7 - Aristotle’s Notion of Continuity: The Structure Underlying Motion

Summary

The basis of Aristotle’s strategy for bringing together time and distance covered in an account of motion is his understanding time, distance, and motion as continua. Against the background of Parmenides’ notion of continuity and the atomistic understanding of magnitudes, this chapter investigates Aristotle’s notion of continuity. It demonstrates the extent to which Aristotle adopts a mathematical notion of continuity according to which divisibility without end is crucial, and it expounds his appropriation of this mathematical notion for the physical realm. The main characteristics of Aristotle’s account of continuity turn out to be a new part-whole relation (in which the whole is prior to the parts since it is only by dividing the whole that we gain parts), a new account of limits, a new understanding of infinity, and a careful distinction between potential divisibility and actual division. We see how this new understanding of continuity helps counter the mereological problems of Zeno’s motion paradoxes by making it illegitimate to define time, space, and motion in terms of an additive part-whole-relation.