Seite - 157 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

sun that is to a certain degree responsible for the coming to be of a man as well as of all other living beings. The eternal locomotion of the sun however is caused (at least indirectly) by the first unmoved mover.41 Just as all the other eternal things in the cosmos that are subject to change, so, too, the sun has always undergone its locomotion. By contrast, the coming to be of a perishable individual thing is a finite change and has to start at some point in time. Therefore, the locomotion of the sun will always be prior in time to such a coming to be, since in virtue of undergoing an eternal loco- motion it will always be in motion before the respective case of coming to be is caused. In this sense then, it is clear in what way there will always be a locomotion that is prior in time to every case of generation, without there being a generation that is prior to this preceding locomotion. The only sense in which one may say then that locomotion is the last of changes in things that have a coming to be is by ignoring that its coming to be is con- nected to certain processes in the cosmos. This would make sense if one is only interested, for instance in the developmental stages through which an animal as the member of a certain species passes in its coming to be; but this certainly must not be done when one tries to work out a causal expla- nation of the different changes that occur in the cosmos, which to a certain degree is what Aristotle is doing when he claims locomotion’s priority in the context of Phys. VIII. Against the background of what has been stated so far it also becomes clear that claim (3) which says that the thing which causes the generation “itself is and is not coming to be” (ὂν αὐτὸ καὶ μὴ γιγνόμενον)42 and that I examined above must have a different meaning than the one I stated further above.43 As I have shown, it is plausible to basically take claim (3) as referring to the male member of a species which as the father of that which is generated no longer undergoes its coming to be, but is completely what it is, for instance a full man.44 But now that we have seen that the sun also plays the role of a cause in this process of generation, one might think that claim (3) therefore refers to both the father and the sun, for also the sun “itself is not coming to be”, in fact, never came to be, but is eternal. While claim (3) as it is stated above may be referring to both father and sun, the more specific qualification that is added in 261a7 makes clear that 41 By the sun being indirectly caused to move by the first unmoved mover I mean that there is a finite chain of movers and moved things that has its starting point in the first unmoved mover and that necessarily leads to the sun’s change in place. Thus, I do not mean to refer to a case of what one might call deviant causation of a change. 42 See Phys. VIII 7, 261a7. As I pointed out on p.151, n.23, the same claim in principle is made five lines earlier in 261a2. 43 See p.151–152. 44 See p.151. The locomotion of the sun as a cause of generation 157 ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen