Page - 166 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

assumption fits very well into the wider context of Aristotle’s general the- ory, in which teleology plays a crucial role. Changes occur for the sake of certain goals or ends. The development of an animal for example aims at the animal’s becoming a full member of a certain kind. In order to fully understand why a change occurs and what its nature is, one has to know what its end is. For Aristotle therefore the end of changes have explanatory priority, and it is in this sense that locomotion’s posteriority should rather be seen as an expression of its importance and priority in essence than the contrary. In order to understand how exactly Aristotle’s argument works and whether it is successful in showing what it needs to show I will present a detailed analysis of it. I will proceed as follows: To begin with, I will show that Aristotle’s first premise, namely that what is posterior in coming to be is prior in essence, is correct. In order to do so, I will examine what it means to be prior in essence and argue that for x to be prior in this way it must ful- fil its essence to a higher degree than the thing it is compared to (7.1.2). Since the term ‘locomotion’ seems to be used in this argument in a special sense, my second step will be to analyse what it stands for in this context and show that it refers to the subject’s capacity to be the source of its change in place (7.1.3). I will then show that the argument’s second premise, i.e. the claim that locomotion is last in the generation of living things, is cor- rect. In order to do so it will be necessary to deal with certain aspects of Aristotle’s theory of the soul (7.1.4). Against this background I will argue that to say that attributes or features of something x are prior in essence means that they are more specific to what x is (7.1.5) I will conclude by evaluating to what extent the argument shows that locomotion is prior in essence. I will argue that it shows locomotion’s priority in essence in living things, but that it is only in connection with the second sub-argument that locomotion’s general priority in essence is established (7.1.6). 7.1.2 The reversed priority claim In my view, sentence (1) in the quote above means the following: the pro- cess of coming to be of living things is goal-directed and aims at reaching a certain endpoint, completion, at which this living thing has fully become such and such a thing. An infant, for instance, right after its birth can neither walk, nor nourish itself, but it will be able to do so after having reached maturity. That this is what Aristotle has in mind becomes clear when he states in sentence (1) that a being that is in the process of coming commentary on the argument for locomotion’s temporal priority, that he has a “propensity for philosophical overkill”. 166 Locomotion is prior in essence ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen