TWO TYPES OF CRITICISM IN THE PSEUDO-ARISTOTELIAN <i>DE MVNDO</i>

Abstract The short treatise De mundo , transmitted with the Aristotelian corpus, has attracted scholarly attention in recent years for its linguistic, rhetorical, historical and philosophical features. This article focusses on the dialectic dimension of De mundo , which has hitherto been underexplored and restricted to its anti-Stoic aspects. The article argues that De mundo engages also with other rival visions of philosophy and conceptions of the cosmos, in some cases explicitly, in others implicitly, but always tactfully, without naming names, and in strict avoidance of open polemic. After reviewing five instances of explicit criticism in De mundo , in Sections 1 and 2 of the article, and five instances of implicit criticism in Section 3, Section 4 points to a general pattern that can be discerned in the author’s lines of criticism. Additionally, Section 4 considers why the author proceeds in the way he does and what this tells us about the author and possible dates of composition of his work.