•  160
    [penultimate draft; prepared for publication in Aristotle’s Parts of Animals: A Critical Guide, ed. Sophia Connell – please cite final version] Parts of Animals II.10 makes a new beginning in Aristotle’s study of animals. In it, Aristotle proposes to “now speak as if we are once more at an origin, beginning first with those things that are primary” (655b28-9). This is the start of his account of the non-uniform parts of blooded animals: parts such as eyes, noses, mouths, etc., as opposed to uni…Read more
  •  120
    I offer a fresh interpretation of the dialectical strategy of Physics 2.8’s arguments that things in nature happen for the sake of something. Whereas many recent interpreters have concluded that these arguments inevitably beg the question against Aristotle’s opponents, I argue that they constitute a careful attempt to build common ground with an opponent who rejects Aristotle’s basic worldview. This common ground, first articulated in the famous Winter Rain Argument, takes the form of an intrigu…Read more
  •  81
    Aristotle on Spontaneous Generation, Spontaneity, and Natural Processes
    Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 58. 2020.
    Aristotle contrasts standard animal generation with ‘spontaneous generation’, which happens when some material putrefies and gives rise to a new organism. This paper addresses two interrelated puzzles about spontaneous generation. First, is it of the same ‘fundamental kind’ of causal process as standard generation? Second, is it ‘spontaneous’, as understood in Physics 2.4–6: rare, accidentally caused, and among things that are for the sake of something? I argue that both puzzles turn on the same…Read more
  •  50
    In Physics 2.4–6, Aristotle offers an account of things that happen “by luck” and “spontaneously”. Many of these things are what we might think of as “lucky breaks”: cases where things go well for us, even though we don’t expect them to. In Physics 2.5, Aristotle illustrates this idea with the case of a man who goes to the market for some reason unrelated to collecting a debt he is owed. While he is there, this man just so happens to run into his debtor and get his money back—which is what he “w…Read more
  •  49
    Aristotle claims that just as a builder uses ‘tools’ to build a house, so too the soul ‘use[s] heat and coldness as tools’ to build an animal (Generation of Animals 740b25–34). I consider two questions about this claim: (1) what sorts of things does the soul use, and what is it for things like them to be organized? and (2) what philosophical work does this sort of organization do in Aristotle’s account of animal generation? I argue that the soul needs flexible intermediate agents, that it organi…Read more
  •  42
    Devin Henry’s excellent book takes on Aristotle’s theory of substantial generation. Substantial generation is the sort of “unqualified” change in which a substance comes to be: it is what happens when Socrates comes to be, rather than when he grows a centimetre taller (1). Henry’s overarching argument is that “Aristotle employs a single model of generation throughout the corpus”: the hylomorphic model. This argument comes in two stages. Chapters 2-4 introduce the three principles of the hylomorp…Read more
  •  40
    Review of Aristotle on sexual difference: metaphysics, biology, politics, by Marguerite Deslauriers (review)
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    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 these…Read more
  •  35
    In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume defines a belief as "a lively idea related to or associated with a present impression".1 He offers variations on this definition throughout the work, writing, for instance, that "belief is a more vivid and intense conception of an idea, proceeding from its relation to a present impression" and that his "general position" is "that an opinion or belief is nothing but a strong and lively idea deriv'd from a present impression related to it". Lest his readers mi…Read more
  •  15
    Review of Sean Kelsey, Mind and World in Aristotle's De Anima (review)
    Philosophical Review 132 (3): 491-4. 2023.
    Here is a fact about humans: we use our senses to pick up on things around us and our intellect to understand whatever is out there to be understood. In Mind and World in Aristotle’s De Anima, Kelsey argues that this fact is, in Aristotle’s view, in need of an explanation. He finds one in De Anima 3.8’s suggestion that “intelligence [is] form of forms, and sensibility form of sensibilia” (432a2–3; quoted on p. 2). Roughly, his proposal is that our sensibility and intelligence “enter into the ver…Read more