Substantial Being in Aristotle's Biology
Creators: name: Rohde, Jake
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2017

description: This is a study of substantial being and the role it plays in Aristotle’s biology. Substantial being in the biological context can, as an analytic first pass, be defined as the essence or what it is to be an animal of a certain kind. According to the framework I develop, substantial being plays two major roles. The first of these is explanatory, particularly within the method of division. This method, sketched out by Plato in the so-called “late” dialogues, is discussed in detail in two works, the Parts of Animals and Posterior Analytics. The idea in Plato is that by taking a general kind and making two mutually incompatible divisions, we can reach the essence of something. Aristotle wrestled with this Academic legacy, and what we find in his work, on my account, constitutes a radical critique and reworking of it from the foundations. In chapter II of this essay I look at the negative critique and groundwork for Aristotle’s positive vision in the first chapter of the Parts of Animals, and in chapter III I turn to the Posterior Analytics for a positive model. Not only does Aristotle’s own account of the method of division make good sense of his scientific practice, it also is coherent with and, once interpreted at the correct level of abstraction, explicated by the account of division in his Posterior Analytics. Once I have outlined Aristotle’s method of division, I will discuss, in chapters IV-V, what substantial being is ontologically speaking, by turning to the De Anima and Metaphysics respectively, and will argue that it is identical to the soul of an animal, which is itself equivalent to the substance of an animal. In Chapter VI, I will challenge my findings with the doctrine of animal parts as presented in a passage in the Politics and look at how explanation functions in a couple of actual cases from the Parts of Animals. If my task succeeds, we will end with a fuller picture of the work substantial being does in the biological context.
A controversial aspect of my methodology is an underlying willingness to understand the biology in light of treatises from the Organon and remainder of the corpus. However, understanding Aristotle’s scientific practice in the biological treatises as an extension of the methodology presented in the Posterior Analytics is, to put it mildly, a controversial move. If we can show, however, that looking at the treatises together creates a richer and philosophically
more coherent explanation, that gives prima facie evidence for considering them in conjunction. What’s more, the various indicators and cross references to other works throughout the Aristotelian corpus provide an obvious sign that Aristotle intended the claims from one treatise to at a minimum be in conversation with those of another. Aristotle’s texts on nature, for example, can be taken as a whole to form a complete system; the foundations of sublunary physics are laid out in a way which gives the physical and conceptual foundations for the natural world in On Generation and Corruption. What’s more, if we are to take the Posterior Analytics seriously at all as a model for science and take its own employment of examples from natural science as meaningful, then the points of agreement or divergence between its theory and scientific praxis must be addressed. I will argue that taking both treatises together will give us the best, and a more illuminating, account of Aristotle on division. Understanding the Metaphysics as in line with the biology is less controversial than the Posterior Analytics case, but it has still been contested. Again, my view is that Aristotle’s corpus becomes substantially less interesting if we deny that the very same concepts which are deployed in multiple treatises are somehow unrelated—nor do I find the “metaphysical” Aristotle a different thinker than the scientific Aristotle enough to conjecture a development or change in his thought with confidence.