Page - 160 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

which it would not occur. It is therefore correct to say that locomotion is posterior not in an unqualified sense, but solely with respect to the coming to be of any single thing. This, however, in no way contradicts the assump- tion of locomotion’s general priority, because for each generation there is something which undergoes locomotion prior to it, namely the heavenly body of the sun that is causally related to and thus responsible for the com- ing to be of the respective thing. In making use of this causal connection that exists between eternal and perishable things in the sublunary sphere Aristotle therefore can success- fully reject the objection that locomotion rather seems to be posterior to generation, or to put it differently, is able to harmonise the fact of locomo- tion’s posteriority in perishable things with his claim about locomotion’s general temporal priority. The objector makes the mistake of focusing on what happens in the sublunary sphere and thereby ignores the fact that any- thing that has a coming to be, as a part of the cosmos, is embedded into a larger framework of causal relations. Emphasizing that such causal connec- tions exist is of utmost importance for dealing with the objection at issue, since merely pointing to the fact that the eternal locomotions that eternal things in the superlunary sphere undergo always precede any other finite change in time does not really address the apparent problem of locomo- tion’s posteriority in perishable things. This is because the objector who looks at things from the restricted perspective stated above does not see how this fact is supposed to relate to his assumption that generation with respect to sublunary things obviously seems to precede locomotion, rather than the other way around. Hence, the reason why Aristotle makes use of the causal relations that exist between the super- and sublunary spheres is to make the objector see that the changes he takes to be independent of the heavens’ eternal motions in fact necessarily need to precede the generation of things and any change succeeding to it in order for the latter to occur at all. Of course the objector would be right to point out that against this back- ground locomotion indeed in general precedes any generation in the sense in question, but that this fact does not seem to be of any significance, since at the same time it is also true that the eternal locomotion of the sun and of all other moving eternal things is succeeded by the generation of perishable things, as well as any other finite change in the sublunary sphere, and in this sense again appears to be posterior. But this point makes clear again what Aristotle’s reason is for bringing causality into play in this argument, when it should basically suffice to point to the eternal locomotion of the heavenly spheres and bodies in order to show locomotion’s general temporal priority: the sun’s movements that are previous to something’s generation are responsible for this change and therefore of importance for harmonising the stated objection with Aristotle’s priority claim and thus with his larger 160 Locomotion has temporal priority ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen