Aristotle Contra Parmenides: On the Dialectics of Change/Permanence and Presence/Implication

Abstract

This paper examines Aristotle’s response to the Parmenidean denial of change, arguing that beyond his explicit categorial developments — substance and accident, act and potency — Aristotle implicitly introduces a new mode of thinking Being: being qua implication. By situating Aristotle within the historical problematic he inherits, the paper shows how his account of coming-to-be “from what is not in a qualified sense” overcomes the abstract opposition between being and nonbeing. While recent scholarship, particularly Andrew Haas’s work, rightly highlights the importance of implication in Aristotle’s thought, this paper argues that Haas absolutizes it at the expense of Aristotle’s plural ontology. Instead, being qua implication is shown to function as one mode among several interdependent senses of Being, inseparable from being qua presence and actuality. The dialectical relation between presence and implication revealed in Aristotle’s theory of act and potency thus calls for a more adequate unifying category: process.