Charlotte Witt

There is a surprising number of deformed animal kinds mentioned in Aristotle’s biological works. The number is surprising because, according to the standard understanding of deformed animals in Aristotle, it should be zero. And the number is significant because there are just too many deformed kinds at too many classificatory levels mentioned in too many works to dismiss them as a minor aberration or as an infiltration of folk belief into biology proper. This paper has two goals. The first is to develop an interpretation of deformed animal kinds in Aristotle, which focuses on the meaning of deformity applied to kinds. To my knowledge there is no adequate interpretation of the meaning of deformity applied to kinds in the scholarly literature

This book develops an account of what substance is in terms of the notion of independence. As the authors note, there is a tradition of defining substance as independent that begins with Aristotle. But what notion of independence can provide an adequate definition of substance? The authors find traditional attempts to define independence, including Aristotle’s, inadequate on a number of grounds, and they propose an alternative account. As a preface to this undertaking, the authors consider and reject a number of standard objections to their project, and as an afterword, they argue that the notion of spiritual substance is as intelligible as the notion of material substance.

Aristotle's doctrines about accidental predication, Accidental identity, Etc., Can be understood as an attempt to state the same view as russell put forward in his theory of descriptions. "a" is predicated accidentally of b when "a to b" has the sense "something that is a is b." this permits scope distinctions which can solve puzzles like that of the masked man, And sophisms involving tense. Aristotle's claim that accidental being is akin to nonexistence resembles russell's account of the present king of france as a logical fiction

“How can it be that the female is both functional and a failure?”. Sophia Connell’s response comes in the form of a careful, thorough, and philosophically sensitive interpretation of Aristotle’s treatise on animal generation. By pursuing the topic of what Aristotle says about female animals and their role in reproduction, Connell casts light into many difficult corners of his theory: What does it mean to say that the male is the “hê archê [tês] kinêseos” of the generation? How should we think of the motions in the semen that “construct” the embryo? Are these motions the same? According to Connell, they are not. The efficient cause of the generation is the male; he is the origin...

292 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:2 APRIL ~996 Huffman gives an excellent discussion of Philolaus' place in the development of Presocratic discussions of archai and hypotheses; and he reconstructs Philolaus' cosmogony and embryology, showing how Philolaus generates the cosmos and individ- ual living things within it from analogous principles, the central fire of the cosmos and the vital heat of an animal. Huffman places Philolaus' "literally eccentric world-view" in the context of this cosmogony, while at the same time vindicating its mathematical good sense. Huffman's reconstruc- tion of Philolaus is an important contribution to understanding the Presocratic activity of writing peri phuseOs, both in reasoning to the arch~ and in explaining how the cosmos and living beings are generated from it. Restoring Philolaus to his place in the history of Presocratic philosophy helps us understand that history as a whole; though more remains to be said..

At one point in this engaging collection of essays, G. E. R. Lloyd describes Aristotle's "sense of the interdependence of philosophical analysis and detailed empirical investigation", a description which fits the author himself. Lloyd is sensitive to the peculiarities of Aristotle's texts without sinking so deeply into their oddities that they lose focus and theoretical interest. With admirable lucidity Lloyd lays out the complex requirements of Aristotle's "official" theory of scientific demonstration, and then discusses the ways in which Aristotle's scientific practice sometimes fits, and sometimes influences, the theory. Lloyd provides a pluralist interpretation of Aristotelian scientific method, and then demonstrates the ways Aristotle complicates his theory in order to fit the messy natural world.

when it is actually heating water; an object is perceptible only when it is actually being 1 perceived-- and so on. But, it is part of the notion of a causal power that it exists whether or not it is active. In order to respond to this challenge Aristotle draws a distinction between two ways of being a power; when it is active the power exists actually; when it is inactive it exists potentially. Contemporary writers have noted that we need a way of understanding powers that includes their present but inactive existence, although Aristotle’s ontological response to this difficulty might seem wrong-headed or unnecessary. One objectionable aspect to his solution is the inherently teleological relationship between being x potentially and being x actually. Second, Aristotle does not draw an ontological distinction between those powers that operate with reason, and those that do not. He does provide different conditions of realization for the two kinds of powers, but those conditions are variants within the same ontology of causal powers. In this regard, Aristotle offers one possible realist framework of causal powers that sees human action on a continuum with the physical sciences rather than as categorically different from them, and therefore requiring an entirely different explanatory framework. It is important to note, however, that Aristotle’s paradigmatic physical science is biology and his framework for understanding natural living beings is teleological. Perhaps a better way to put this is that Aristotle’s understanding of the physical sciences is entirely different from ours, and it is a good question how relevant Aristotle’s unified framework of causal powers is given current conceptions of the physical sciences, and the centrality of physics and chemistry as models of the physical sciences. The common theme that unites both of these aspects of Aristotle’s ontology of causal powers is the central presence of teleology.