Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- I THE DAWNING OF A NEW ERA
- 1 The Comparative Study of Animal Development: William Harvey's Aristotelianism
- 2 Monsters, Nature, and Generation from the Renaissance to the Early Modern Period: The Emergence of Medical Thought
- II THE CARTESIAN PROGRAM
- III THE GASSENDIAN ALTERNATIVE
- IV SECOND-WAVE MECHANISM AND THE RETURN OF ANIMAL SOULS, 1650–1700
- V BETWEEN EPIGENESIS AND PREEXISTENCE: THE DEBATE INTENSIFIES, 1700–1770
- VI KANT AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES ON DEVELOPMENT AND THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIZED MATTER
- VII KANT AND THE BEGINNINGS OF EVOLUTION
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The Comparative Study of Animal Development: William Harvey's Aristotelianism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- I THE DAWNING OF A NEW ERA
- 1 The Comparative Study of Animal Development: William Harvey's Aristotelianism
- 2 Monsters, Nature, and Generation from the Renaissance to the Early Modern Period: The Emergence of Medical Thought
- II THE CARTESIAN PROGRAM
- III THE GASSENDIAN ALTERNATIVE
- IV SECOND-WAVE MECHANISM AND THE RETURN OF ANIMAL SOULS, 1650–1700
- V BETWEEN EPIGENESIS AND PREEXISTENCE: THE DEBATE INTENSIFIES, 1700–1770
- VI KANT AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES ON DEVELOPMENT AND THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIZED MATTER
- VII KANT AND THE BEGINNINGS OF EVOLUTION
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Aristotle is my general, Fabricius my guide.
Wm. Harvey, Preface to Exercitationes de generatione animaliumINTRODUCTION
Aristotle saw the study of nature as one of three kinds of theoretical investigation, that is, investigation aimed at knowledge for its own sake (the other two being first philosophy and mathematics; cf. Aristotle Metaphysics E 1 1026a7–22). The most central ontological distinction among the objects of “natural” study is that between eternal natural objects and those that come to be and pass away. Indeed, Aristotle begins his justly famous encomium for the study of animals with just that division:
Among the beings constituted by nature, some are ungenerated and imperishable throughout all eternity, while others partake of generation and perishing. Yet it has turned out that our studies of the former, though they are valuable and divine, are fewer (for as regards both those things on the basis of which one could examine them and those things about them which we long to know, the perceptual phenomena are altogether few). We are, however, much better provided in relation to knowledge about the perishable plants and animals, because we live among them. For anyone wishing to labor sufficiently can grasp many things about each kind. (644b22–31)
For Aristotle, the fact that animals and plants are generated and perish raises a number of special questions about how they are to be investigated, and most of the first chapter of De partibus animalium I, Aristotle's philosophical prolegomenon to the study of animals, is devoted to raising and answering those questions.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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