Aristotle and Others

Abstract

The importance of Lynne Spellman's treatment of Aristotle's theory of substance' is far greater than its modest size would suggest. Her persuasive reading of Aristotle stresses links with Plato, arguing that for Aristotle what primarily exists are is forms of natural kinds, indistinguishable from one another within a given kind and hence knowable, not numerically distinct from the sensible individuals in which they are present (this being the Platonic separation that Aristotle rejects) but not identical with them either. Socrates-qua-member-ofnatural-kind, i.e. Socrates-in-what-he-shares-with-human-beings-generally, is primary; Socrates with all his material accidents is secondary a distinction which is put to good use in the final chapter in tackling the problem of teleological versus non-teleological explanation. Features of S.'s reading of Aristotle (though not her explanation of it in terms of a modification of Platonism) are anticipated in some of the writings attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias. The account on p.88 of the relation between species-form and individual strongly resembles that in Alexander On Providence p.89 Ruland (and, at the level of genus, in quaestio 1.1 1), with S.'s horse Secretariat replacing Achilles' horse Xanthos. S.'s recognition (p.120) that it is material, not formal factors that distinguish tokens of types is parallelled in Alexander, quaestio 1.3; and S.'s view of form leads her, like Alexander in numerous contexts, to stress the permanence of species though not of their individual members (p.121). The similarity between S.'s understanding of Aristotle and Alexander's is not conclusive for its correctness; but it reinforces its plausibility. One niggle; an index of passages discussed would have been helpful. Gad Freudenthal2 argues that Aristotle's basic four-element theory cannot explain the functioning and continued existence of living things, which must be due to vital heat (defined, 28-9, as heat carrying informing movements), a theory dating back to Aristotle's De Philosophia (84; cf. 191 on its importance for Aristotle's later thought) and subsequently supplemented not replaced by the inadequate and uncompleted doctrine of connate pneuma as the substrate of vital heat (130, 142; cf.195 on the difficulties as compared with the Stoic theory). Medieval Peripatetics filled the gap by a non-Aristotelian appeal not to vital heat but to an Neoplatonized Active Intellect (39, 196ff.). The notion that