Charlotte Witt

The past twenty five years have seen an explosion of feminist writing on the philosophical canon, a development that has clear parallels in other disciplines like literature and art history. Since most of the writing is, in one way or another, critical of the tradition, a natural question to ask is: Why does the history of philosophy have importance for feminist philosophers? This question assumes that the history of philosophy is of importance for feminists, an assumption that is warranted by the sheer volume of recent feminist writing on the canon. This entry explores the different ways that feminist philosophers are interacting with the Western philosophical tradition

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.