A Non-Patient-Centered Account of Change: Revisit of Aristotle’s Physics III.3 and V.1-4

Aristotle’s account of change has been commonly regarded to be a patient-centered account of change. In Physics III.1-2, change is characterized solely from the patient perspective: "change is the actuality of the patient that is potentially F, as such." Take the process of teaching-learning medical arts as an example. According to Aristotle, there are two actions involved in this case: (i) the teacher’s teaching or acting-upon (poiesis), which is said to be the agent’s actuality, as well as (ii) the student’s learning or being-acted-upon (pathesis), which is said to be the patient’s actuality. In Phys. III.3 the teacher’s teaching and the student’s learning are said to be one and the same process of change (kinesis). Nevertheless, in Phys. III.1-2, the process of change is characterized as the student’s learning, i.e., the patient’s actuality, alone. It is for this reason that the student’s learning is commonly regarded as being identical with the process of change and hence being more fundamental to the teacher’s teaching, as Edward Hussey (1983, 65-72) and David Charles (1984, 5-30) construe. I call this view THE PRIORITY OF THE PATIENT’S ACTUALITY. In this paper I argue that Phys. III.3 is devoted to clarifying the fact that the account of change offered in Phys. III.1-2 is a non-patient-centered account: that change is neutral between the agent’s actuality and the patient’s actuality. But I do not contend that Aristotle has abandoned the view that every change takes place in the patient alone. Through reconstructing the arguments in Phys. III.3, I argue (a) that the teacher’s teaching and the student’s learning, although different in definition, should be understood as one and the same process of change in the sense that the substrate process that underlies the teaching process is identical with the substrate process that underlies the learning process, (b) that such a substrate process that underlies both the learning and the teaching processes should be understood as the process of change itself, and that (c) the process of change itself is neutral between the learning and teaching processes and cannot be regarded as being identical with the learning process only. I argue that the discussion of determining the species of change in Phys.V.1-4 offers a further support for the non-patient-centered account of change: (i) the account of the substrate process that underlies the teaching process and the learning process in Phys. III.3 coheres with the account of the track of change (en hoi) that is said to determine the number and spieces of change in Phys. V.4; (ii) as Aristotle has pointed out in Phys. V.1-2, neither the teaching process nor the learning process alone is qualified as a change in its own right (kath’ hauto). Accordingly, the process of change itself should not be regarded as identical with the learning process, i.e., the patient’s actuality. The non-patient-centered account of change helps, first, avoiding the conflation of the patient’s actuality (pathesis) with the track of change (en hoi). The latter should be construed as the substrate process that underlies the former, i.e., the patient’s actuality, as well as the agent’s actuality. Second, this account helps distinguishing two kinds of the agent’s actuality: that the agent’s actuality of making the patient acquire medical arts (poiesis) should not be conflated with the agent’s actuality of exhibiting her nature of being a medical arts teacher (energeia).