Animals in the World: Five Essays on Aristotle's Biology (SUNY in Ancient Greek Philosophy)

## ANIMALS IN THE WORLD all. Thus, the politics and the biology of Aristotle, two domains in which I have worked primarily during my career, seem to me today to be in different situations. As for Aristotle's politics, I decided that it was still possible (for how long is another question) to write a work of synthesis, and that is what I tried to do in Endangered Excellence. 4 That work took the place of another project, that of publishing a collection of articles, more or less revised, of some of those that I had dedicated to Aristotelian politics. Since I also had, as an editor had suggested to me, the project of bringing together articles on Aristotle's biology, I wondered whether I could do for the biology what I had done for the politics. But very quickly the project seemed to me impossible: the extraordinary increase of publications on the subject, specialized analyses more and more profound and subtle that interpreters have provided, made it, in my opinion, impossible, at least for me, to take up again the project that Anthony Preus had successfully carried out in 1975, that of publishing a synthetic work on Aristotle's biology. 5 But I had no intention of publishing a specialized work, so I chose an intermediate solution: deal with the questions that seemed to me important for the understanding of Aristotle's texts dedicated to animals, these questions being chosen, on a purely subjective basis, as those which have particularly interested me in the course of my studies these last forty years. There are five such questions, with a chapter dedicated to each. This little book turns on two problems-the first being that of knowing whether one may attribute to Aristotle "a biology, " the second of judging to what point the idea of perfection applies, for him, to the world of living things. But the work itself is constructed in overlapping layers: the first and third chapters ask whether Aristotle could be considered as the creator of a true biological thought, while the second chapter, which asks about the form given by Aristotle to teleology, finds a natural continuation in the last two chapters, which turn on the idea of perfection, chapter 4 examining the relationships between perfection and diversity and chapter 5 the modeling function of a particular living thing, the human being. If we must isolate the most general and fecund result that this study tries to establish, we may say that it tries to show how much, on fundamental points, Aristotle differentiated himself from what we may 4. Contents 6 Introduction 8 Chapter 1 Is There an Aristotelian Biology? 14 Aristotle and Nineteenth-Century Biology 16 Aristotle and Cuvier 19 Some Remarks on Aristotle’s Biological Corpus 31 The Relationships between the History of Animals and the Parts of Animals 34 An Impossible Chronology 39 Chapter 2 The New Horizon of Teleology 58 The Historical Background 62 Aristotle’s Solution and Its Consequences for His Teleology 68 “Many Things Happen because It Is Necessary” 78 Hypothetical Necessity 81 The Two Natures 101 Nature’s Excellence 112 Chapter 3 A Philosophy of Life? 118 The Nutritive Soul 125 Sexual Generation and the Female Material 131 Spontaneous Generation 150 A General Theory of Homoiomeries? 171 Chapter 4 Diversity 186 What the Word “Animal” Names 190 Continuity and Diversity, Perfection and Harmony 207 The Revenge of the Special on the General 233 Chapter 5 Animal Nature and Human Nature 244 Animal Pleasure, Human Pleasure 269 Sheep and Men 290 Conclusion 298 Bibliography 312 Editions of Aristotle 312 Works and Articles 313 Index 320 References to Aristotle’s Works 326 In Animals in the World , renowned Aristotle scholar Pierre Pellegrin attempts to demonstrate that Aristotle, by proposing an original version of natural perfection, opposes the whole of the Greek tradition. Nature is perfect, not only in its harmony of a complete and well-organized whole, but also because it brings together functionally perfect individuals. "Five innovative essays demonstrating how Aristotle's biology is an integral part of Aristotle's understanding of the universe"-- Provided by publisher