Volume 49, Issue 1 -

My aim in this paper is to outline and discuss the role played in Aristotle’s inquiry into living things by his extensive comparative account of the body plan of different kinds of animals, and of the shapes and figures of their bodily parts, which we may call his morphology. In tackling this question, I begin with Aristotle’s statement that the diagrammatical representation of the body’s organization based on the axes of symmetry is the second most important principle of the inquiry on living things, after the teleology principle. I discuss, in turn, his concern about the applicability of the mathematical approach to the living shapes; his analysis of the ways in which form is related to limit; and his criticism of Democritus’ and Empedocles’ treatment of form and shape. Through exploring the ways in which Aristotle recurs to the morphology principle in the practice of biology, I point out that morphology provides a key methodological framework for the two most important tasks of the research program of the inquiry on living things – the definition of the kinds and the explanation of the causes.

This article explores the nature of Aristotelian emotions and the body-soul metaphysics required to undergird them. The point of departure is an oft-cited argument that appeals to our experience of fear and anger to show the inseparability of the soul. My claim is that this argument is commonly misunderstood: that the intended target is not a separable soul, but an embodied soul. Reinterpreted, we find that Aristotle is driven by an interest to integrate the sentient body with the intellect. And while, on this interpretation, the argument does not support a functionalist reading of Aristotle on the soul, it does suggest that Aristotle shares key intuitions with Embodied Cognition theorists and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in particular, who demonstrates the dependence of reason on the body.

Aristotle speaks often of orthos logos which might be translated “right rule.” Nevertheless, many contemporary interpreters and translators avoid the term “rule” and similar terms. I shall show that Aristotle does indeed provide numerous rules including right rules for all of the virtues on his list in the Nicomachean Ethics. But these rules do not undermine Aristotle’s credentials as a founder of virtue ethics or of moderate particularism.

For several decades, most philosophical studies of Aristotle’s Politics have treated the work as more or less unified in substance, if not in form. Recently, however, a challenge to this emerging consensus has been raised by Mogens Herman Hansen, who maintains that the Politics in fact contains two fundamentally incompatible theories of constitutions ( politeiai ) Despite raising a number of legitimate interpretive problems, this challenge has gone unanswered by Aristotelian scholars. This paper considers Hansen’s argument and seeks to resolve the puzzles it raises. Answering Hansen’s challenge illuminates Aristotle’s theory of constitutions and its place in his broader political theory.