Journal of the History of Philosophy

Book Reviews Daniel Devereux and Pierre Pellegrin, eds. Biologie, logique et m~taphysiquechezAristote. Paris: l~ditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, x99o. Board, FF 37~9 The twenty-odd contributions to this volume (the record of a conference held in France in the summer of 1987) amply reflect--and in some cases extend well beyond-the range of topics promised by the title. The volume is at its best with a core of essays reviewing the "state of the question" on issues at the intersections of Aristode's biology with his metaphysics, and of his scientific practice with the "pure" model of the Analyt- /cs. An auspicious first paper by Lloyd sets out and questions some of the more radical recent challenges to received views about Aristotle's metaphysical theories from students of his biology; it is followed by responses from two of the main challengers, Pellegrin and Balme. One set of views under attack comprises Pellegrin's "moriology," or "zoology without species," according to which Aristotle's main interest in division is at the level of the moria or parts: there is no room for a taxonomic project in the sense of supplying a comprehensive classification of animals in the Aristotelian enterprise at all; instead, the parts of animals are the proper objects of definition, and have prior claim over the whole animal to the title of substance. Pellegrin's response is conciliatory on this last point, with a more measured account than formerly of Metaphysics Z16, according to which the whole animal but not its parts are substance, and with a useful discussion of Aristotle's rule that no substance can be composed of substances. Pellegrin also argues that moriology better accommodates Aristotelian teleology: Aristotle responds to atomistic mechanism as an explanation for the diversity of the animal kingdom by subordinating mechanism to teleology; but teleology has a clearer role at the level of the parts, which have a function within the whole, while the whole animal has merely the function of living. (Pellegrin cannot mean to complain, however, that the end or goal for the animal has no real content, since the goal of an animal of a given kind is surely living its distinctive style of life, as the kind of animal it is.) Balme's views are no less controversial. Balme argues that the matter of a thing is itself informed, and has the forms necessary to act as the matter of the thing; from this, he concludes dubiously that, in general, material differences between things come down to formal differences between their proximate matters. Does this principle cover all material differences whatever, or merely qualitative differences? What, for example , of Lloyd's complaint that Balme's account sees no difference between two spheres, one of wood and the other of bronze, on the one hand, and two wooden spheres on the other? Here too, according to Balme, it is formal differences in their two matters that [623] 624 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:4 OCTOBER 1993 properly account for the difference between the spheres in each group: the form of a thing "determines" all the thing's matter, and "necessarily includes" all the matter. Balme links this with an obscure account of what he takes to be Aristotle's solution to the problem of the unity of form and matter in the compound material substance in MetaphysicsH6; he argues that the individual can now be defined, the objections to this in Zeta being "deliberately aporetic'; and finally, he connects his view of form as particularized down to the level of the individual and its material accidents with the account of inherited characteristics in GA A. It is not clear, however, that the form transmitted by the male parent is the sole source of features in the offspring, as his argument requires; there is the interaction with the matter from the female to be considered too, and the influence of environmental factors. On these last questions, the debate is continued by Furth (not a fan of individual forms), and in greater detail by Cooper, who concludes from the relevant passages in GA that the form the male transmits is particularized, if...