Page - 59 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

aimed at showing the primacy of locomotion is to compare locomotion to the other kinds of change in different respects, and here it seems that Aris- totle, as we have seen, is focusing for some reason on the role locomotion plays in living things insofar as they may be the source of certain changes. This also explains why the substantial change of generation—in contrast to the following four arguments—is not compared to locomotion here, although it certainly will be necessary to make clear that change in place is also prior to generation if the thesis that locomotion has priority over all other kinds of change is to hold.55 But since a living being cannot be responsible for its own coming to be, generation is simply irrelevant to showing that locomotion is presupposed by any change of which the animal may be the source. What Wagner in his criticism therefore takes to be a weakness of the argument, namely its focusing on processes of growth and diminution in living beings, indeed seems to be necessary in order to show what Aristotle wants to show here.56 Aristotle has to focus on the special kinds of change in magnitude, since, as I will now show, it is unclear or might even seem wrong that locomotion is also prior with respect to these special cases of change. In what follows I will therefore present different reasons that may have compelled Aristotle to focus on quantitative change in living organisms in this first argument. First of all it is important to see that the very fact that living beings by having a nature and a soul are responsible for their growth and alteration seems in a certain sense to create a problem for the claim that locomotion is primary, a problem that Aristotle has to face. For, one might think that growth and alteration in living things for this reason can occur indepen- dently of locomotion—after all, their nature and soul are sources of this liv- ing thing’s own changes, and hence of their growth and alteration. Yet, it might then turn out that growth or alteration in such living beings is prior, or at least not posterior to locomotion, which would both contradict the priority claim as it is stated by Aristotle. If this really were the case, one could rightly object that locomotion against this background surely appears to be a bad candidate for the primary kind of change. I will now show that this possible objection first of all may seem to arise in particular with respect to plants or other non-locomotive animals and that this might make 55 Accordingly Wagner (1967), 688, is mistaken when he claims that it is clear for Aristo- tle that change in substance cannot be the primary kind of change since this process does not occur in the supra-lunar sphere. For this does not fit with the fact that Aristotle (as Wagner, 690, is well aware of!) in the fourth argument argues against the claim that generation is pri- mary and also shows in the second argument that locomotion has priority over generation and corruption. 56 See Wagner (1967), 688. The reason for the restriction of the argument’s scope 59 ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen