The term ‘heat’ originates from the Old English word hǣtu, a word of Germanic origin; related to the Dutch ‘hitte’ and German ‘Hitze’. Today, we distinguish three different meanings of the word ‘heat’. First, ‘heat’ is understood in colloquial English as ‘hotness’. There are, in addition, two scientific meanings of ‘heat’. ‘Heat’ can have the meaning of the portion of energy that changes with a change of temperature. And finally, ‘heat’ can have the meaning of the transfer of thermal energy (...) from a hotter to a colder system or body. By contrast, for the Ancients and Scholastics, ‘heat’ was a manifest, real quality of bodies and there was an ontological distinction between biological or innate heat (which was regarded as an innate principle of life for warm-blooded animals) and the physical manifest heat of external objects, which is potentially harmful. During the late Renaissance period, however, both views changed fundamentally and evolved - via the application of physical and mechanical analogies - into the foundations for today’s unified mechanistic theory of heat. (shrink)

Duas das principais controvérsias que têm ocupado aqueles que se dedicam à teoria aris- totélica do movimento animal são a controvérsia acerca da forma da cognição através da qual um animal irracional apreende um objeto como um objeto de desejo e a controvérsia acerca da função desempenhada pela cognição na explicação aristotélica dos movimentos voluntários de locomoção animal. Neste artigo, eu apresento uma teoria acerca das formas como o desejo e a cognição se articulam na teoria aristotélica segundo a qual (...) um animal irracional apreende um objeto como um objeto de desejo através da percepção incidental deste objeto e, ao contrário do que a maioria parece acreditar, esta percepção não tem sempre a mesma função na produção destes movimentos. Se o que for dito aqui estiver correto, em alguns casos esta percepção é responsável tanto pela geração do desejo quan- to pela sua orientação, mas em outros ela é responsável apenas pela sua orientação. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the structure and the defeasibility conditions of argument from analogy, addressing the issues of determining the nature of the comparison underlying the analogy and the types of inferences justifying the conclusion. In the dialectical tradition, different forms of similarity were distinguished and related to the possible inferences that can be drawn from them. The kinds of similarity can be divided into four categories, depending on whether they represent fundamental semantic features of the (...) terms of the comparison or non-semantic ones, indicating possible characteristics of the referents. Such distinct types of similarity characterize different kinds of analogical arguments, all based on a similar general structure, in which a common genus is abstracted. Depending on the nature of the abstracted common feature, different rules of inference will apply, guaranteeing the attribution of the analogical predicate to the genus and to the primary subject. This analysis of similarity and the relationship thereof with the rules of inference allows a deeper investigation of the defeasibility conditions. (shrink)

Prisoners involved in the Attica rebellion and in the recent Georgia prison strike have protested their dehumanizing treatment as animals and as slaves. Their critique is crucial for tracing the connections between slavery, abolition, the racialization of crime, and the reinscription of racialized slavery within the US prison system. I argue that, in addition to the dehumanization of prisoners, inmates are further de-animalized when they are held in conditions of intensive confinement such as prolonged solitude or chronic overcrowding. To be (...) de-animalized is to be treated not as a living being who is sustained by its mutual relations with other living and nonliving beings, but rather as a thing to be warehoused and/or exchanged for a profit. The violence of de-animalization affects both human and nonhuman animals held in control prisons, factory farms, laboratories and other sites of intensive confinement. In order to make the connections between these sites, and to develop forms of solidarity appropriate to our shared animality, we need a post-humanist critique of intensive confinement that breaks with the logic of opposition between human and animal, and articulates our constitutive relationality as (inter)corporeal beings. (shrink)

I develop two different epistemic roles for emotion and desire. Caring for moral ends and people plays a pivotal though contingent role in ensuring reliable awareness of morally salient details; possession of various emotions and motives is a necessary condition for autonomous understanding of moral concepts themselves. Those who believe such connections compromise the "objective" status of morality tend to assume rather than argue for the bifurcated conception of reason and affect this essay challenges.

In this paper I address an important question in Aristotle’s biology, What are the causal mechanisms behind the transmission of biological form? Aristotle’s answer to this question, I argue, is found in Generation of Animals Book 4 in connection with his investigation into the phenomenon of inheritance. There we are told that an organism’s reproductive material contains a set of "movements" which are derived from the various "potentials" of its nature (the internal principle of change that initiates and controls development). (...) These movements, I suggest, function as specialized vehicles for communicating the parts of the parent’s heritable form during the act of reproduction. After exploring the details of this mechanism, I then take up Aristotle’s theory of inheritance proper. At the heart of the theory are three general principles (or 'laws') that govern the interactions between the maternal and paternal movements, the outcome of which determines the pattern of inheritance for the offspring. Although this paper is primarily aimed at providing a detailed analysis of Aristotle’s account of inheritance, the results of that analysis have implications for other areas of Aristotle’s biology. One of the most interesting of these is the question of whether Aristotle’s biology is anti-evolutionary (as traditionally assumed) or whether (as I argue) it leaves room for a theory of evolution by natural selection, even if Aristotle himself never took that step. (shrink)

Historically embryogenesis has been among the most philosophically intriguing phenomena. In this paper I focus on one aspect of biological development that was particularly perplexing to the ancients: self-organisation. For many ancients, the fact that an organism determines the important features of its own development required a special model for understanding how this was possible. This was especially true for Aristotle, Alexander, and Simplicius, who all looked to contemporary technology to supply that model. However, they did not all agree on (...) what kind of device should be used. In this paper I explore the way these ancients made use of technology as a model for the developing embryo. I argue that their different choices of device reveal fundamental differences in the way each thinker understood the nature of biological development itself. In the final section of the paper I challenge the traditional view (dating back to Alexander's interpretation of Aristotle) that the use of automata in GA can simply be read off from their use in the de motu. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a running dispute between Werner Callebaut’s naturalistic view and Filip Kolen and Gertrudis Van de Vijver’s transcendentalist view on the nature of philosophy of biology and the relation of this discipline to biological sciences. It is argued that, despite differences in opinion, both positions agree that philosophy of biology’s ultimate goal is to ‘move’ biology or at least be ‘meaningful’ to it. In order to make this goal clear and effective, more is needed than a polarizing (...) debate which hardly touches upon biology. Therefore, a redirection in discussion is suggested towards a reflection on the possibilities of incorporating philosophy in interdisciplinary research, and on finding concrete research questions which are of interest both to the philosopher and to the biologist. (shrink)

When does a human being begin to exist? We argue that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. We lay down a set of conditions for being a human being, and we determine when, in the course of normal fetal development, these conditions are first satisfied. Issues dealt with along the way include: modes of substance-formation, twinning, the nature of the intra-uterine environment, and the nature of the (...) relation between fetus and mother (connection, parthood, dependence). (shrink)

The term “God of the philosophers” refers to the concept of God as understood and discussed in philosophical discourse. It is a philosophical concept of God that is often considered distinct from the concept of God found in religious traditions. Throughout history, various philosophers and theologians have used the term to refer to God whose existence and attributes have been the subject of philosophical reasoning and reflection. In this study, I explore Ibn Sīnā’s way of reconciling two concepts of God. (...) I argue that Ibn Sînâ, a philosopher with an Aristotelian and Neoplatonic heritage, sees no contradiction between the God of the philosophers and the God of the scriptures. Ibn Sina’s way is interesting because it is an attempt to bridge the gap between two concepts of God without compromising the classical theistic understanding of divine attributes. First, I will briefly present the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic contexts of Ibn Sīnā’s philosophy to show his way of reconciliation. Second, I will give an account of Ibn Sīnā’s concept of God as it is revealed in his understanding of the divine attribute of immutability. Finally, I will examine his views in which he most explicitly offers the concept of a God who is responsive, who is present, and who is engaged with human beings. His ideas about God’s agency, petitionary prayer, and divine providence provide ample evidence that the God of Ibn Sīnā is the God of the religious traditions known to and worshipped by human beings. (shrink)

In Aristotle’s account of change, lacking a form is called privation (Physics I.7 191a14). For example, someone takes on the form of being musical only from previously having the privation of being unmusical. However, he also states that “shape and nature are spoken of in two ways, for the privation too is in a way form” (Physics II.1 193b19). I will demonstrate that these seemingly contradictory statements are not actually in tension. Since all perceptible matter must be enformed, we would (...) have trouble discussing things that have yet to undergo generation, like menstrual fluid, and things that have undergone corruption, like corpses, if we did not cite the privation as a sort of form. I will argue that, given his commitment to hylomorphism, Aristotle is committed to privation being a form in a qualified sense. It cannot be a form in an unqualified sense because privation often spoils the matter such that it can no longer be reformed. The fact of the matter is we cannot draw a bright line between privation and form because the two are contraries and can be said to hold to different degrees at different points on a spectrum. (shrink)

In this essay, I respond to a problem raised by Sarah Broadie in her 1987 article “Nature, Craft and Phronesis in Aristotle.” Broadie analyzes Aristotle’s famous craft analogy for natural causation in order to determine whether or not it requires importing a psychological dimension to natural teleology. She argues that it is possible to make sense of the analogy without psychology, but that the tradeoff is a conception of craft so thoroughly de-psychologized that it is rendered unrecognizable, perhaps even incoherent (...) as a referent. I dispute this suggestion and argue, rather, that Aristotle’s insistence on removing psychology from the craft side of the analogy points to his prioritization of techne itself, rather than any particular craftsman, as primary efficient agent. The lack of psychology that characterizes a techne ensures stability and reliability in the causal process that could not be guaranteed by the idiosyncratic psychologies of various craftspeople. The same kind of stability and reliability belong to nature as an efficient cause, forming the basis of the comparison between craft and natural teleology. It is therefore the craft, not the craftsman, that must stand as analog to nature. I demonstrate the value of this revision by applying the analogy to the case of natural teleology: reproduction as depicted in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals. The result is a reading of Aristotle’s analogies that can assuage Broadie’s concerns and allow for a natural thing’s own nature to more fully inhabit its intended role as an inner source of change. (shrink)

The scientific study of consciousness or subjective experiencing is a rapidly expanding research program engaging philosophers of mind, psychologists, cognitive scientists, neurobiologists, evolutionary biologists and biosemioticians. Here we outline an evolutionary approach that we have developed over the last two decades, focusing on the evolutionary transition from non-conscious to minimally conscious, subjectively experiencing organisms. We propose that the evolution of subjective experiencing was driven by the evolution of learning and we identify an open-ended, representational, generative and recursive form of associative (...) learning, which we call Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL), as an evolutionary transition marker of minimal consciousness. This evolutionary marker provides evidence that the evolutionary transition to consciousness has gone to completion and allows reverse-engineering from this learning capacity to the system that enables it – making possible the construction of a toy model of UAL. The model allows us to identify some of the key processes and structures that constitute minimal consciousness, points its taxonomic distribution and the ecological context in which it first emerged, highlights its function and suggests a framework for exploring developmental and evolutionary modifications of consciousness. We point to ways of experimentally testing the relationship between UAL and consciousness in human and in non-human animals and discuss the theoretical and ethical implications of our approach. The framework we offer allows the exploration of the evolutionary changes in agency, value systems, selective processes and goals that were involved in the transition to subjective experiencing from a perspective that resonates with the approaches of bio-semioticians. (shrink)

This article examines Aristotle's views concerning the possibility of friendship between human beings and nonhuman animals. The suggestion that he denies this possibility is rejected. I reassess the textual evidence adduced by scholars in support of this reading, while adding new material for discussion. Central to the traditional reading is the assumption that animals, in Aristotle's view, cannot be friends in virtue of their cognitive limitations. I argue that Aristotle's account of animal cognition is perfectly consistent with the possibility of (...) friendship between human beings and nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Throughout history, women and men have been seen as "opposites" in various respects. Examples from the writings of political theorists illustrate this point, while Virginia Woolf is shown to have departed radically from the general tendency to dichotomize sexual difference. Further, this "need" to dichotomize sexual differences contributes to anxiety about and stigmatization of homosexuality. As the social salience of gender becomes reduced, it is to be expected that hostility to homosexuality will decline.

This paper explores the anatomical foundations of Aristotle's natural philosophy. Rather than simply looking at the body, he contrives specific procedures for revealing unmanifest phenomena. In some cases, these interventions seem extensive enough to qualify as experiments. At the work bench, one can observe the parts of animals in the manner Aristotle describes, even if his descriptions seem at odds with 20th century textbooks. Manipulating animals allows us to recover his teleological thought more fully. This consideration of Aristotle as a (...) sophisticated biologist helps our reading of his writings in other areas of philosophy. (shrink)

How many individuals are present where we see a pregnant individual? Within a substance ontological framework, there are exactly two possible answers to this question. The standard answer—two individuals—is typically championed by scholars endorsing the predominant Containment View of pregnancy, according to which the foetus resides in the gestating organism like in a container. The alternative answer—one individual—has recently found support in the Parthood View, according to which the foetus is a part of the gestating organism. Here I propose a (...) third answer: a pregnant individual is neither two individuals nor one individual but something in between one and two. This is because organisms are better understood as processes than as substances. With a special focus on the Parthood View, I explain why a Process View of pregnancy, according to which a pregnant individual is a bifurcating hypercomplex process, surpasses the substance ontological approaches. (shrink)

Eldred offers a remedy to the consequences of ancient Greek misconceptions of time that are also entrenched in today’s mathematized physics. Here time is spatialized as the one-dimensionally linear ‘arrow of time’ for the sake of predicting and controlling movement. But such spatialized time distorts the phenomenon of time itself. An alternative, hermeneutic-phenomenological path begins with a pre-spatial concept of time that is genuinely three-dimensional. This paves the way for recasting who we are as humans in belonging, first of all, (...) to the free openness of 3D-temporality. This belonging enables temporally 3D-vision of the psyche that empowers us to see movement at all and reconcile its inherent contradictoriness. We are then also able to conceive ourselves no longer merely as internally cogitating, self-conscious subjects, but as engaged existentially in temporally 3D-interplay, mutually estimating and esteeming who we are. This unpredictable interplay is constrained, however, by being played out in the sociating medium of thingified value, the accumulative movement of thingified value having gained the upper hand in dictating our life-movements as well as our interplay with the earth. (shrink)

Gabrielle Suchon’s Treatise on Ethics and Politics offers surprising descriptions of sexual difference for an ostensibly feminist work. Stereotypically feminine traits—such as excessive emotions, chattiness, and deception—are compared to earthquakes, storms, wildfire, and apparitions. Although these descriptions may seem off-putting to modern readers, I argue that in offering these unflattering descriptions of women, Suchon is making a novel intervention in debates about the nature of sexual difference. In the Renaissance and Early Modern period, the salient question about feminine difference was (...) whether it was a preternatural deformity, and specifically a monstrosity. While most pro-woman authors argued that women were not preternatural, Suchon argues the affirmative, claiming that “persons of the sex are true wonders.” In doing so, Suchon presses on a tension at the heart of scholastic conceptions of women while also provoking an emotional response that might encourage men to reconsider whether patriarchal practices are truly to their advantage. (shrink)

The case of embryo research provides insight into the challenges for historians and philosophers of science who want to engage social issues, and even more challenges in engaging society. Yet there are opportunities in doing so. History and philosophy of science research demonstrates that the public impression of embryos does not fit with our scientific understanding. In cases where there are competing understandings of the phenomena and public impacts, we have to negotiate social responses. Historians and philosophers of science can (...) both inform and learn from engaging in the process, by helping to recognize underlying assumptions and by demonstrating changing ideas over time and what factors have caused the changes. (shrink)

This essay pursues Gilbert Durand’s plea for a new anthropological spirit that would overcome the bureaucracy-or-madness dichotomy which has since Nietzsche left its imprint upon contemporary thought, forcing it to choose between an “Apollonian” ontology established upon some kind of first principle and a “Dionysian” ontology consisting in the erasure of any founding norm. It does so by reclaiming Dionysus and Apollo’s original twin-ness and dual affirmation in dialogue with contemporary anthropological theory, especially Roy Wagner’s thesis on the interplay of (...) “elicitation” and “containment” in sociocultural life. What would happen then, I ask, if we were to reimagine today’s philosophical game – which after Heidegger Deleuze, and Derrida turns variously and increasingly around subtraction – otherwise: as a chiastic board on which Apollo would cut Dionysus’s continuum, which Dionysus would in turn restore despite Apollo’s cuts, and on which the obliteration of any of the two gods would entail the inevitable dismemberment of the other? Accordingly, I offer a full reassessment of Dionysus’s and Apollo’s complementary roles in ancient-Greek culture in discussion not only with Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy but also with Ihab Hassan’s postmodern critique of Orpheus. All of it less with the purpose of putting forward a new metaphysics than with the intent of restating the translucent-ness that keeps together reality and thought against any claim that they are either transparent or opaque to one another. (shrink)

The Renaissance witnessed a proliferation in medical discourse, pedagogical illustration, and popular rhetoric – what I refer to here as “metaphoric botanies” – comparing the human fœtus, or embryo, to a plant. Far from being a mere linguistic inheritance from ancient medicine, such “metaphoric botanies” not only allowed early moderns to conceive of the unobservable development of the human fœtus, but also emphasized the relation of the mother to the unborn child. Much of the “metaphoric botanies” surrounding the fœtus throughout (...) the Renaissance analogize its development to that of a plant “rooting” itself in the mother’s uterus, through which it receives sustenance. Though feminist scholarship has made the important argument that such language has historically been utilized in debates surrounding abortion, these “botanies” might also be placed within a certain representational tradition, through which it might be understood as a meditation on species-being and -continuation in a period fraught with epistemological and metaphysical uncertainty. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a running dispute between Werner Callebaut’s naturalistic view and Filip Kolen and Gertrudis Van de Vijver’s transcendentalist view on the nature of philosophy of biology and the relation of this discipline to biological sciences. It is argued that, despite differences in opinion, both positions agree that philosophy of biology’s ultimate goal is to ‘move’ biology or at least be ‘meaningful’ to it. In order to make this goal clear and effective, more is needed than a polarizing (...) debate which hardly touches upon biology. Therefore, a redirection in discussion is suggested towards a reflection on the possibilities of incorporating philosophy in interdisciplinary research, and on finding concrete research questions which are of interest both to the philosopher and to the biologist. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the level of gender bias in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals while exercising due care in the analysis of its arguments. I argue that while the GA theory is clearly sexist, the traditional interpretation fails to diagnose the problem correctly. The traditional interpretation focuses on three main sources of evidence: (1) Aristotle’s claim that the female is, as it were, a “disabled” (πεπηρωμένον) male; (2) the claim at GA IV.3, 767b6-8 that females are (...) a departure from the kind; and (3) Aristotle’s supposed claim at GA IV.3, 768a21-8 that the most ideal outcome of reproduction is a male offspring that perfectly resembles its father. I argue that each of these passages has either been misunderstood or misrepresented by commentators. In none of these places is Aristotle suggesting that females are imperfect members of the species or that they result from the failure to achieve some teleological goal. I defend the view that the GA does not see reproduction as occurring for the sake of producing males; rather, what sex an embryo happens to become is determined entirely by non-teleological forces operating through material necessity. This interpretation is consistent with Aristotle’s view in GA II.5 that females have the same soul as the male (741a7) as well as the argument in Metaphysics X.9 that sexual difference is not part of the species form but is an affection (πάθος) arising from the matter (1058b21-4). While the traditional interpretation has tended to exaggerate the level of sexism in Aristotle’s
developmental biology, the GA is by no means free of gender bias as some recent scholarship has claimed. In the final section of the paper I point to one passage where Aristotle clearly falls back on sexist assumptions in order to answer the difficult question, “Why are animals divided into sexes?”. I argue that this passage in particular poses a serious challenge
to anyone attempting to absolve Aristotle’s developmental biology of the charge of sexism. (shrink)

It is widely felt that the sorts of ideas current in modern laterality and split-brain research are largely without precedent in the behavioral and brain sciences. This paper not only challenges that view, but makes a first attempt to define the relevance of older concepts and data to present research programs.

Mary Midgley famously compares philosophy to plumbing. In both cases we are dealing with complex systems that underlie the everyday life of a community, and in both cases we often fail to notice their existence until things start to smell a bit fishy. Philosophy, like plumbing, is performed by particular people at particular times, and it is liable to be done in a way that suits the needs of those people and those whom they serve. I employ Mary Midgley's philosophy (...) and biography to explore the importance of a diversity of voices for academic philosophy, and for society as a whole. (shrink)

Reclamation work denotes the process of uncovering the lost contributions of women to the philosophy of education, analyzing their works, making them accessible to a larger audience, and (re)introducing them to the historical record and canon. Since the 1970s, scholars have been engaged in the reclamation work, thus making available to students, professors, and researchers a rich and varied perspective for tracing the evolution of educational thought. This article shares the responses of undergraduate and graduate students to discussing the reclamation (...) work and canonical formation in their Philosophy of Education course. Two of the benefits most commonly cited by students involve learning a fuller, more accurate picture of history and ameliorating contemporary gender inequity. We assert that the traditional canon and syllabi for Philosophy of Education and Social Foundation courses could be enriched through the inclusion of works that trace the tradition of women's intellectual thought. (shrink)

Reason has regularly been portrayed and understood in terms of images and metaphors that involve the exclusion or denigration of some element-body, passion, nature, instinct-that is cast as "feminine." Drawing upon philosophical insight into metaphor, I examine the impact of this gendering of reason. I argue that our conceptions of mind, reason, unreason, female, and male have been distorted. The politics of "rational" discourse has been set up in ways that still subtly but powerfully inhibit the voice and agency of (...) women. (shrink)

The Middle Included is a systematic exploration of the meanings of logos throughout Aristotle’s work. It claims that the basic meaning is “gathering,” a relation that holds its terms together without isolating them or collapsing one to the other. This meaning also applies to logos in the sense of human language. Aristotle describes how some animals are capable of understanding non-firsthand experience without being able to relay it, while others relay it without understanding. Aygün argues that what distinguishes human language, (...) for Aristotle, is its ability to both understand and relay firsthand and non-firsthand experiences. This ability is key to understanding the human condition: science, history, news media, propaganda, gossip, utopian fiction, and sophistry, as well as philosophy. Ömer Aygün finds Aristotle’s name for this peculiar but crucial human ability of “gathering” both experiences is logos, and this leads to a claim about the specificity of human rationality and language. (shrink)

At the heart of this essay lies the problem of Christian universals.Sin-talk is arguably Christian theology’s primary contribution to any account of the human condition. Fashionable or unfashionabl...

In the treatise called La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne co’ diffetti et mancamenti de gli uomini Lucrezia Marinella claims that women are superior to men. She argues that men are excessively hot, and that heat in a high degree is detrimental to the intellectual and moral capacities of a person. The aim of this paper is to set out Marinella’s views on temperature differences in the bodies of men and women and the effects of bodily constitution on the capacities (...) necessary for political deliberation and rule. I situate Marinella’s argument in the context of an ongoing debate about physiological differences between the sexes, begun in antiquity and extending into the Renaissance. That debate is important for several reasons: as part of a broader discussion of the nature and worth of women, as determining influential interpretations of ancient authorities on matters of physiology, and as anticipating later discussions of the relation between the sexed body and political roles. This paper considers Marinella in dialogue with a number of interlocutors, elements of whose work can be found in her own: Aristotle, Mario Equicola, Galeazzo Flavio Capra, Ludovico Domenichi and Torquato Tasso. (shrink)

Historical progress has largely been described in terms of the power to order social and ecological realities according to the interests of a few. Their concepts, images, and metaphors have transmitted knowledge (both explicit and tacit) that has come to be regarded as received wisdom. This kind of power, which has shaped (as well as described) history, has belonged primarily to men; whereas women's nature and, accordingly, their power have been defined primarily in terms of sexuality. Men's control of women's (...) sexuality is therefore the source of the disqualification of women as free agents‐that is, as significant participants in, say, scientific and religious meaning‐giving processes. Thus morality requires reevaluation of our assumptions about human nature. Most importantly, it demands that female sexuality be considered within the context of rationality and spirituality. (shrink)

Goethe’s studies of natural form have occupied generations of scholars and the discussion on the relationship between Goethe’s thought and evolutionary theory has never ceased since Haeckel’s claims in the late nineteenth century. In scholarship which has aimed to address the question of change in Goethe’s concept of nature, the focus has been primarily on his scientific writings. Aiming for a comprehensive understanding of Goethe’s thought on reproduction, this article sets out to contribute to the ongoing debate by focusing on (...) his literary text The New Melusine, a story centred on a dwarf figure. Examining texts by naturalists such as Buffon, Humboldt, and Darwin, the article demonstrates how Goethe, in the speculative framework of a literary text, explores patterns of transformation by means of sexual reproduction which did not make it into his better known scientific writings on plant morphology and comparative anatomy. I argue that the Melusine story becomes for Goethe a space to consider a new understanding of reproduction, its transformative power, and biopolitical possibilities, while at the same time providing an opportunity to reflect critically on its consequences for the individual. (shrink)