Scott O'Connor

Aristotle uses 'body' to describe the matter of animals, the elements and what they compose, as well as magnitudes extended in three-dimensions. These last bodies belong to the category of quantity, alongside surfaces and lines. It is this notion of body that interests Christian Pfeiffer, who presents Aristotle's various discussions of it as one exhaustive theory of body. According to this theory, magnitudes are form-matter composites, where boundaries are forms and extensions are matter. The boundary of a body is its particular shape and its extension is its volume. It follows that Socrates destroys his body and gains another by standing up (since the shape of the sitting and standing bodies, and thus the bodies...

In Physics I.8, Aristotle outlines and responds to an Eleatic argument against the reality of change. I defend a new reading according to which the argu- ment assumes Predicational Monism, the claim that each being can possess only one property. In Phys. I.2, Aristotle responds to Predicational Monism, which he attributes to the Eleatics; I argue that he uses this response to distinguish coin- cidental from non-coincidental becoming, a distinction he employs in Phys I.8 to resolve the argument against the reality of change. The Eleatics’ acceptance of Predicational Monism, I argue, explains why this distinction is unavailable to them.

In 'Physics' I.7, Aristotle claims that plants and animals are generated from sperma. Since most understood sperma to be an ovum, this claim threatens to undermine the standard view that, for Aristotle, the matter natural beings are generated from persists through their generation. By focusing on Aristotle’s discussion of sperma in the first book of the 'Generation of Animals', I show that, for Aristotle, sperma in the female is surplus blood collected in the uterus and not an ovum. I subsequently argue that, for Aristotle, this blood does persist through the production of the fetus