This book argues that the main focus of the life and work of Aristotle was on the natural sciences. Of central importance are his scientific expeditions, which can be reconstructed from scattered geographical statements. Comparison with modern biology confirms the empirical nature of his biological writings, and the philological approach taken here offers a corrective against premature philosophical systematizing.

This paper makes some additional points about matters discussed in my book „Aristoteles als Naturwissenschaftler“ (Aristotle as a Natural Scientist), Berlin 2014. Findings by the biologist A. M. Leroi, who published a book on Aristotle with a similar subject that same year („The Lagoon. How Aristotle invented science“), will be considered. It will be argued that the mayflies discovered by Aristotle in the Kuban River belong to the species Palingenia fuliginosa. Aristotle is more likely to have observed the life-history of (...) the catfish in the river Strymon in Northern Greece than in the Achelous river basin in Acarnania. He probably never set eyes on the catfish Silurus aristotelis, which is endemic to Acarnania and was discovered by Agassiz in 1857. (shrink)

This article tries to disentangle different perspectives on nature in Aristotle's biological work. In one sense Aristotle speaks of nature as a craft-like factor in the generation of living beings. In another sense 'nature' refers to Aristotle's conception of an unchanging universe, in which the individual living beings are perishable, but reproduce themselves and thus guarantee that the essential blueprints of the different species (eidê) remain the same. In addition, however, Aristotle's zoology acknowledges natural processes that involve greater dynamics and (...) more exceptions, most notably when it comes to the allocation of available matter within the animals of a certain species or to the adaptation to a species' proper environment. In conclusion, it seems fair to say that in Aristotle's zoology different autonomous perspectives overlap, so that it would be inappropriate to reduce all of them to a common denominator. (shrink)