of changing beings is solved by his discovery of the notion of potentiality. Δύναμις becomes for Aristotle the ἀρχή, the governing principle and source, of natural beings, the being of beings that move.
The Phenomenology of Seeing and the Recognition of Movement as the Being of Beings
At Physics A2, 185 a12ff, Aristotle announces as a presupposition of the investigation that natural beings are constituted by movement. He says this is immediately evident through ἐπαγωγή (induction). In Prior Analytics 67 a22ff, Aristotle says: “it never happens that a person knows the individual (the particular) in advance; rather he receives knowledge of the individual by induction (ἐπαγωγή—leading it forth) and, as it were, through recognition.” Ἐπαγωγή means the ability to hold together the seeing (nous) of the whole and the seeing (αἴσθησις) of the individual that is constituted by this whole. It is because human being is the site of this correlation that we can see beings in their being and understand the being of beings. In the Posterior Analytics 100 a16, Aristotle says: “what is perceived is the individual, but the perception is in relation to the whole.” Further, he says at 100 b4, “it is clear that we must know that which is first by ἐπαγωγή. For even perception (αἴσθησις) lays claim to (εμποιεί) the whole (καθόλου) in this way.”
Knowledge of the whole is not arrived at by abstracting one common characteristic from a series of individuals. It is the individual that manifests in its being its common ground with other beings. The individual man Callias, Aristotle says, appears, but he shows himself as a man and thus we “see” the whole. The individual, when it stands in its being, always already shows itself in relation to other beings when it shows itself as it is. The knowledge that Aristotle seeks here in the Physics can only be reached within the framework of a “phenomenology” of beings that asks the question what beings must be such that they can at all show themselves as they are; and a phenomenology that asks who the human being is such that we can “see” and “recognize” beings in their being. Ἐπαγωγή means to point to this capacity to understand beings as a whole.
In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger seeks to clarify the meaning of phenomenology in his own thought, a meaning clearly implied in his discussion of Aristotle’s notion of ἐπαγωγή, through a consideration of the Greek origin of this word. He secures the meaning of phenomenology as “to let what