The general theory of science outlined in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics mandates that the scientific enterprise proceeds in stages, and that the two main stages of any scientific inquiry are the collection of the relevant data followed by their explanation – the pre-explanatory and the explanatory stages of inquiry, respectively. Aristotle’s study of animals illustrates this methodological insight in an especially clear way. Moreover, the following epistemic principle controls Aristotle’s study of animals: the study of animals must start from the most organized and most determinate form of life and must take that as its starting point to generate results that can be subsequently extended to what is comparatively less organized and less articulate. This means that the study of animals must begin with a discussion of the human body. This methodological insight is at work in Aristotle’s History of Animals. However, its significance goes well beyond the stage of the collection and presentation of the relevant data; this chapter shows that this rule of inquiry also shapes the explanation of the zoological data in Parts of Animals, Progression of Animals, and Generation of Animals. The chapter also discusses the distortions created by the application of this rule of inquiry with a concentration on Aristotle’s explanation of animal locomotion.

The first and most important step into the Peripatetic study of living beings is the observation that life takes many forms. In the sublunary world, it takes the form of plant and animal life (with human life as a special kind of animal life). When Aristotle and Theophrastus speak of animals and plants, they never assume that they are a single form of life. This is confirmed by what we read at the outset of the Meteorology, where Aristotle outlines an ambitious research program that ends with separate yet coordinated studies of “animals and plants.” Whether there is unity, and how much unity there is, in these two studies remains an open question at the outset of the Meteorology. But when we look at the two corpora of writings that Aristotle and Theophrastus have left on the topic of animals and plants, we see that the unity they are able secure is limited. Last but not least, this chapter shows that the study of the nutritive soul advanced in Aristotle’s De anima cannot secure unity within the study of animals and plants.

Aristotle’s De anima provides the foundation for a theoretically informed study of perishable life on the crucial assumption that the soul is that which distinguishes what is alive from what is not. It is because Aristotle and Theophrastus take animals and plants to be different kinds of perishable living beings that they are justified in approaching the study of perishable life through separate studies of animals and plants. The chapter offers a survey of the discourse on and around life before Aristotle and Theophrastus with a focus on Plato and the doxographical information on the Presocratic investigation of nature. It also considers the way in which the study of life is narrow down to the study of perishable life, that is animals and plants, as a result of the conceptual work done in Aristotle’s De anima.

This chapter plays an important role in the argument of the book. It shows that there is room in Aristotle’s life for a study of what is common to animals and plants in addition to separate studies of animals and plants. At the same time, it shows that what Aristotle is able, or willing, to say in common for animals and plants is truly limited. By the end of the chapter the reader will see that the Peripatetic study of life is a complex scientific endeavor consisting of at least three components: a study of what is common to animals and plants followed by separate yet coordinated studies of animals and plants. What Aristotle is able, or willing, to say in common for animals and plants is to be found within the boundaries of project of the Parva naturalia.

Chapter 1 details the major events in Goethe’s long and varied life, from its beginning to its end, and explains their significance for his development. The scope of the account ranges from intimate details of Goethe’s life to the impact of major political events on him and his work. It follows Goethe from location to location, examines the many strands of his career and considers particularly important relationships, professional, literary, intellectual and personal. The chapter also explains the circumstances of the composition of all his most significant works.

This chapter offers a succinct introduction to Goethe and his work and gives an overview of the essays which make up the collection.

Serving as the editorial introduction to the Cambridge Companion to William Morris, this chapter offers a broad outline of Morris’s life, emphasizing the historical and cultural factors that informed his artistic philosophy and wide-ranging output. The contours of Morris’s critical reception, past and present, are also sketched, and brought into dialogue with the chapters collected here. The first part of the discussion considers ‘The Making of Morris’: that is, the complex nexus of influences and events that enabled him to make a distinctive and enduring contribution in so many fields. Much of this discussion is biographical, but it also considers spatial and geographical ways of understanding the shape of his life. The second part is entitled ‘Morris Making Us’,. It proposes ways in which Morris’s influence continues to condition and enable our ways of thinking as inheritors of his legacy.

Chapter 5 argues that the identification of the form in the mind of the artisan with art amounts to ascribing it the role of efficient cause. As the chapter explains, the form in the mind of the artisan is responsible for both qualified and unqualified coming-to-be. Art is the only form that is an efficient cause, in contrast to the form inherent in the artefact. By resorting to Aristotle’s biological works, the chapter clarifies how artefacts come to lack an inner principle of their behaviour and how this is connected with their lack of an inner principle of unqualified coming-to-be. Two theses in particular are challenged. The first is that the form is transmitted from the mind to the object and, as a result, the form of an artefact is potential, because this is the status of the form in the mind in the artisan. The second thesis is that artefacts are not substances because their forms are not principles of changes. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the relation between eternity and substantiality.

This chapter concerns the pursuit of aretē among the sophists. It argues that such pursuit did not mean what it came to mean to Plato and his heirs. For the latter, the goal of human life, called eudaimonia, is personal flourishing; and aretē is used to refer to some highly valued psychological condition crucial to achieving eudaimonia. The sophists use aretē to refer to a psychological condition once. Predominantly, they use aretē to refer to a life of civic success, conceived as success in public affairs, saliently involving the agent’s making significant positive contributions to his fellow citizens and polis. As such, sophistic ethics tends to be civic ethics. Granted this, there is limited evidence of anti-civic ethics among the Sophists. Given traditional views of the Sophists, the locus of this evidence is ironic. It consists of attributions to the Socratic Aristippus and content in the Athenian Antiphon’s On Truth.

In this chapter, I present Aristotle’s arguments in his books on Physics defending the claim that there is purposiveness in nature independent of thinking, foresight and deliberation. Hegel’s arguments for objective purposiveness are correctly understood only in light of those of Aristotle. In fact, I argue that the sense in which teleology is for Hegel the truth of mechanism (and, ultimately, of causality) is the sense in which, for Aristotle, final causes are the cause of ‘that which comes to be by nature’ and the cause of other kinds of causes (matter, efficient causes and even form) being where they are and having the effects that they eventually have. The chapter revises Aristotle’s understanding of this connection.

The account of the best life for humans, that is, of happy or flourishing life, was the central theme of ancient ethics. This book addresses other important questions about the value of life that likewise received much discussion in antiquity: What does it take to have a life that, if not happy, is at least worth living, in comparison to being dead or never having come into life? Does every human life have some non-instrumental value that makes it worth living? And do all lives that are worth living for those who live them also have to be meaningful, in the sense of making a positive contribution to other humans or world at large? In reconstructing, for the first time, philosophical engagements with these questions from a range of ancient philosophers, from Socrates to Plotinus, the work offers a fresh narrative of ancient ethics. It explores these views against the background of the pessimistic outlook on the human condition adopted by the Greek poets, but also points out continuities and contrasts between the ancient perspective and modern philosophical debates about related themes in biomedical ethics and in the ethics of procreation.

This chapter focuses on Neoplatonist engagements with the issue of life worth living as represented in the philosophy of Plotinus. The Platonic metaphysics and ethics regards the highest form of life as the life of pure intellection, and the materiality of the body in strongly negative terms as the limiting and potentially corrupting influence on the soul. Therefore, the question about the conditions of a life worth living emerges specifically as a question about the worth of embodied life. Is it worthwhile for the immortal soul to descend into bodies, and to remain there until the bond between body and soul dissolves naturally? Plotinus’s attempts to answer this questions are best viewed in terms of a negotiation between the anti-corporealist stance, according to which disembodied existence is always better for the soul, and an acknowledgment that the embodied condition is good for the soul, insofar as it enables the realisation of some of its capacities.

In this chapter, I explore the role of the concept of inner purposiveness in the final section of Hegel’s Logic and also the Philosophy of Nature. Hegel defends the claim that the concept is meaningfully applied to living organisms, particularly animals. The concept is actually used precisely where we should expect it, given the argument of ‘Teleology’, both when talking about the internal organisation of animals in parts-organs and when talking about the self-repair or regeneration processes by which they stay alive. By contrast, the concept no longer dominates the description of the natural process that Hegel designates ‘process of the genus’ (or ‘generic process’), in which he considers that natural life is ultimately submitted to externality. I argue that this application and lack of application taken together confirm my views on ‘Teleology’.

The Stoics break with Plato and Aristotle, who envisaged the value that makes a life worth living as a degree or part of the value that makes a life happy. Instead, they establish two separate axiological scales, one that determines whether a life is happy, and another one that determines whether it is worth living. The former contains virtue and vice, or what is good and bad, whereas the latter is defined by the so-called preferred and dispreferred indifferents, such as health, wealth or renown. This allows for the possibility that a virtuous and happy person sometimes ought to depart from life, when they do not have a prospect of a life worth living, while a vicious and unhappy person ought to stay alive, when they have such a prospect. This decoupling of the happy life from the worthwhile life is consistent with the Stoic view that life itself is a preferred indifferent, and hence the deliberations about staying alive should be referred to other preferred indifferents rather than to virtue and vice.

In contrast to Plato, Aristotle allowed and argued for the possibility that all human lives have some non-instrumental value. This valuation of life is premised on his teleological conception of nature: insofar as all human lives are natural ends of some sort, they are thus a good. However, this non-instrumental value of mere living is in itself not sufficient to make a life worth living. As in Plato, whether a life is lived well or badly is the decisive factor, and again the state of virtue or vice is the most important consideration. Vice makes a life worse than death, regardless of the other good things in it, but fully fledged virtue is not necessary for a life worth living. In contrast to those who are fully virtuous, other non-vicious humans may need other goods, or at least freedom from other bads, such as serious illness or grave misfortunes, to pass the threshold of a life worth living. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle is less optimistic about the chances of the non-educated elite having a life worth living, though he does not flatly deny that possibility.

Focusing on the Republic, this chapter argues that Plato regards psychological health, or the virtue of justice, as the necessary – and sufficient – condition of a human life worth living. This healthy condition amounts to a good exercise of soul’s function (ergon), which is premised on a good exercise of an individual’s function, or job, in the city. This account allows even peasants or craftsman in Plato’s ideal city to have a life worth living, even though they fall short of the best possible human life lived by the rulers-philosophers. It is argued that this non-elitist account of a life worth living is compatible with the famous claim from Plato’s Apology that an unexamined life is not worth living for humans. For in the ideal city all citizens live an examined life, at the very least in the sense of being ruled by the wise philosophers. At the same time, Plato decisively denied the possibility that the mere fact of being alive, or the fact of having a soul, would be a good. It can be a good, if a life is lived well, or it can be an evil, if a life is lived badly.