Aristotle: Biology

An appreciation of the "more philosophical" aspects of ancient medical writings casts considerable light on Aristotle's concept of nature, and how he understands nature to differ from art, on the one hand, and spontaneity or luck, on the other. The account of nature, and its comparison with art and spontaneity in Physics II is developed with continual reference to the medical art. The notion of spontaneous remission of disease (without the aid of the medical art) was a controversial subject in (...) the medical literature, and Aristotle's aporia about the notion of spontaneous generation of natural things runs parallel to this controversy. Aristotle's account of spontaneous generation in the Metaphysics and in the Generation of Animals can also be profitably illuminated by looking at the comparison with medicine in detail. The result, hopefully, is a clearer and more consistent picture not only of Aristotle's concepts of nature, art, and spontaneity, but also of the influence of medical writings and concepts on his natural philosophy. Joel Mann has written a commentary on the essay. (shrink)

Hynek Bartos does the field of ancient philosophy a great service by detailing the influence of early Greek thinkers (such as Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, and Diogenes of Apollonia) on the Hippocratic work On Regimen, and by demonstrating that work’s innovative engagement with contemporary scientific and philosophical concepts as well as its direct influence on Plato and Aristotle. His study usefully counteracts the lamentable tendency among ancient philosophers to ignore or downplay the influence of medical literature on philosophy in general, (...) and to heap scorn on this text in particular, which Kirk, Raven, and Schofield considered ‘an eclectic and very superficial quasi- philosophical treatise’ and Barnes famously called ‘a silly farrago of ill-digested Presocratic opinions’. (shrink)

This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that being is inescapably diverse in kind—is anchored in his argument for the existence of change. Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of change. When he (...) gave this definition, arguing that change is real was a losing proposition. To show that it exists, he had to rework the way philosophers understood reality. His groundbreaking analysis of change has long been interpreted through a Platonist lens, however, in which being is conceived as unchanging. Offering a comprehensive reexamination of the relationship between change and being in Aristotle, Sentesy makes an important contribution to scholarship on Aristotle, ancient philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, and metaphysics. (shrink)

The paper addresses the following question: why do human beings, on Aristotle’s view, have an innate tendency to badness, that is, to developing desires that go beyond, and often against, their natural needs? Given Aristotle’s teleological assumptions (including the thesis that nature does nothing in vain), such tendency should not be present. I argue that the culprit is to be found in the workings of rationality. In particular, it is the presence of theoretical reason that necessitates the limitless nature of (...) human non-rational desires. (shrink)

The soul is an explanatory principle of Aristotle’s natural science, accounting both for the fact that living things are alive as well as for the diverse natural attributes that belong to them by virtue of being alive. I argue that the explanatory role of the soul in Aristotle’s natural science must be understood in light of his view, stated in a controversial passage from Parts of Animals (645b14–20), that the soul of a living thing is a “complex activity” of its (...) organic body. This paper explores the role of this “complex activity” model of soul in Aristotle’s study of soul in De Anima. I argue, first, that the model has its origins in De Anima II.4, where Aristotle argues that living things do all they do by nature for the sake of a single, teleologically primary end. I argue further that Aristotle uses this model to account for the psychological attributes naturally present in living things, including their capacities for vital activities like nutrition, reproduction, and perception, and that this is the task to which Aristotle devotes the obscure final chapters of De Anima III. (shrink)

In some influential histories of ancient philosophy, teleological explanation and mechanistic explanation are assumed to be directly opposed and mutually exclusive alternatives. I contend that this assumption is deeply flawed, and distorts our understanding both of teleological and mechanistic explanation, and of the history of mechanistic philosophy. To prove this point, I shall provide an overview of the first systematic treatise on mechanics, the short and neglected work Mechanical Problems, written either by Aristotle or by a very early member of (...) his school. I will argue that the work is thoroughly Aristotelian in methodology, and that taking it seriously can deepen our understanding of Aristotle’s discussion of animal and human self-motion in the Physics and On the Movement of Animals. (shrink)

According to most scholars, in the Parts of Animals Aristotle frequently provides explanations in terms of material necessity, as well as explanations in terms of that-for-the-sake-of-which, i.e., final causes. In this paper, I argue that we misunderstand both matter and the way that Aristotle explains things using necessity if we interpret Aristotle as explaining things in terms of material necessity. Aristotle does not use the term “matter” very frequently in his detailed discussions of animal parts; when he does use it, (...) he typically identifies blood as matter. I argue that this is because blood is, for Aristotle, what properly nourishes and grows the other parts of the body and he views nourishment and growth as types of coming-to-be. The second half of the paper turns to necessity as a cause in the Parts of Animals. I argue that in the Parts of Animals Aristotle is not interested in distinguishing between what Aristotle elsewhere treats as very different types of necessity. (shrink)

Exceptions are often cited as a counterargument against formal causation. Against this I argue that Aristotle explicitly allows for exceptions to essences in his biological writings, and that he has a means of explaining them through formal causation – though this means that he has to slightly elaborate on his general case theory from the Posterior Analytics, by supplementing it with a special case application in the biological writings. Specifically for Aristotle an essential predication need not be a universal predication. (...) Rather an essential predication is where a property belongs essentially to a species or genus. This essential predication serves a causal and explanatory role, and is not dependent on a corresponding universal predication. (shrink)

Aristotle was the first thinker to articulate a taxonomy of scientific knowledge, which he set out in Posterior Analytics. Furthermore, the “special sciences”, i.e., biology, zoology and the natural sciences in general, originated with Aristotle. A classical question is whether the mathematical axiomatic method proposed by Aristotle in the Analytics is independent of the special sciences. If so, Aristotle would have been unable to match the natural sciences with the scientific patterns he established in the Analytics. In this paper, I (...) reject this pessimistic approach towards the scientific value of natural sciences. I believe that there are traces of biology in the Analytics as well as traces of the Analytics’ theory in zoological treatises. Moreover, for a lack of chronological clarity, I think it’s better to unify Aristotle’s model of scientific research, which includes Analytics and the natural sciences together. (shrink)

This paper aims to undertake an examination of the exposition made in the aristotelian treatise De Incessu Animalium about the directional orientations (above and below, right and left, front and behind) mostly from its extra, inter and intratextual context. These directional orientations seem to be directly related to the principles of movement, perception and growing. The treatise starts from the points of origin (archai) of these functions in the animals and, from these functions, distinguish them. Therefore, functionality is established as (...) the first value, because it is the prism through which Aristotle perceives and think the right, above and front in the animals. On that account, it is corroborated the great importance of functionality in the aristotelian philosophy. Afterwards, it will be searched if (or how) the primacy of the trinominal formed by right, above and front is related to aspects of the greek imaginary contemporaneous with the given text. (shrink)

Organisms receded from view in much of twentieth-century biology, only to undergo a sort of renaissance at the start of the twenty-first. The story of why this should be so is complicated and fascinating, but belongs primarily to the history of biology. On the other hand, to the extent that it is so, a question naturally arises: what, after all, are organisms? This question has a long and complicated history of its own, both within and without of biology; an investigation (...) of this history yields some guidance as to how organisms might yet be conceived today. One suggestion borne of these investigations is this: organisms are, for better or worse, normatively delineated unities. (shrink)

Human beings, according to Aristotle, are not the only political animals. Bees, wasps, ants and cranes are the other political species mentioned by Aristotle in the History of Animals. Politics, I, 2 confirms this point and makes the additional statement that human beings, if not the only political animals, are nevertheless more political than the other political animals. There has been a traditional scholarly agreement that the capacity for rational speech is the reason why human beings are more political. This (...) traditional view seems to have some support from the same chapter of Politics, where Aristotle addresses, right after having stated that human beings are more political, the role of language in human beings’ political life. This paper contests this traditional view about language and claims that it is the more political character of human beings which explains the political role of language and not vice versa. -/- . (shrink)

It has become somewhat of a platitude to call Aristotle the first epigenesist insofar as he thought form and structure emerged gradually from an unorganized, amorphous embryo. But modern biology now recognizes two senses of “epigenesis”. The first is this more familiar idea about the gradual emergence of form and structure, which is traditionally opposed to the idea of preformationism. But modern biologists also use “epigenesis” to emphasize the context-dependency of the process itself. Used in this sense development is not (...) simply the unfolding of a pre-determined sequence of changes specified in advance by the organism’s genotype. It is also sensitive to inputs from the internal and external environment, which help determine in real-time which of the many potential developmental pathways are actualized during the process. Within this paradigm developing embryos are viewed as dynamic and responsive systems that react to inputs from the internal and external environment ‘on the fly’. In this paper I argue that, while Aristotle was an epigenesist in the first sense, he would have rejected epigenesis in the more modern sense. First, Aristotle’s model of choice for a developing embryo is the automaton that executes a set of preset movements (GA 734b9-13, 741b7-15). The automatons he has in mind are not dynamic AI systems capable of modifying their behaviour on the fly in response to environmental cues but completely deterministic mechanisms whose movements are fixed by their original design. Second, given Aristotle’s views about the different kinds of causal powers there are, it looks like only intentional agents endowed with actual decision-making powers could be capable of the sort of plasticity at the core of a more dynamic epigenesis. For that kind of epigenesis requires powers for alternative outcomes, and Aristotle is explicit that such powers require rational desires (προαίρεσις) that control which of those alternatives to bring about. If I am right, then he could not have made sense of the idea of a developing embryo (as a non-intentional system) making adjustments to its phenotype on the fly in response to emerging problems and opportunities, given the conceptual resources available to him. (shrink)

This paper presents a discussion about how the necessity and teleology are present in the theory of nature in Empedocles and Aristotle. For this task we go through the fragments relate to the thought of Empedocles in the Poem From Nature as a central reference to the work The presocratic philosophers of Kirk and Raven, and the work Physics I and II of Aristotle.

Translation of Aristotle's Parts of Animals Book I into Portuguese, with full commentaries.

: In Parts of Animals II.10, 655b37-656a8, Aristotle tacitly identifies a group of animals which partake of “ living only”. This paper is an attempt to understand the nature of this group. It is argued that it is possible to make sense of this designation if we consider that some animals, which are solely endowed with the contact senses, do nothing more than mere immediate nutrition by their perceptive nature and have no other action. It is concluded that some of (...) Aristotle ’s merely living animals would be certain kinds of sponge, certain sea anemones and the ascidians among testacea. (shrink)

Starting with Aristotle and moving on to Darwin, Marco Solinas outlines the basic steps from the birth, establishment and later rebirth of the traditional view of living beings, and its overturning by evolutionary revolution. The classic framework devised by Aristotle was still dominant in the 17th Century world of Galileo, Harvey and Ray, and remained hegemonic until the time of Lamarck and Cuvier in the 19th Century. Darwin's breakthrough thus takes on the dimensions of an abandonment of the traditional finalistic (...) theory. It was a transition exemplified in the morphological analysis of useless parts, such as the sightless eyes of moles, already discussed by Aristotle, which Darwin used as a crowbar to unhinge the systematic recourse to final causes. With many excerpts, a chronological sequence and an analytical approach, this book follows the course of the two conceptions that have shaped the destiny of life sciences in western culture. (shrink)

The intellectual history of evolutionary theory really does not begin in earnest until the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. Prior to that, the idea that species might have evolved over time was not a serious possibility for most naturalists and philosophers. There is certainly no substantive debate in antiquity about evolution in the modern sense. There were really only two competing explanations for how living things came to have the parts they do: design or blind chance. Ancient Greek Atomism, for example, (...) taught that all composite bodies, including living things, are generated through the random collision of atoms as they rebel and move in the void. Plato and Aristotle both dismissed this possibility on the grounds that living things are too complex and too well-adapted to be products of chance. This eventually became the central premise in Galen’s own Argument from Design. That species forms might have gradually evolved over time by a process of natural selection was not seen as a plausible alternative. Of course, such a theory had been proposed by Empedocles in the fifth century BCE. But because his theory still relied heavily on chance, it was not taken seriously by any of the later ancient Greek or Roman thinkers. My aim in this paper is to investigate the reasons why evolutionary thinking failed to gain momentum in antiquity after its introduction by Empedocles. (shrink)

The book aims to offer a contribution to the historiographical and conceptual reconfiguration of the evolutionary revolution in the light of the centuries-old tenets of the Aristotelian biological tradition. Darwin’s breakthrough constitutes a thorough overturning of the fixist, essentialist and teleological framework created by Aristotle, a framework still dominant in the 17th Century world of Harvey and Ray, as well as Galileo, and then hegemonic until Linnaeus and Cuvier. This change is exemplified in the morphological analysis of useless parts, such (...) as the sightless eyes of moles, already discussed by Aristotle, and which Darwin used almost like a crowbar to unhinge the systematic recourse to final causes. This is an ancient teleological heritage present in various forms in the concept of natural selection, but by then confined within an eminently historical framework open to randomness. Un contributo alla riconfigurazione storiografica e concettuale della rivoluzione evoluzionistica alla luce della tenuta plurisecolare della tradizione biologica aristotelica. La svolta di Darwin si delinea quale puntuale rovesciamento dell'impianto fissista, essenzialista e teleologico coniato da Aristotele, ancora dominante nel Seicento di Harvey e di Ray, nonostante Galileo, e poi egemone fino a Linneo e Cuvier. Svolta esemplificata dall'analisi morfologica delle parti inutili, come gli occhi ciechi della talpa, tematizzate già da Aristotele, e che Darwin usò quale grimaldello per scardinare il ricorso sistematico alle cause finali. Antica eredità teleologica presente in varie forme nel concetto di selezione naturale, ma ormai calata entro una griglia eminentemente storica e aperta alla casualità. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Aristotle's notion of potentiality as it applies to the beginning of life. Aristotle’s notion of natural kinēsis implies that we should not treat the entity at the beginning of embryonic development as human, or indeed as the same as the one that is born. This leads us to ask: When does the embryo turn into a human? Aristotle’s own answer to this question is very harsh. Bracketing the views that lead to this harsh answer, his (...) theory of kinēsis still gives us reason for searching for a replacement answer. Aristotle’s own work unfortunately gives us no help in finding this answer. (shrink)