Reading Aristotle Physics VII.3: ‘What is Alteration?’
(Proceedings of the International ESAP-HYELE Conference).
Edited by Stefano Maso, Carlo Natali, & Gerhard Seel.
Pp. xvii, 152, Las Vegas, Zurich, Athens, Parmenides Publishing, 2012, $65.00.

This book presents the results of an international conference on Aristotle’s Physics, book VII, chapter 3 that  took  place  in  Vitznau,  Switzerland on April 12–15, 2007. It opens with a 13-page introduction by Robert Wardy of Cambridge. Next Aristotle’s text is given in Greek, in both the a and b versions, together with a new English translation by the six contributors, harmonized by Stefano Maso of Venice and Gerhard Seel of Bern. The core of the book consists in an in-depth analysis and line-by-line commentary on the six parts of the text by Benjamine Morison, Ursula Coope, István Bodnár, Cristiana Viano, Frans A. J. de Haas, and Carlo Natali. Finally in two appendices Gerhard Seel provides a clarification of the logical and semantic background to Aristotle’s argument and Oliver Primaversi offers a synopsis of the two versions of the Greek text.

A distinctive Aristotelian doctrine is that, though perception and knowledge may be occasioned, conditioned, or accompanied by physiological alterations or changes in the eye and the brain respectively, they themselves are not examples of alteration or change in their subjects, but rather represent the completion or fulfillment (perfection) of such subjects. You would hardly say that a subject has changed when it is actualizing or realizing more fully its nature; it is simply more fully itself. This view, though coherent with our natural or spontaneous ways of speaking, at the same time represents the confluence of two deeper Aristotelian doctrines: the first is a ‘naturalized Platonism’, whereby there are no transcendent ‘Forms’ that may be represented more or less well in nature, but there is a ‘sliding scale’ to most common nouns, including abstract terms like ‘Being’ and also terms for specific substances in the world whereby, when a thing passes from potentiality to actuality, it is more real, intense, or vibrant in its own kind or, in the words of Ursula Coope, it manifests more fully a nature it already has, so that there has been neither generation nor alteration in this process. The second is that there is a pervasive and apparent cosmological trajectory from chaos and movement towards form and rest, which encompasses (among others) the realms of physics, epistemology, and ethics. In this view distinctively, the concern for health in biology is naturally extended (and completed) by a pursuit of knowledge in epistemology and of virtue in ethics. The universe comes to completion in a human being who achieves the fullest actualization possible, through which he becomes the closest possible approximation in nature to the unmoved mover that causes it.

Patrick Madigan
Heythrop College

Reprinted with permission of the Heythrop Journal