INTRODUCTION

Traditionally, attempts to relate Aristotle's well-known passion for biology to his ethical thought have focused on two points of intersection. In Nicomachean Ethics I 7, Aristotle relies heavily on the idea that human excellence (or virtue) must be the excellence of a specifically human functional capacity, and his approach to defining that capacity is reminiscent of De Anima II 2-3: Functions shared with plants and animals are ruled out in favor of those that are distinctively human, those associated with reason. This so-called function argument has generated a good deal of scholarly discussion, but a careful reading of it, especially in light of Aristotle's remarks at 1102a 13–32 about the limited need for a scientific understanding of the soul for the purposes of ethics, must lead one to conclude that no detailed understanding of biology was needed to craft it.

A second point of possible intersection on which scholars have focused is Aristotle's concept of a political animal, used often in the biological works and extending to many species other than man. Furthermore, Aristotle's Politics, much more than his Nicomachean Ethics, is a “biological” work, opening with an extended narrative about the natural growth of the polls out of essentially biological origins: