Page - 153 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

But does this explanation really make clear that locomotion is prior in time in general in spite of the fact that it is posterior in the sense stated by the objection? Although everything said so far seems to fit together very well with what is stated in the passage as a whole, and it is certainly correct that there must be some generator that performs locomotion in order to cause the coming to be of its offspring, one could say that this temporally prior locomotion again presupposes the coming to be of the generator in the first place. In other words, the fact that x’s father moves from place A to place B before, and in order to, make x come into being does not show that this kind of locomotion is prior in time to coming to be in general. Such an occurrence certainly is earlier than the respective coming to be in the same way as my father, my grandfather, and my great grandfather are prior to me; but this does not make clear that there is a way in which locomotion may be said to have temporal priority in general over the other kinds of change, especially with respect to coming to be, because in a species’ eternal chain of beings there will always be such a process of coming to be that is prior in time to the locomotion and which some member of this species performs. In order to solve this problem it is helpful again to consider the context of this passage: the passage presents one of the five arguments for the prior- ity of locomotion. This claim is essentially connected to the discussion in Phys. VIII 1–6 in which Aristotle shows that change must be eternal and that therefore a first unmoved mover has to exist. In fact, Aristotle is inter- ested in showing that locomotion is the primary kind of change for the sake of showing that only this kind of change can be directly caused by the first unmoved mover. But how is the fact that locomotion seems to have tem- poral posteriority connected to this greater context? That there certainly is such a connection is indicated by what Aristotle presents as the basic reason for the general temporal priority of change in place, namely the fact that eternal things can only undergo this kind of change. But in what way does this help to show that locomotion indeed is prior in time in general despite the fact that in a certain sense locomotion may be said to be the last of changes in this respect as well? Aristotle clearly does not think that claiming that eternal things, like for instance the heavenly bodies, can only change in this way is enough to explain how the objection may be reconciled with the claim about locomotion’s primacy in time, for otherwise he would have stopped after writing the first two lines of this passage. In order to solve this problem one has to have in mind that the things that are undergoing eternal locomotion are not just arbitrary things in the cosmos, but rather things that without exception play a fundamental role in the processes that occur in it. The first principle of eternal locomotion is the first unmoved mover. The eternal circular locomotion of which it is the direct source, i.e. that of the outermost sphere, again is the cause of all other Coming to be presupposes an earlier locomotion 153 ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen