Introduction

In their contributions to Part I, David Balme and Montgomery Furth have given us reason to think that Aristotle's systematic study of animals might help us to understand those concepts at the center of his metaphysical analysis of substance: form, matter, essence, substratum, kind, universal, differentia, actuality, potentiality, perhaps even nous. Each of the papers in this Part attempts to illustrate that thesis by bringing Aristotle's biological works directly to bear on such central themes of his metaphysics.

The keynote paper of Part IV is a slightly revised version of David Balme's rich and provocative ‘Aristotle's biology was not essentialist’, first published in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie in 1980. Balme argues that the essentialist identification of form and species traditionally attributed to Aristotle is not to be found in his biological works. According to GA, an animal's development is ‘primarily towards the parental likeness, including even non-essential details, while the common form of the species is only a generality which “accompanies” this likeness’. Animal form includes material accidents and is to be distinguished from essence, which ‘picks out only those features for which a teleological explanation holds’. Both are to be distinguished from species, which is a generalization over individual composites, over forms as actualized in matter.