Page - 142 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

three kinds of change is necessarily accompanied by a change in place, but not vice versa. The third argument makes use of the fact that all changes in the cosmos depend on the eternal change that is directly caused by the first unmoved mover, and thereby establishes that the other kinds of change depend on locomotion insofar as they depend on the first eternal motion. That is to say, the third argument has presented another reason for saying that an asymmetric relation of ontological dependence holds between loco- motion and the other kinds of change, and hence for saying that locomo- tion must be the primary kind of change. This argument in particular made it possible to see that it is the special characteristics of change in place, namely the fact that it can be one, continuous and eternal, that is essentially connected with the fact that the change that has its primary source in the first unmoved mover must be locomotion. 5.5 Conclusion What has this chapter shown? First of all we have seen that as Aristotle states explicitly the third argument, too, is supposed to make clear that locomotion has ontological priority over the other kinds of change, in other words that there can be locomotion without any of the other kinds of change, while the converse does not hold. The argument starts from the assumption of the eternal existence of change. Against the background of the discussion of Phys. VIII, it has become clear that change needs to be eternal in virtue of their being one continuous and eternal change and not, as one might have thought, by there being a succession of different changes: Aristotle, in referring to the eternal change, clearly means the one and continuous change of which the first unmoved mover is the primary cause and which rules out the second way in which the existence of eternal change can be explained. In order for this to be clear, it was necessary to understand in what way a change may be said to be one, continuous and thus eternal in the necessary sense. The outcome was that only changes that are one with respect to their time, their subject, and also to the genus and species of the change are one without qualification and continuous. In the penultimate step I showed why neither change in quality, nor in quantity, nor in substance can form one continu- ous and eternal change, and that this is only possible for locomotion, or more precisely, circular locomotion. The final conclusion then is that change in place is ontologically prior to all of the other kinds of change insofar as the primary change of which the first unmoved mover is the direct source and on which all other occur- rences of any change ultimately depend can only be a locomotion. Since this 142 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