Page - 85 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

objection such a change occurs is due to the fact that a human being is per- forming locomotion and not that a change in place is occurring. But our analysis of the objection has made it clear that the claim about locomotion not involving any change with respect to the inner spatial rela- tion of its subject’s part does not imply that in the course of locomotion the subject’s parts do not change for whatever reason with respect to their inner spatial order; the claim is that change in place per se, as we have seen, does not necessarily entail that such a change of the inner spatial order of the subject’s parts must occur, while this is the case for every occurrence of growth, and, as we will see later on, of each of the other kinds of change as well. Contrary to what one might have thought, therefore, the example of a man walking does not show that I am mistaken in my understanding of locomotion as a change in which strictly speaking the relation between the subject’s inner parts change in no way, an understanding that I think underlies Aristotle’s discussion of locomotion and growth in GC I 5 and Phys. VIII 7. Confronting the change in place that occurs when something grows or diminishes with the locomotion of the revolving sphere thus helped us to spell out one of the features that make locomotion in the full sense so unique among the different kinds of change, namely that the inner structure of what undergoes locomotion as a whole is left completely untouched by locomotion. This insight is far from being trivial. For among other things it is because of this special character that locomotion is the only kind of change eternal things can undergo, which, as we will see later on, is another reason for its primacy, as the fifth argument for the priority of locomotion shows.29 4.2.5 Compatibility with the irreducibility of the kinds of change As I have shown, Aristotle correctly claims that what changes in size in a sense also changes with respect to place. Yet, as pointed out at the begin- ning of this chapter, it is often assumed that the second argument does not present Aristotle’s point of view, but rather that of his predecessors, espe- cially of certain Presocratic thinkers. Those who make this claim, however, mostly base their hypothesis exclusively on what is said in the first and sec- ond sub-arguments and either ignore what is stated in the part on growth and diminution, or, at least in one case, assert that this is a more or less superfluous addition that does not really fit into the supposedly Presocratic context.30 29 For this see section 7.2. 30 For the latter see Zekl (1988), 289, n.114, who claims that the part dealing with growth What changes in quantity changes with respect to place 85 ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen