British Journal for the History of Science 52 (3):383-403 (2019)
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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.
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DOI | 10.1017/s0007087419000165 |
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References found in this work BETA
Aristotle's Theology.Stephen Menn - 2012 - In Christopher Shields (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aristotle. Oup Usa. pp. 422.
Humans and Other Political Animals in Aristotle's History of Animals.David Depew - 1995 - Phronesis 40 (2):156-181.
Humans and Other Political Animals in Aristotle's History of Animals.David Depew - 1995 - Phronesis 40 (2):156 - 181.
King-Bees and Mother-Wasps: A Note on Ideology and Gender in Aristotle's Entomology.Robert Mayhew - 1999 - Phronesis 44 (2):127-134.
On Bees and Humans: Phenomenological Explorations of Hearing Sounds, Voices, and Speech in Aristotle.Ömer Orhan Aygün - 2013 - Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 17 (2):337-350.
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Citations of this work BETA
Modes of Argumentation in Aristotle's Natural Science.Adam W. Woodcox - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Western Ontario
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