Page - 196 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

coming to be sometimes entails alteration of the matter and that it, in this way, may be a constitutive part of the process of coming to be without which the process would not take place. I will not examine whether this is true for all cases of coming to be. The reason presented for this assertion is that something, for instance the matter (ὕλη), of that which is coming to be undergoes an alteration. Suppose a statue is being cast of a lump of bronze. In the process, the bronze is heated so that it can be poured into the mould. That is, the bronze is subject to an alteration, as it changes from being cold to being hot. At the same time the bronze, by becoming warmer, expands or, as Aristotle puts it in this context, is rarefied. Thus, the making of a statue from a lump of bronze necessarily involves alteration, for without melting the bronze, the statue could not be cast. But is this also true of living beings? After all a bronze statue is a product of art, an artefact, and the coming to be of such things might differ signifi- cantly from that of living things. The science of nature, to which the treat- ment of change in Physics VIII belongs, deals, however, with things that are significantly different from artefacts, namely with things that have a nature, i.e. their own source of change—and hence of their own development and growth—within themselves.64 Yet, Aristotle obviously thinks that the com- ing to be of artefacts, e.g. of a house or a statue, is analogous to that of liv- ing things like human beings, at least insofar as in both cases the matter of which they are composed undergoes an alteration in their coming to be.65 But in what way might one say that an alteration occurs in the coming to be of, say, a man? Aristotle does not explain this, probably thinking it to be obvious. An explanation may be found in his understanding of the develop- ment of living things and of the processes that according to his biological works are involved in this development. One of these processes, and the one on which I will focus here, is concoction (πέψις). Concoction plays an essential role in living things in general and in their coming to be in parti- cular. For instance, it is necessary for the digestion of food, the production of blood and semen, and for the process in which the ovum, after its fecun- dation, develops into a full-grown living thing.66 Concoction in general is described as a process that operates by heat.67 According to Aristotle, through the heat of concoction, the matter of that 64 See Phys. II 1, 192b13–15. 65 See for instance Phys. VII 3, 246a4–9, in which, besides the coming to be of a human being, also that of a house is mentioned. 66 For digestion of food involving concoction, see for instance PA II 3, 650a2–7; for the claim that blood is developed through concoction e.g. HA III 19, 521a17–18, and for the one that semen comes to be by concoction e.g. GA I 12, 719b2, or IV 1, 765b10–11. For the last point see what follows and n.68 of this section. 67 See, for instance, Mete. IV 2, 379b12, and GA IV 1, 765b15–16. 196 Locomotion is prior in essence ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen