Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology

477 Pages·1987·20.36 MB·English

by  Allan Gotthelf

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN ARISTOTLE'S BIOLOGY
... there are gods here too.
(PA i. 645a2i)
PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES
IN ARISTOTLE'S
BIOLOGY
EDITED BY
Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox
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First published 1987
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Philosophical issues in Aristotle's biology.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
1. Biology—Philosophy. 2. Biology—Philosophy-
History. 3. Aristotle. I. Gotthelf, Allan, 1942-
II. Lennox, James G.
qh331.p465 1987 574'-Oi 86-24423
ISBN 978-0-521-32582-0 Hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-31091-8 Paperback
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Contents
Notes on contributors page vii
Preface xi
Introduction
r
I Biology and philosophy: an overview
Introduction 5
1 The place of biology in Aristotle's philosophy,
D. M. BALME 9
2 Aristotle's biological universe: an overview,
MONTGOMERY FURTH 21
3 Empirical research in Aristotle's biology, G. E. R. LLOYD 53
II Definition and demonstration: theory and
practice
Introduction 65
4 Aristotle's use of division and differentiae, D. M. BALME 69
5 Divide and explain: the Posterior Analytics in practice,
JAMES G. LENNOX 90
6 Definition and scientific method in Aristotle's Posterior
Analytics and Generation of Animals, ROBERT BOLTON 120
7 First principles in Aristotle's Parts of Animals,
ALLAN GOTTHELF I 67
III Teleology and necessity in nature
Introduction 199
8 Aristotle's conception of final causality,
ALLAN GOTTHELF 204
9 Hypothetical necessity and natural teleology,
JOHN M. COOPER 243
10 Teleology and necessity, D. M. BALME 275
vi Contents
TV Metaphysical themes
Introduction 287
11 Aristotle's biology was not essentialist, D. M. BALME 291
Appendix 1 Note on the aporia in Metaphysics Z 302
Appendix 2 The snub 306
12 Logical difference and biological difference: the unity of
Aristotle's thought, PIERRE PELLEGRIN 313
13 Kinds, forms of kinds, and the more and the less in
Aristotle's biology, JAMES G. LENNOX 339
14 Animals and other beings in Aristotle, L. A. KOSMAN 360
15 Aristotle on bodies, matter, and potentiality,
CYNTHIA A. FREELAND 392
16 Aristotle on the place of mind in nature,
WILLIAM CHARLTON 408
List of works cited 424
Index locorum 431
General index 453
Notes on contributors
DAVID M. BALME is Professor Emeritus of Classics at Queen Mary
College, University of London, and former Fellow of Clare College
and Jesus College, Cambridge. He is the author of Aristotle's De
Partibus Animalium IandDe Generatione Animalium I (Oxford 1972; repr.
1986). He has published numerous articles on Aristotle's biology,
natural philosophy and metaphysics, and has edited and translated
Aristotle: Historia Animalium VII-X in the Loeb Classical Library
(forthcoming). He is currently at work on a critical edition, with
commentary, of the whole of HA for Cambridge University Press.
ROBERT BOLTON is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers
University, and has taught at Michigan, MIT, Pittsburgh, and
Virginia. He studied ancient philosophy with Gregory Vlastos at
Princeton, where he was awarded the McCosh Prize for a thesis on
Plato, and with G. E. L. Owen at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He
has published articles on Aristotle's scientific method and philosophy
of language in classical and philosophical journals.
WILLIAM CHARLTON is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University
of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is author of Aristotle's Physics Books I and
II (Oxford 1970) and Aesthetics, An Introduction (London 1970), and
numerous articles and reviews on ancient philosophy, metaphysics,
and aesthetics.
JOHN M. COOPER is Professor and Chairman, Department of Philos-
ophy, Princeton University and author of Reason and Human Good in
Aristotle (Cambridge, Mass. 1975) and many articles and reviews in
classical and philosophical journals.
CYNTHIA A. FREELAND is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Uni-
versity of Houston, having taught for eight years at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has published articles on Aris-
totle's natural philosophy and philosophy of action, and is currently
working on a book on Aristotle's philosophy of science. In addition
vii
viii Notes on contributors
to her work in ancient philosophy, she has written on topics in
aesthetics and psychoanalysis.
MONTGOMERY FURTH is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has written on Frege, Leibniz,
the Eleatics and Aristotle, and has recently published a translation
of the central books of Aristotle's Metaphysics (Indianapolis 1985). His
Substance, Form and Psyche: an Aristotelean Metaphysics, from which the
extract in this volume is taken, is forthcoming from Cambridge
University Press. At present he is working on a book about the
Presocratics.
ALLAN GOTTHELF (co-editor) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Trenton State College, and life member, Clare Hall, Cambridge. He
is editor of Aristotle on Nature and Living Things (Pittsburgh and
Bristol 1985), the Festschrift for David Balme, and organizer or
co-organizer of several international conferences on the philo-
sophical significance of Aristotle's biology. He has published articles
and reviews on ancient philosophy, chiefly on Aristotle and
Theophrastus.
L. ARYEH KOSMAN is Professor and Chairman, Department of Phil-
osophy, Haverford College and former Junior Fellow of the Center
for Hellenic Studies. He is the author of many articles on the
philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle.
JAMES G. LENNOX (co-editor) is Associate Professor of History and
Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. A former
Junior Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies and Fellow of the
Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, he
has published numerous articles and reviews in the history and
philosophy of biology, especially on Aristotle's philosophy and
biology.
G. E. R. LLOYD is Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the
University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, where he
has taught since i960. He has published numerous books and articles
on topics in ancient philosophy and science, including most recently
Magic, Reason and Experience (1979) and Science, Folklore and Ideology
(1983). The Sather Classical Lectures that he delivered at Berkeley
in 1984 are to be published shortly by University of California Press
under the title The Revolution of Wisdom.
PIERRE PELLEGRIN is Charge de Recherche at the Centre National
de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, and author of La Classification
Notes on contributors ix
des animaux chez Aristote: statut de la biologie et unite de /'Aristotelisme
(Paris 1982; rev. edn. in English translation by A. Preus, Berkeley
1986), and of numerous articles and reviews in Greek philosophy. He
is co-director of an Aristotle fragment translation project in France.