1. The text of Aristotle's science of living things
Our work on the new critical edition of Aristotle's De anima is making good progress. The critical edition will provide future scholarship on Aristotle's De anima with a new and lasting foundation.
2. The idea of Aristotle's science of living things
The monograph "The Architecture of the Science of Living Things. Aristotle and Theophrastus on Animals and Plants" by Andrea Falcon (CUP) offers a comparative study of Aristotle's zoology and Theophrastus botany from a decidedly methodological point of view. This entails giving attention especially to the few transitional passages where Aristotle and Theophrastus offer their own account of what they are trying to accomplish in their own works. The two separate corpora of writings that have been transmitted to us engage in a study of perishable life via separate studies of animals and plants. What we know about the biological discourse before Aristotle and Theophrastus suggests that this approach to the study of perishable living beings was an important innovation. There is a precise order in which animals and plants were studied in the early Peripatos—namely, first animals and then plants. In his monograph, Falcon takes this order of study very seriously. It explores the reasons that may have led Aristotle and Theophrastus to adopt it.
The monograph "Aristotle on the Essence of Human Thought" by Klaus Corcilius, Andrea Falcon, and Robert Roreitner (OUP) offers a new interpretation of the notorious chapters on the thinking capacity in Aristotle's De anima III 4-8. The monograph does so on the basis of TIDA’s insights concerning the fundamental role of the De anima for Aristotle’s science of living things. The argument of the book shows that this stretch of text contains a single and coherent account of the essence of the human capacity for thought (nous). Nous, it is argued in line with TIDA's principles, is the first principle, and ultimate explanans, of the phenomena of human thinking. What is new and distinctive about the interpretation advanced in this book is that the discussion of nous in the De anima is shown to - by Aristotle's standards – successfully account for the human capacity of thinking. This includes the explanation of such features of human scientific thinking as objectivity, universality, and necessity.
The article "Aristotle’s Perceptual Objectivism" by Michael Arsenault (Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 2024) deals with the issue of Aristotle's perceptual objectivism. We ordinarily think of Aristotle as an objectivist about perceptible qualities. Yet this consensus has long been threatened by various thorny passages, including especially De anima III.2 425b26–426a28, which appear to suggest that Aristotle is a subjectivist. Arsenault shows that recent attempts to make sense of these passages by appeal to Aristotle’s three-stage distinction between first potentiality, second potentiality/first actuality, and second actuality commit Aristotle to a subjectivism that he cannot consistently endorse. Arsenault argues for an alternative that vindicates Aristotle’s objectivism.
The article "La botanique d’Aristote" by Justin Winzenrieth (Elenchos 45/1) argues that Aristotle had valid reasons to find the subject-matter of plants much less interesting than zoology, as the activities of plants amount to a subset of what animals do. When studying attributes common to both plants and animals in the transmitted corpus, Aristotle systematically focuses on the case of the most complex animals and, once an explanatory model has been found, proceeds to apply it to the remaining cases with less details. Most of Aristotle’s botany is found to be already encapsulated in the main results of his study of animals.
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