The aim of this timely addition to the Cambridge Companion series is, according to the editor, ‘to give an overview of the richness of current research on biological aspects of Aristotle's philosophy’ (p. 9). As stated in the front matter, it is also intended to fill a gap, providing ‘the first full-length comprehensive account of Aristotle's biology, its background, content, and influence’. The volume accomplishes its mission admirably.
Besides the editor's introduction, the collection features eighteen chapters, each offering a brief but instructive overview of the status quaestionis and some advancing the scholarship with fresh theses. The collection opens with Connell's introduction outlining the content and methodology of Aristotle's biology and its reception in modern scholarship. Connell also includes a roadmap of the volume describing the grouping of the chapters (p. 9).
In Chapter 1 M.R. Johnson conducts a productive inquiry into Aristotle's use of biological principles in theology and of theological principles in biology. The following two chapters locate Aristotle's biology in its historical context. In Chapter 2 K. Thein elaborates on Aristotle's dissension with the Presocratics and Plato. Aristotle rejects their idea of ‘a shared causal story that would account for both the origin of the universe and the birth of animals and plants’ (p. 30) and, along with that, their use of analogies between macro- and micro-cosmos (p. 40). Historical context is also crucial to H. Bartoš in Chapter 3, who analyses Aristotle's biology in the light of Greek medicine. He argues against those who minimise the influence of Hippocratic medicine on Aristotle's biology. Although this thesis is not original, Bartoš adds new medical material to the discussion: the Hippocratic texts On Regimen, On Flesh and On Ancient Medicine (p. 49). He also reports an ancient debate Aristotle participated in, between those who held that medicine should draw on natural philosophy and those who favoured a separation between the two. Aristotle sided with the former.
In Chapters 4–6 we learn about Aristotle's explanatory models in biology and additional methodological issues. M. Leunissen explores, in Chapter 4, the role of observation in Aristotle's zoology, especially in HA, and his sensitivity to the right observational conditions (p. 69). But Aristotle was unable to observe many animals directly such ‘as endemic species to Asia and Africa’ (p. 76), often relying on both the observations of others and stories from folk biology – he was also critical of them. D. Henry devotes Chapter 5 to an analysis of the much-discussed (dis)connection between Aristotle's ‘scientific practice’ in his biology – he centres on PA – and his ‘scientific theory’ in A. Po. Aristotle oscillates between two methods: (A) the investigation of animals should proceed ‘species-by-species’; (B) it should first establish common attributes to broader kinds. Those who argue for a continuity between PA and A. Po. take Aristotle to reject (A) while championing (B). Henry disagrees: Aristotle employs both methods, depending on the type of the biological attribute in question. The lesson: to avoid missing such points, we should read Aristotle's ‘biological works in their own right first’ (p. 93). Next, in Chapter 6, J. Gelber examines ‘Teleological Perspectives in Aristotle's Biology’, specifying two main areas where they prevail: biological processes (e.g. animal generation) and facts (e.g. the features of a kind of organism, p. 98). Although teleology permeates Aristotle's biology, there are exceptions (p. 103). She also contends that Aristotle operates in biology with an ‘organism-centred’ (p. 106) notion of teleology: the end of an organism is immanent to it (its ‘flourishing’, p. 108), and not for the sake of another kind.
Chapters 7–11 are also meant to form a unified cluster: Chapter 7 lays out the metaphysical background of ‘the material underpinnings of living capacities as detailed in Chapters 8–11 on nutrition, generation, perception, and self-motion’ (p. 9). As promised, C. Witt discusses Aristotle's view of life from a metaphysical angle in Chapter 7. After showing how traditional readings fail to identify the distinctive mark of life in Aristotle's ontology, she takes a new approach: Aristotle distinguishes not only between ‘categorical kind of beings’, but also between ‘ways of beings’: potential and actual. It is the second distinction that really matters to Aristotle's view of life: life is the actualisation of a being's intrinsic ends or functions (p. 116). In Chapter 8 R.A.H. King offers a careful reconstruction of Aristotle's account of nutrition. He studies its (meta)physical background (e.g. how nutrition is conceived as a kind of change, viz. growth or even as an entelecheia, p. 133) along with its strictly biological dimension (e.g. the function of heat in converting food into blood, pp. 136–8). The question of animal generation, with an emphasis on ‘the differentiated roles of male and female’, is tackled by Connell in Chapter 9, who also deals with Aristotle's theory of hereditary resemblance. She explains both Aristotle's grounds for rejecting traditional models of animal generation (pp. 144–5) and his positive views: sperma is concocted blood produced by the nutritive part of the soul in both progenitors. But each has a different kind of sperma: ‘the male is … more of a generator than the female’ (but see pp. 146–7). This connects with Aristotle's sexism, which, though uncontroversial, should not be exaggerated (p. 151). With Chapter 10 C. Freeland delves into the biological basis of Aristotle's theory of perception, concentrating on his account of proper sensibles and on the exegetical debate between ‘literalists’ (i.e. perception involves a physical assimilation of the sense organ to its object) and ‘spiritualists’ (i.e. perception is a form of awareness that requires no change in the sense organ). She finds a compromise between the two (p. 164). K. Corcilius’ Chapter 11 is devoted to animal agency and self-motion. He first examines the function of the soul as ‘unmoved mover’ of animals’ bodies, then specifies how Aristotle's model of animal motion maps onto his physical theory of motion as comprising three stages: perception/cognition of good/bad object (= unmoved mover), desire (= moved mover) and the animal (= moved thing) (pp. 180–2). The first stage notwithstanding, animals do not trigger their own motions sensu stricto, as they do not ‘inject’ new energy into their environments, but ‘appropriate’ already circulating energy (pp. 185–6). The essay closes with remarks on the place of Aristotle's theory of animal self-motion in his zoology and on the uniqueness of human action.
A similar integrative approach runs through Chapters 12–13, where we learn about Aristotle's views on the relationship between the mind of human and non-human animals and on the connection between biology and other fields of inquiry, especially politics. Connell reappears in Chapter 12, this time discussing animal cognition, including not only sense perception but also intelligence, social cognition and communication. Aristotle credits animals with advanced cognitive capacities typical of mature humans, for example, understanding (sunesis), thinking (dianoia) and practical intelligence (phronesis) (pp. 198–9). But there is disagreement on how to understand this ascription. Connell invites us to ‘treat each cognitive capacity … individually’ (p. 198): some of them vary according to degrees in different species (e.g. phronesis), while others (e.g. sunesis, dianoia) are predicated by analogy of non-human animals. She concludes with some observations about the peculiarities of human cognition. Next, Chapter 13 by E. Cagnoli Fiecconi explores various ‘overlaps’ between Aristotle's biology and politics (p. 211), for example his account of natural virtue and the function argument. She addresses some of their unwelcome implications discussed by scholars (e.g. Aristotle's sexism and ethnocentrism, pp. 217–19) and certain tensions between the two fields (e.g. inter-species justice, pp. 219–22).
The final group of essays (Chapters 14–17) deals with the legacy of Aristotle's biology in the West. In Chapter 14 M. Hatzimichali traces the early reception, from the Peripatetics to the Roman Imperial period. Compared to the attention Aristotle dedicated to it, zoology attracted little interest among Hellenistic authors. Additionally, much of the early reception of Aristotle's biology took place outside the Peripatetics and ‘outside philosophical circles altogether’ (p. 233). The reception of Aristotle's biology in ‘late antiquity and beyond’ is the theme of A. Falcon in Chapter 15, who notes that, save for Galen, there was a ‘lack of engagement with the study of life and living beings’ in later antiquity (p. 247). Other Aristotelian writings (Phys., De Cael., Meteo.) played a more prominent role ‘within a certain conception of natural philosophy … as physics without biology’ (p. 247). With D. Depew's Chapter 16 we reach modern times. He looks at Aristotle's biology from a Darwinian perspective and at Darwin from an Aristotelian perspective (p. 261), drawing attention to teleological motifs in Darwin's work that he and his followers failed to recognise due to an excessively narrow view of teleology linked to theological ideas of intelligent design. Once we identify ‘the intrinsic finality of adaption’ (p. 276), there is more room for accommodating Darwin's evolutionary theory with Aristotle's biology. In Chapter 17 D. Walsh describes and defies the ‘resistance’ and ‘revulsion’ of contemporary biologists to Aristotle's biology (p. 280). While contemporary biology is ‘anti-individualistic, anti-essentialist, anti-teleological’ (p. 285), Aristotle's biology is the opposite of each. Still, this is not a disadvantage for Aristotle since such commitments create gaps in contemporary biology that may benefit from an engagement with Aristotle, especially his emphasis on ‘organismal form’ (p. 294). The volume closes with an afterword by J.G. Lennox in Chapter 18, where he recounts the pre-history and influence of Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology (1987), a seminal work edited by himself and A. Gotthelf that greatly contributed to disseminating Aristotle's biology in Aristotle scholarship.
Aristotle's biology has sparked much scholarly interest in recent decades, and this collection is a unique contribution to this trend. There is no scarcity of edited volumes on Aristotle's biology (e.g. Gotthelf [ed.], Aristotle on Nature and Living Things [1985]; Gotthelf and Lennox [edd.], Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology [1987]; W. Kullmann and S. Föllinger [edd.], Aristotelische Biologie [1997]; R. Bolton and J.G. Lennox [edd.], Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle [2010]), whose richness and diversity is particularly amenable to this sort of collaborative work. But none of them is meant to offer the kind of analysis, both panoramic and introductory, characteristic of the Cambridge Companions. That granted, newcomers should be warned that the volume is not a neutral guide to the fundamentals of Aristotle's biology. For one thing, although it covers a vast range of topics, it is an open question whether all of them are part of the fundamentals and conversely whether all fundamentals are covered – either way, if we judge the volume by its self-imposed mission mentioned at the beginning of this review, this is not a shortcoming. For another, rather than merely reconstructing Aristotle's doctrine, several essays address exegetical challenges and questions, thereby leaving ample room for the authors’ critical originality and insights – something not uncommon among the Cambridge Companions. The book is thus not only aimed at beginners looking for orientation but also at scholars in need of adrenaline. Both audiences will be well-served with this exceptional volume, the first introductory reference book on Aristotle's biology ever to appear.
