum and Secret of Secrets don't appear in the Complete Works of Aristotle, either volume 1 or volume 2? I guess because they were written by a Pseudo-Aristotle, but so are some of the works which are included in the Complete Works. I'd like to know if these three also have conventional English names so I can correct these articles too. AlexanderVanLoon (talk) 14:18, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

These are works outside the Corpus Aristotelicum, i.e. while they may have been ascribed to Aristotle, they were not part of the group of Greek writings attributed to Aristotle that were passed down together in Byzantine manuscript transmission. More pragmatically, that corpus is defined by the judgment of modern editors who discerned a coherent corpus, especially Bekker's great edition. Since they're not in the Aristotelian corpus presented by Oxford/Revised Oxford, etc., I wouldn't worry about any more general principles of consistency. Instead we should just follow WP:COMMONNAME on a case-by-case basis, i.e., determine how each is most frequently referred to in English-language reliable sources. I wouldn't assume there's any reason to suppose they're not already correctly titled. For example, I'm pretty confident that Liber de Causis is the standard form of reference and should remain the article title. Wareh (talk) 18:17, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

"fier"

"occurs the substance which is made up of small particles and is fier, being kindled by..."
Is this a typo? 've changed it to "fire" for the time being.--Adûnâi (talk) 21:10, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Pseudo-Aristotle?

How do we not it is not Aristotle, but a pseudonym? The article doesn't mention that. CielProfond (talk) 21:15, 22 September 2017 (UTC)