Aristotle by Jonathan Barnes

Author:Jonathan Barnes [Barnes, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 0192854089
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2001-10-11T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Change

Can we say anything more, in general terms, about those middle-sized material objects which are the chief substances in Aristotle’s world? One of their most important features is that they change. Unlike Plato’s Forms, which exist eternally and are always the same, Aristotle’s substances are for the most part temporary items which undergo a variety of alterations. There are, in Aristotle’s view, four types of change: a thing can change in respect of substance, of quality, of quantity, and of place. Change in respect of substance is coming-into-being and going-out-of-existence, or generation and destruction; such changes occurs when a cat is born and when it dies, when a statue is made and when it is smashed. Change in respect of quality is called alteration: a plant alters when it grows green in the sunlight or pale in the dark; a wax candle alters when it grows soft in the heat or hardens in the cold. Change in respect of quantity is growth and diminution; and natural objects typically begin by growing and end by diminishing. Finally, change in respect of place is motion. Most of the Physics is devoted to a study of change in its different forms. For the Physics studies the philosophical background to natural science; and ‘nature is a principle of motion and change’, so that ‘things have a nature if they possess such a principle’. That is to say, the very subject-matter of natural science consists of moving and changing things.

Aristotle’s predecessors had been puzzled by the phenomena of change: Heraclitus had thought that change was perpetual and essential to the real world; Parmenides had denied the very possibility of coming-into-being, and hence of any sort of change; Plato had argued that the ordinary changing world could not be a subject of scientific knowledge. In the first books of the Physics Aristotle argues that every change involves three things. There is the state from which the change proceeds, the state to which the change proceeds, and the object which persists through the change. In Book V the account is embellished slightly: ‘there is something which initiates the change, and something which is changing, and again something in which the change takes place (the time); and apart from these, something from which and something to which. For all change is from something to something; for the thing changing is different from that to which it is changing and from that from which – for example, the log, the hot, the cold’. When a log becomes hot in the grate, it changes from a state of coldness; it changes to a state of hotness; the log itself persists through the change; the change takes some time; and there was something – perhaps my lighting the match – which initiated the change.

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