Katherine Meadows

Aristotle’s priority relation exhibits a puzzling disunity: Aristotle argues for priority in being relations in multiple ways, and none of the arguments he gives would succeed in justifying the full range of cases he endorses. While questions about how to unify Aristotle’s claims and arguments about priority have received sustained scholarly attention, questions about what could motivate Aristotle to accept this prima facie disunified set of cases have received less focused attention. This chapter explores the textual resources a causal view of priority offers us to address this question about the motivation for Aristotle’s views, and argues that these resources point us in the direction of a philosophically interesting account of the unity of the priority relation – one according to which different cases count as prior precisely because of their differences, not in spite of those differences.

In this paper, I offer a new account of how the Prime Mover explains the good order of the sublunary world: the Prime Mover explains why sublunary things are as good as they are by nature, and in particular why sublunary things have the natural capacity to act in ways that constitute imitations of the Prime Mover. I develop this proposal on the basis of the household analogy Aristotle offers in Λ 10, and argue that we find supporting evidence for it in De Anima II 4, Generation and Corruption II 10 and Generation of Animals I, where Aristotle uses the divine to explain certain (good) aspects of the natures of sublunary things in just the way my reading of the household analogy leads us to expect.

Aristotle is often taken to define priority in being in Metaphysics Δ.11, where he says that those things are prior in being which “admit of being without other things, while these others cannot be without them: a division which Plato used” (1019a3-4). But Aristotle’s pattern of arguments about priority – some of which use Plato’s Test and others of which use distinct, causal tests – looks puzzling if Plato’s Test is his definition. This paper offers a new interpretation of Δ.11 on which it offers a guide to the Aristotelian use of Plato’s Test, given that being is said in many ways, rather than endorsing it as Aristotle’s own definition of priority. This reading illuminates Aristotle’s pattern of arguments in the corpus – explaining why Aristotle uses Plato’s Test in some cases and departs from it in others – and suggests a plausible story about how these arguments were shaped by engaging with Plato.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ.8 argument for the priority of actuality to potentiality poses an immediate interpretive problem: the argument uses two distinct tests for priority, one of which threatens to reverse the results of the other. This paper argues that the standard approach to this passage, according to which one thing is prior to another when it satisfies the ontological independence test from Metaphysics Δ.11, fails to secure the argumentative unity of the passage. It introduces a new, causal account of priority which explains both Aristotle’s claims about priority and the way he argues for them.