predicated essentially because man is the whatness of being of Socrates. Meanwhile, in the statement, Socrates is musical, the word - musical is predicated accidentally because it does not describe the essence of Socrates. The definition of musical and Socrates are distinct. Musical is present in but not said of Socrates. To explain, musical describes a feature belonging to Socrates – viz. one of his accidents. In an accidental predication, the name but not the definition is predicable of the subject (Categories, 5.2a). Therefore, there are two ways of referring to being, by its whatness, or substantially, and by its attributes, or accidentally. Parmenides’ “way of truth” failed to account for this dual equivocity because plurality is denied. Instead, he treats “is” as uniequivocal and therefore as one type or homogenous.With this reasoning, Aristotle understands how Parmenides dismissed becoming or change. Only with the understanding of the dual equivocity of being can one understand the process of change. Change consists of three basic principles, according to Aristotle. These principles are matter, privation of form, and form, itself. While the nature of change exists as contraries, there is an underlying subject to the change, the hypokeimenon. In other words, privation and form are the contraries while matter is the hypokeimenon. “We call “composite” both the thing generated and that which is in the process of becoming,” (Physics I, 7, 109a5). For example, A becomes B can also be said as B coming to be from A, in most cases. It cannot be said that “musical came to be from man” if “man became musical,” because it is illogical. Aristotle claims that there must be an underlying subject if “of simple things that come to be something, some of them persist throughout the generation but others do not. . . there must be always be som...
