ABSTRACT
This chapter looks how the concept of potentiality is itself a major instrument for ensuring continuity. Earlier Greek philosophy had posed the problems of continuity and discontinuity in different contexts. Most sharply on the physical side, the atomists had asserted the discontinuity of matter in discrete particles in space. Problems of continuity and discontinuity have the widest scope in metaphysics. The chapter also looks at the treatment of the One, which is the generic notion of the continuous, the interpretations of the continuous, chiefly geometric, the definitional relations of the continuous with other terms, and its relation to contact. Aristotle's basic metaphysical concept that ensures continuity is potentiality. The Megarian school argued that a thing has the potentiality of acting only when it is engaging in action, and that that potentiality is absent when the actuality is absent. Aristotle uses the principle to demand a certain kind of explanation for development.
