Page - 84 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

supposes that things would consist of atoms, an assumption that, as is pointed out for instance in GC I 2, leads to a number of serious problems, and is therefore untenable in Aristotle’s view.27 Thus, what seemed at first sight to be an answer to the objection does not help us to deal with the objection after all. What really solves the problem is clarifying the fact that the case of loco- motion presented in the objection, i.e. my walking from A to B, is a special case of locomotion, namely that of a certain kind of animal, more specifi- cally, a human being, and thus involves elements that do not belong to loco- motion as such. A man performing locomotion usually does so by moving his limbs (thereby changing the relation in which its parts stand to each other). Yet, this in no way implies that this is the case for locomotion in general. If one merely thinks about my change in place from A to B and ignores the fact that I undergo locomotion as a human being—a living organism with arms and legs and with blood that circulates through the body—and in this sense abstracts from what is accidental and hence irrele- vant to this change qua change in place, one can see that the change in the spatial order of the subject’s part does not belong to locomotion per se; sup- pose I could move in space by hovering over the ground. Suppose, further- more, in this way I could hover from place A to place B without moving in any other sense28 in one perfect rectilinear motion: as in the case of the pen, which we considered at the end of 4.2.3, in this case as well there is no reason to assume that any of my parts changes with respect to its inner-spa- tial order. The fact that this occurs when I walk from my office to the cafe- teria is due to the specific way in which I as a human being move; but, again, locomotion per se does not entail any such change of the parts and it does not follow from the mere fact that something x moves from A to B that x’s inner parts change their spatial order. But another example suffices to show that the change of the inner spatial order of my parts when I walk has its reason in my specific way of performing locomotion and not in the nat- ure of change in place as such. Suppose I would like to go out for a run, but since it is cold and raining outside I decide to exercise on the treadmill in my apartment. Thus, in moving my limbs on the treadmill in the fashion in which human beings usually do in order to run or walk from place A to B, I change the inner spatial order of my parts without ever leaving the place where I am performing this exercise. It is clear therefore that locomotion per se does not entail a change in the inner spatial order of its subject’s parts; the fact that in the aforementioned 27 For this discussion see GC I 2, 315b24–317a17. 28 Of course, in this example one also needs to ignore the fact while I am hovering over the ground, certain changes in the inner spatial order of my body’s parts nonetheless occur, e.g. my blood circulates and so on. 84 Locomotion necessarily accompanies each of the other kinds of change ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen