Page - 82 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

answer to this objection. The first of these, namely the view that this objec- tion would not arise if one were clear about the exact subject of the locomo- tion presented in the example, will not, however, solve the problem. Yet, as I will show, the problem can be solved by means of the second strategy, which is to show that this objection is based on mistaken assumptions about what change in place per se is responsible for. The first way in which this objection might be faced would be to take a closer look at the change that is presented as one single change and that I undergo as a whole with respect to place in the example, i.e. my locomotion from the office to the cafeteria. For then it will become clear that this pro- cess of walking strictly speaking is not one single change, but may be ana- lysed into a number of different changes of which the whole process of walking consists. The movement of my left leg, for instance, strictly speak- ing is not part of the locomotion that I undergo as a whole. This becomes clear if we ask what the subject of each of the two changes is. The subject of my left leg’s movement is my left leg. We might say that my body under- goes a change when I move my left leg, yet only with respect to a part—just as in the previously cited example Aristotle provides in Phys. V 1, where the body is said to become healthy in virtue of the eye becoming so.25 The sub- ject of my locomotion from the office to the cafeteria, however, is my body as a whole. According to the distinctions developed in Phys. V 1 one should say that my body undergoes at least two changes in place at the same time: one as a whole and another with respect to one of its parts, namely the left leg. But to say that two changes, each undergone by a different subject, are one and the same is absurd, even if they happen at exactly the same time and one of the subjects is a part of the other. Indeed, Aristotle shows in Phys. V 4 that one of the criteria for a change’s unity is that the subject of the respective change be one and the same.26 Of course, it is true that there is a causal relation between my locomotion to the cafeteria and the contemporaneous movement of my leg, for without the latter I would not reach the cafeteria. But this fact does not make the moving of the leg a part of my body’s locomotion as a whole. Leaving the causal relation aside, whether I move my left leg (or any other part of my body) plays no role in understanding what it means for my body to change in place as a whole. Therefore, it seems the objection is no objection. Although what I’ve just said might appear to solve the problem at first glance, I will now show that it certainly cannot be considered as a way of successfully blocking the objection. The problem, as we have seen, was that with respect to the process of a man walking from place A to B the inner spatial order of what seems to be the proper subject of the locomotion from 25 See my discussion of this example from Phys. V 1, 224a23–26, on p.77. 26 See Phys. V 4, esp.l. 227b31–228a1, 228a21–22. 82 Locomotion necessarily accompanies each of the other kinds of change ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen