Aristotle’s meta-zoology

Abstract

Brill argues that the particular political forms of human intimacy that arise for Aristotle from the possession of language and the capacity for choice—intimacies collectively understood as arising from the sharing of life—can only be fully understood when measured on a zoological scale. Here, they emerge not as categorically distinct from forms of shared animal life, but rather as an intensification of them. Political community, in turn, emerges from Aristotle’s Politics as the properly human habitat (topos), by merit of its foundation on the fragile shared perception of advantage and disadvantage. This tenuousness creates an instability that requires a very particular form of ecological thought, one that must attend to what is shared between human and non-human animals.