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While actuality is linked by Aristotle to his concept of a formal cause, potentiality (or potency) on the other hand, is linked by Aristotle to his concepts of hylomorphic matter and material cause. Aristotle wrote for example that "matter exists potentially, because it may attain to the form; but when it exists actually, it is then in the form."
In Aristotle's estimation, an explanation without the temporal actuality and potentiality of an infinite locomotive chain is required for an eternal cosmos with neither beginning nor end: an unmoved eternal substance for whom the Primum Mobile [note 2] turns diurnally, whereby all terrestrial cycles are driven by day and night, the seasons of ...
(The word "nature" for Aristotle applies to both its potential in the raw material and its ultimate finished form. In a sense this form already existed in the material: see potentiality and actuality.) Whereas modern physics looks to simple bodies, Aristotle's physics took a more general viewpoint, and treated living things as exemplary.
For Aristotle, in fact, matter is the basis of all that exists; it comprises the potentiality of everything, but of itself is not actually anything. A determinate thing only comes into being when the potentiality in matter is converted into actuality; this is achieved by the substantial form.
Then Aristotle proceeds and concludes that the actuality is prior to potentiality in formula, in time and in substantiality. With this definition of the particular substance (i.e., matter and form), Aristotle tries to solve the problem of the unity of the beings, for example, "what is it that makes a man one"?
Aristotle holds a teleological worldview: he sees the universe as inherently purposeful. Basically, Aristotle claims that potentiality exists for the sake of actuality. [53] Thus, matter exists for the sake of receiving its form, [54] as an organism has sight for the sake of seeing. [53] Now, each thing has certain potentialities as a result of ...
To understand motion, book III begins with the definition of change based on Aristotle's notions of potentiality and actuality. [6] Change, he says, is the actualization of a thing's ability insofar as it is able.
Many of Aristotle's works are extremely compressed, and many scholars believe that in their current form, they are likely lecture notes. [2] Subsequent to the arrangement of Aristotle's works by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century BC, a number of his treatises were referred to as the writings "after ("meta") the Physics" [b], the origin of the current title for the collection Metaphysics.