The Chain of Change
Robert Wardy
Cambridge, 1990

[Note: I've read only a few pages of this book, as referenced by Monte Ransome Johnson on p. 83 of his book Aristotle on Teleology.]

With regard to the discussion of the 'complete' or 'perfect' in Physics VII.3 246a10-b3 (specifically the idea that "it is in the achievement of its characteristic excellence that a thing becomes complete, and by the same token becomes what it by nature most truly is", pp. 211-212), Wardy writes: 

"[W]e nevertheless must confront a problem which directly attacks the suggestion that virtue and vice respectively contribute to and detract from the very being of their possessor. The objection is this: if as a man acquires virtue he completes his human development, or as he sinks into depravity gradually ceases to be, then he simply does not survive change in hexis. But that is absurd - one and the same man lives through his ethical education and history, and it is because he retains his identity that we praise and blame him. Furthermore, Aristotle himself is at pains to stress this fact. Therefore VII.3's seeming assimilation of change in state or condition to existential change is utterly unacceptable not only to us, but also to Aristotle. We can dissolve this conundrum by taking proper account of Aristotelian degrees of being, since the paradox succeeds solely by playing on our unthinking inclination to work with an absolute concept of existence. If 'being ...' (e.g. 'being a man') is variable, then naturally one and the same individual persists through a more or less determinate range of changes in what he is. This sounds like a contradiction because we assume that any change in essential character entails destruction - but the truth is rather that a thing only perishes if it loses its essence altogether. If essences can be and are variably realised both synchronically and diachronically, then Aristotle has a right to his claim that the perfect man *is* malista kata phusin. For Aristotle, the statement that Socrates is more of a man than Anytus is a literal rather than a metaphorical assertion." (Wardy, pp. 212-213)

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