Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- I Biology and philosophy: an overview
- II Definition and demonstration: theory and practice
- III Teleology and necessity in nature
- IV Metaphysical themes
- 11 Aristotle's biology was not essentialist
- 12 Logical difference and biological difference: the unity of Aristotle's thought
- 13 Kinds, forms of kinds, and the more and the less in Aristotle's biology
- 14 Animals and other beings in Aristotle
- 15 Aristotle on bodies, matter, and potentiality
- 16 Aristotle on the place of mind in nature
- List of works cited
- Index locorum
- General index
13 - Kinds, forms of kinds, and the more and the less in Aristotle's biology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- I Biology and philosophy: an overview
- II Definition and demonstration: theory and practice
- III Teleology and necessity in nature
- IV Metaphysical themes
- 11 Aristotle's biology was not essentialist
- 12 Logical difference and biological difference: the unity of Aristotle's thought
- 13 Kinds, forms of kinds, and the more and the less in Aristotle's biology
- 14 Animals and other beings in Aristotle
- 15 Aristotle on bodies, matter, and potentiality
- 16 Aristotle on the place of mind in nature
- List of works cited
- Index locorum
- General index
Summary
Aristotle is often characterized, by both philosophers and evolutionary biologists, as the fountainhead of a typological theory of species that is absolutely inconsistent with evolutionary thinking. D'Arcy Thompson, on the other hand, in his remarkable On Growth and Form, claimed that the idea of using quantitative methods to help understand morphological relationships among animals of different species took root in his mind during his work on Aristotle's biology:
Our inquiry lies, in short, just within the limits which Aristotle laid down when, in defining a genus, he showed that (apart from those superficial characters, such as colour, which he called ‘accidents’) the essential differences between one ‘species’ and another are merely differences of proportion, or relative magnitude, or as he phrased it, of ‘excess and defect’.
A theory that asserts that species of a genus differ only in the relative magnitudes of their structures sounds very different, and might be thought to be incompatible with, a theory that claims that there are complete discontinuities between one eidos and all others. Can Aristotle consistently have held both these views? He can, and he did. To understand how he did so, one must understand the way in which he used the Academic technical notion of ‘the more and the less’ in his biology.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology , pp. 339 - 359Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987
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