This paper explores the issue of life and its relevance to nursing, through Aristotle's philosophy and an Aristotelian interpretation of Nightingale's Notes on Nursing. Life as process and becoming has ontological status in Aristotle's philosophy and this dynamism is particularly relevant for nursing. The paper presents aspects of Aristotle's philosophy of life: his account of life as inherent powers of the individual, his analysis of change and time, and his understanding of sickness and health as qualitative states of living beings. (...) It is shown how the Greek medical‐philosophical tradition, continued by Galenic medicine and hygiene into modern time, influenced Nightingale's nursing. Individuals' life‐maintaining metabolic relations to their surroundings are investigated through Aristotle and modern philosophy of biology and through Nightingale's nursing emphasis on the patient's relation to her or his immediate surroundings. It is argued that Nightingale's concern is really the processes of individual life, which in sickness necessitate temporally continuous nursing observation. Humans' radical dependency on their surroundings is actualized as interpersonal interdependency. The paper argues that the end of nursing care, the telos for which sake it is practised, is inherent in the individual course of the patients' life. When life processes are affected by sickness, infirmity, medical interventions or mental suffering, individuals need competent help to live – and to live as well as possible. It is suggested that the special responsibility of nursing is to facilitate, relieve and protect individual life continuously during such times. (shrink)

This chapter is an examination of the way aporiai are employed in Aristotle’s scientific account of animal reproduction, and how they are resolved. I argue that – surprising as it may be, given what Aristotle says in Metaphysics B about the importance of going through aporiai – there seems to be nothing of much significance about his use of them, at least if we assume that genuine cases of aporiai are being tracked by use of aporia-language. I demonstrate this negative (...) thesis by systematically going through the examples. There seems to be no common purpose for which they are raised, they have no single type of structure, and they are not caused by any one sort of difficulty. (shrink)

In 'Physics' I.7, Aristotle claims that plants and animals are generated from sperma. Since most understood sperma to be an ovum, this claim threatens to undermine the standard view that, for Aristotle, the matter natural beings are generated from persists through their generation. By focusing on Aristotle’s discussion of sperma in the first book of the 'Generation of Animals', I show that, for Aristotle, sperma in the female is surplus blood collected in the uterus and not an ovum. I subsequently (...) argue that, for Aristotle, this blood does persist through the production of the fetus. (shrink)