he universe, including motion, is an aspect of the way that he overcomes the difficulty with the explanation of projectile motion.
Both universal and particular are knowable relative to what caused them or what they cause, hence relative to motion, the basis of Aristotle's natural philosophy: "Nature is a principle of motion and change, and it is he subject of our inquiry. We must therefore see that we understand what motion is; for if it were unknown, nature too would be unknown" (Physics 342). The rational pattern of natural processes, which takes the "form" as it were of tending toward perfection, or as Aristotle has it "nature," or the infinite or unchangeable, that is seen by Aristotle as what is not subject to motion. Stwertka and Stwertka (21) say that Aristotle explains what keeps an object in motion after an artificial push by saying that it is "driven by the air behind it. As for the movements of the heavenly bodies, he supposed that the sun, the planets, and the stars all moved in perfect circles around the earth."
The problem with attributing the concept of the mover to projectile motion is that projectiles by their nature separate from what has moved them. Thus if the bow is considered to be what moves the arrow, then the concept of the mover does not fully explain how the arrow, separated from the bow, can really be considered its mover. If that were so, then, as Koestler remarks, the logical expectation is that the arrow should drop to the ground immediately. "The answer to this objection," Koestler says, "was that the initial motion of the arrow, while still on the bow, created a disturbance in the air, a kind of vortex, which now became the arrow's 'mover', and pulled it along its course" (Koestler, Act 236) A further objection is that if the arrow is being driven by air behind it, how can it be projected into the wind? Koestler says that this objection was not developed until the 14th century.
Newton's view th...