Page - 65 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

vious to the locomotion, and one of these changes that obviously may occur prior to this act of locomotion, as we have seen, is growth. In this sense growth—but also all the other changes the living being undergoes in this state of ‘rest’—is prior to this locomotion. Moreover, one could even go a step further and say that, at least in certain cases, without these changes locomotion could not occur. For, as Morison has pointed out in his discus- sion of the passage from Phys. VIII 2 and 6, Aristotle thinks for instance that these changes are necessary in a sense for a sleeping animal to wake up and start to change place:71 the animal, after having ingested some food, digests the food while sleeping and distributes the nourishment to the respective parts of the body. Growth may occur, one might add, but after the distribution the animal wakes up and performs locomotion.72 If this is the case, then one indeed might raise the objection that this example clearly shows that locomotion in living beings certainly does not have primacy. As I have already said before, this would be a serious problem for Aristotle’s priority claim, as it then would not hold with respect to all changes that have their cause in sublunary sources of change, since animals, as the only proper self-movers and hence as the only proper sources of chains of change, are central to those changes. Aristotle, therefore, clearly needs to provide an appropriate answer to this objection. However, this answer, as I have shown, is presented in his first argument. There it is made clear that any growth, diminution, and alteration, when they occur in living things, necessarily presupposes some preceding locomotion; but, as I said before, this does not need to be the locomotion of that which grows, and it suffices for Aristotle to show that none of these other changes can occur without some change in place in order to show that locomotion is primary among the three kinds of non-substantial change. That this is Aristotle’s motivation for presenting this specific argument, is of course not clear at first glance from the passage in which the argument is stated, when viewed in isolation. Aristotle does not explicitly formulate there what I take to be the possible objection against the priority claim that he is thinking of. But a reader who has the discussion of the third eternity- objection and the solution that I have just outlined in mind, and who is now confronted with the claim about locomotion’s general priority indeed might wonder how this claim fits with the fact that the self-caused locomo- tion of an animal is preceded by, and according to the discussion might in some cases even be caused by, these other changes that occur in animals as self-sustaining organisms; after all, the solution to the third eternity-objec- tion in Phys. VIII 6 is given only two Bekker pages before the presentation 71 See Morison (2004), 69–70. 72 For this example see Phys. VIII 6, 259b11–13. The reason for the restriction of the argument’s scope 65 ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen