being (Seinsweise) and is not a strict ontological concept. Instead it is char-acterized as a “functional concept” (WP3, 8; Funktionsbegriff) or “relational concept” (GA83, 250; Verhältnisbegriff). Heidegger supports this by listing the different significations the term hupokeimenon can have (and therefore, presumably, the different ways of being it can refer to): (1) that which lies at the basis for speaking (the ti of a logos, which is always a logos tinos); (2) that which lies at the basis of the properties that are expressed in speech (ausgesagten Eigenschaften; the qualification is found only in Weiss and is important in making the contrast between points one and two clear: the whiteness of something can be a hupokeimenon in sense one as that about which I am speaking, while what underlies the whiteness as a property is a hupokeimenon in a different sense); (3) that which is there for me to make use of in technical production. Heidegger’s point is that the only thing in common to these different senses is a relation: one thing underlying another. The important implication appears to be that we should stop seeing the notion of hupokeimenon as expressing a particular conception of being, that we should consider it ontologically neutral. But has not Heidegger him-self been guilty of treating the hupokeimenon as a strict ontological concept? And if we stop doing so, does this not mean that the hupokeimenon does not in fact express a conception of being distinct from being dunamei on because it does not express a conception of being at all? Unfortunately, these questions are not pursued as the class turns to chapter 2 of Physics Γ.
This chapter is described as Aristotle’s positive Auseinandersetzung with his predecessors. “Positive” because he shows the extent to which what they said was grounded in the phenomenon of motion and uses the insufficiency of what they said to better reveal the phenomenon. The task of this chapter is therefore not antiquarian or historical, but genuinely philosophical. Aristotle’s predecessors tried to explain motion by identifying it with not-being or otherness or unequalness (201b20–21; ἑτερότητα καὶ ἀνισότητα καἰ τὸ μὴ ὄν φάσκοντες εἶναι κίνησιν). As Weiss succinctly expresses the point, all of these concepts apply to motion in some way and reveal its structure, but from any and all of them no motion necessarily results (WP3, 8). What moves is not what it was before; motion upsets equilibrium; motion involves something becoming other than it was. Aristotle also explains that his predecessors reached for these concepts in response to motion appearing to be something indeterminate or unbounded (201b24–25; ἀοριστόν τι δοκεῖ εἶναι ἡ κίνησις). But even if these concepts capture something true about motion, motion no more necessarily results from them than it does from