Scott O'Connor

In GC I.1 Aristotle criticizes the monists and pluralists for accepting positions that eliminate either generation or alteration, and in GC I.4 he defends the existence of both. Thus, he must believe that his account is immune to those objections he raises against his predecessors, but it is difficult to reconstruct these objections, and so difficult to discern how Aristotle distinguishes his own account from theirs. In this paper, I propose a new reconstruction of these objections, and I show how Aristotle’s own account is immune to them so reconstructed. On my interpretation, Aristotle argues that neither the monists nor the pluralists can explain the generation of a substance. The monists cannot explain how an ultimate subject of predication–one mark of substance–is generated. The pluralists cannot explain how a being that can alter–another mark of substance–is generated. I subsequently show how Aristotle’s own account in GC I.4 sufficiently diverges from his predecessors to allow something that is both generable and alterable.

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