Page - 36 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

Yet, Aristotle does not really make clear what his motivation is for asking these three questions, one of which concerns the primary kind of change. This probably is also the reason why none of the commentators, with one exception, seems to be able to give an appropriate answer to the question about Aristotle’s motivation.79 As I will show, one can only understand the importance of all three of these questions by looking at them in conjunc- tion. I will argue now that the treatment of these questions, taken as a whole, provides essential support for the theory that was developed in VIII 1–6, insofar as it shows the truth of an assumption on which this theory is essentially based, namely that there is a change that is eternal and one and that in other respects is an appropriate candidate for the eternal change whose direct source is the first unmoved mover, although it is far from obvious that this is the case. First of all, it might seem puzzling, or even absurd, that Aristotle raises question (1), i.e. asks whether there can be a change that is continuous. Since as Aristotle shows in Phys. VI every change is continuous, and in fact it is this essential feature of the phenomenon of change which enables him to rebut Zeno’s paradoxes and to establish that change is a proper object of scientific inquiry. But why then should we deal with this question at all? The answer is that the term ‘continuous’ here, as in other places, clearly is not used in the sense defined in Phys. V 3 and VI 1. As I will show later on in my discussion of the third argument, being continuous here rather stands for being eternal.80 The first question, accordingly, asks whether there is a change that can be eternal. 79 Themistius, In Phys. 8, 225, 11–16, Philoponus, In Phys. 8, 895, 4–5, and Simplicius, In Phys. 8, 1264, 23–27, seem to think that Aristotle raises these questions in order to show again what was shown before, namely that what is directly changed by the first unmoved mover needs to undergo change eternally. In other words Aristotle makes “these matters” clearer by showing parts of what he has already demonstrated in Phys. VIII 6 once again, but by means of another argument; this would imply that the section started by these introductory remarks is more or less superfluous. Ross (1936), 92 and 709, on the one hand, correctly points out that the treatment of the first two questions is crucial insofar as they answer a previous objec- tion. As to the question which is the primary kind of change and the answer arrived at, Ross, on the other hand, points out that, as it is “of small general interest”, no further discussion is needed (92–93), while in his commentary he at least admits that it may be important insofar as it tells us “what is the nature of the movement imparted by the first mover” (709); yet, he does not say what role this may play in the argument of Phys. VIII. Wagner (1967) and Gra- ham (1999) in their commentaries do not say anything about the question why Aristotle is interested in what the primary kind of change is and which role the examination of this ques- tion plays or might play in Phys. VIII. As I shall show, only Aquinas offers a possible explana- tion for Aristotle’s treatment of the three questions, see p.39, n.88. 80 For this see section 5.2. 36 The importance of the primary kind of change ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen