The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

which the primary place in which a thing is
actually is.
    When what surrounds, then, is not separate from the thing, but
is in continuity with it, the thing is said to be in what surrounds
it, not in the sense of in place, but as a part in a whole. But
when the thing is separate and in contact, it is immediately ‘in’
the inner surface of the surrounding body, and this surface is
neither a part of what is in it nor yet greater than its extension,
but equal to it; for the extremities of things which touch are
coincident.
    Further, if one body is in continuity with another, it is not
moved in that but with that. On the other hand it is moved in that
if it is separate. It makes no difference whether what contains is
moved or not.
    Again, when it is not separate it is described as a part in a
whole, as the pupil in the eye or the hand in the body: when it is
separate, as the water in the cask or the wine in the jar. For the
hand is moved with the body and the water in the cask.
    It will now be plain from these considerations what place is.
There are just four things of which place must be one-the shape, or
the matter, or some sort of extension between the bounding surfaces
of the containing body, or this boundary itself if it contains no
extension over and above the bulk of the body which comes to be in
it.
    Three of these it obviously cannot be:
    (1) The shape is supposed to be place because it surrounds, for
the extremities of what contains and of what is contained are
coincident. Both the shape and the place, it is true, are
boundaries. But not of the same thing: the form is the boundary of
the thing, the place is the boundary of the body which contains
it.
    (2) The extension between the extremities is thought to be
something, because what is contained and separate may often be
changed while the container remains the same (as water may be
poured from a vessel)-the assumption being that the extension is
something over and above the body displaced. But there is no such
extension. One of the bodies which change places and are naturally
capable of being in contact with the container falls in whichever
it may chance to be.
    If there were an extension which were such as to exist
independently and be permanent, there would be an infinity of
places in the same thing. For when the water and the air change
places, all the portions of the two together will play the same
part in the whole which was previously played by all the water in
the vessel; at the same time the place too will be undergoing
change; so that there will be another place which is the place of
the place, and many places will be coincident. There is not a
different place of the part, in which it is moved, when the whole
vessel changes its place: it is always the same: for it is in the
(proximate) place where they are that the air and the water (or the
parts of the water) succeed each other, not in that place in which
they come to be, which is part of the place which is the place of
the whole world.
    (3) The matter, too, might seem to be place, at least if we
consider it in what is at rest and is thus separate but in
continuity. For just as in change of quality there is something
which was formerly black and is now white, or formerly soft and now
hard-this is just why we say that the matter exists-so place,
because it presents a similar phenomenon, is thought to exist-only
in the one case we say so because what was air is now water, in the
other because where air formerly was there a is now water. But the
matter, as we said before, is neither separable from the thing nor
contains it, whereas place has both characteristics.
    Well, then, if place is none of the three-neither the form nor
the matter nor an extension which is always there, different from,
and over and above, the extension of the thing which is
displaced-place necessarily is the one of the four which is left,
namely, the boundary of the containing body at which it is in
contact with the contained body. (By the contained body is meant
what can be moved by way of locomotion.)
    Place is thought to be something important and hard to grasp,
both because the matter and the shape present themselves along with
it, and because the displacement of the body that is moved takes
place in a stationary container, for it seems possible that there
should be an interval which is other than the bodies which are
moved. The air, too, which is thought to be incorporeal,
contributes something to the belief: it is not only