This chapter addresses an interpretive question about why Aristotle identifies generation, growth, and nourishment as the three distinct functions or activities of nutritive soul. Scholars typically try to explain this by appealing to the shared goal of these activities, though there is no consensus about what that goal is: Does Aristotle think that generation is a way of keeping oneself alive (and thus that the shared goal is self-maintenance), or is nourishment really a quasi-generative activity (and thus that the shared goal is “form (re)production”)? Rather than taking that approach, Gelber offers a different but complementary way of accounting for the unity of these activities, by focusing on the continuity of their shared physiological basis. As it is argued here, the fact that these biological processes form a continuous cycle stems from Aristotle’s adherence, in his biological theory, to principles from his hylomorphic metaphysics. Attending to the details in works such as Generation of Animals that focus on the mechanisms underlying generation, growth, and nourishment, it is shown how we can construct a coherent account of the unity of the three nutritive soul activities.

Macfarlane highlights Aristotle’s use of the concept of pathological pneuma, which reveals Aristotle’s connections with the medical ideas current in his time. Macfarlane’s analysis casts new light on this connection, the difference between respired and connate pneuma, and on the relation between connate pneuma and blood.

Aristotle divides the physical world between a celestial realm, which is alive but neither hot nor cold, and a sublunary realm, which is moved by heat in two forms: the vital heat of the biological works and the inanimate fire, the operation of which is explained in the Meteorologica. In the context of the second division we find Aristotle distinguishing between the macrocosm (roughly the world according to Physics, de Caelo, Generation and Corruption and the Meteorologica) and the microcosm (the realm of the biological works, the individual sublunary animals). Wilson argues that this second division does not overturn the first one, but rather complements it, for it has some bearing on the question of solar and vital heat. He further argues that Aristotle mediates the macrocosm and the microcosm through the conceptual apparatus of the spontaneous generation in which heat plays a manifest role.