Aristotle (in)famously claims that “femaleness” is “as it were a deformity”, though “natural” (GA 4.6, 775a15-6), and that women’s deliberative faculties are “without authority” (Pol. 1.13, 1260a14). How are these claims – one biological, one political – to be understood? How (if at all) do they fit together? And how can Aristotle make them while also holding – as he seems to – that females are somehow valuable? -/- Deslauriers’ impressive new book takes on these questions. It defends two main (...) theses. The first concerns Aristotle’s biological and political accounts of sexual difference and the questions they address. It is that while Aristotle does think females are inferior to males, in both domains, his project is nevertheless to figure out why it is better to have them around: to show why sexual difference is good. This allows Deslauriers to defend her second thesis: that there is a connection between those domains. (shrink)

This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle's account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Shame is shown to provide motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.

Aristotle claims that in making an animal, nature acts like a “good housekeeper” who “is accustomed to throw out nothing from which it is possible to make something useful” (744b16–17). How does nature act when it “make[s] something useful” in these cases – and does it differ from other ways it acts? I defend two main claims. The first is that Meteor. 4.2’s distinction between two sorts of ‘concoction’ processes offers an underappreciated source of evidence for answering this question. My (...) second claim concerns the nature of those processes and the ends they realize. While they are both the ends of their respective types of concoction, they differ in that some essential (process-defining) features of the second end – but not the first – are supplied by what the capacities of the “underlying” patient (on which the agent acts) are for. The result is a distinction between two kinds of end-directed efficient causation. (shrink)