Page - 120 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

ciple of Aristotle’s theory of change, that a change that is explicitly charac- terised as continuous in our passage is contrasted with another that suppo- sedly is not, while at the same time both changes by means of the adverbial form of συνεχές are said to exist continuously (συνεχῶς).14 For a change that would be eternal in virtue of being composed of some other changes differs from the first one precisely in its not being continuous, and this seems to be the reason for preferring option (1) to option (2). In order to make sense of the argument as a whole one certainly needs to understand what exactly Aristotle means by these statements and in what way he is cor- rect in making them. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that Aristotle here (but also in other places15) in addition to the two uses of the term ‘change’ already men- tioned, i.e. as a mass term and a count noun, also implicitly presupposes two different notions of the word ‘change’ (κίνησις), namely a wider and a narrower notion, when it is used in the sense of a count noun. One needs to be aware of this difference in order to make sense of the third argument, because it is due to the fact that these two notions seem to be applied here that it is at all possible to confront the case of a continuous change with what seems to be a non-continuous one. The two notions of ‘change’ are these: on the one hand, the term ‘change’ may refer to a change that is con- tinuous, i.e. whose (potential) parts form one whole change in virtue of their limits being one and the same. This kind of change is a change in the strict sense of the word, since usually for Aristotle every change must be continuous—in fact it is this very feature which allows Aristotle to reject Zeno’s paradoxes in Phys. VI and thereby to make it possible to treat change as a phenomenon that is accessible to scientific inquiry. On the other hand, there is a notion of change that is of a wider scope and which seems to encompass phenomena that we would also call ‘change’ in our everyday language, but that according to the strict understanding presented above would not count as one continuous change. The second way in which change (in the sense of the mass term) may be said to be eter- nal, i.e. by there being an eternal change that is composed of a number of individual succeeding changes so to speak, is an example of Aristotle’s use of the wider notion of change. In contrast to the strict sense, such a change are they supposed to touch? An explanation of this necessarily will need to refer to the differ- ent factors that determine a change, i.e. the subject, the realm (e.g. place or quality), and the time with respect to which the change occurs. 14 Therefore, Graham (1999), 125, is right when he notes that the use of συνεχῶς, at least at first glance, “as a modifier for cosmic motion is potentially misleading” because Aristotle “does not intend this qualification by itself to entail continuous motion” contrary to what one might think. 15 See for instance also Phys. V 4 (see p.121, n.17). 120 All changes depend on the first locomotion, but not vice versa ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen