Aristotle is often named as the first zoologist or biologist because of his writings on animals. Although Aristotle’s major intention in these books was to illustrate his ideas of how knowledge and understanding might advance, at least one modern biologist (C. Darwin) has recognized Aristotle's depth and breadth as being of surviving merit. Of greater surprise is the ongoing attention that his works continue to receive, including publications in contemporary scientific journals. This review identifies 38 peer-reviewed papers on various topics (...) from Aristotle’s biological writings that have been published during the last 50 years. These papers are described according to content (genetics, population biology, anatomy, brain, movement), specific creatures (fish, scorpions, elephants, insects, birds), publication outlet, distribution over the fifty year period surveyed, and visible trends in the topics studied. It is concluded that, in the highly-competitive field of peer-reviewed scientific publication and citation, Aristotle's biology continues to excite the interest of scientists and remains salient to modern science itself. (shrink)

φρόνη­σις and σοφία as kinds of knowledge and being Aristotle, Heidegger, Gadamer Φρόνη­σις and σοφία, practical and theoretical knowledge, were described by Aristotle as essential for the perfection of human life and thus for achieving happiness, the supreme good. The investigation of the relationship between the “highest” virtues and between the correspondent life ideals by Heidegger and Gadamer “made” the Stagirite “talk” in the 20 th century from the perspective of Heidegger’s question of Being and Gadamer’s philosophical Hermeneutics. A renewed (...) interpretation of the πρᾶξις/θεω­ρία interrelation elaborated by Aristotle could contribute to the development of attitudes required to face the current challenges, and so keep on making the Stagirite’s “doctrine” fruitful for our present. (shrink)

Concluding his discussion of bee reproduction in Book 3 ofGeneration of Animals, Aristotle makes a famous methodological pronouncement about the relationship between sense perception and theory in natural history. In the very next sentence, he casually remarks that the unique method of reproduction that he finds in bees should not be surprising, since bees have something ‘divine’ about them. Although the methodological pronouncement gets a fair bit of scholarly attention, and although Aristotle's theological commitments in cosmology and metaphysics are well (...) known, scholars have almost universally passed over the comment about bees and divinity in silence. This paper aims to show why that comment is no mere throwaway, and offers an exploration and elaboration of the ways in which divinity operates even at fairly mundane levels in his natural philosophy, as an important Aristotelian explanation for order, proportion and rationality, even in the lowest of animals. (shrink)

This article suggests that human action in Machiavelli is both materialistic and temporalized. It further argues that Reinhart Koselleck’s view of Machiavelli’s understanding of time as historical circularity is misleading. The author is making the case that Machiavelli drew from Lucretian materialism to strip political concepts of content via an animal-materialist anthropology and ontology holding that man, as any animal, is material reality acting under an atomic arrangement wherein no time, whether linear or circular, can exist. The conclusion is that (...) Koselleck’s interpretation of the circularity of time in Machiavelli kept him from seeing his role as an antecedent of the conceptual and temporal revolution underlying the Sattelzeit. (shrink)

Human beings, according to Aristotle, are not the only political animals. Bees, wasps, ants and cranes are the other political species mentioned by Aristotle in the History of Animals. Politics, I, 2 confirms this point and makes the additional statement that human beings, if not the only political animals, are nevertheless more political than the other political animals. There has been a traditional scholarly agreement that the capacity for rational speech is the reason why human beings are more political. This (...) traditional view seems to have some support from the same chapter of Politics, where Aristotle addresses, right after having stated that human beings are more political, the role of language in human beings’ political life. This paper contests this traditional view about language and claims that it is the more political character of human beings which explains the political role of language and not vice versa. -/- . (shrink)