Abstract

THE phenomenological analysis given by Aristotle in the first book of the Physics shows that change necessarily involves three principles, substratum, form, and privation. The substratum has two related functions. First, it is the subject of change, its own “characteristics” remaining the same; it thus ensures an element of permanence. Its presence indicates that there is true change, not creation and annihilation. Second, as subject of the change, it must have the capacity to receive determinations successively; in this sense it is a potency or “principle of determinability”. The privation, or lack, is necessary in order that something should come to be which was not before. Unlike the substratum and the form which comes to be, it is not a real principle although it has a foundation in the real. It is formal in character; it is associated with the substratum before the change and thereafter ceases to “be”.