Aristotle's Teleology Research Articles

From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle by Mariska Leunissen

Reviewed by: From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle by Mariska Leunissen Paula Gottlieb Mariska Leunissen. From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xxxii + 216. Cloth, $74.00. In her new book, Leunissen, author of Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's Science of Nature (2010), turns her expertise in Aristotle's biology to the issue of virtue of character. The book contains some fascinating material from Aristotle's biological works and also material from relatively neglected parts of the Politics, including discussions of ethnography, climate, physiognomy, and "eugenics." Leunissen's thesis is that an examination of this material will provide insight into how people become morally virtuous, and especially why Aristotle excludes women from this group. Leunissen suggests that it is Aristotle's biology that leads to his views about women, but that does not exclude the possibility of the social prejudices of ancient Athens from infecting both. For example, when Aristotle thinks that women have cold blood and are oversensitive to pain, it is not clear whether the biological grounds for his so thinking are immune to various social prejudices about women. Sometimes, indeed, Aristotle's biology seems to be at odds with his views about women. For example, since hot-blooded male babies need to be acclimatized to the cold in preparation for later military service (117, 180), according to Aristotle, would females, who have cold blood by nature, not be more suitable for warfare and developing courage, according to Aristotle's own assumptions? Aristotle's ideas about pain in women, if correctly attributed, are even more startling. The ancient Greeks knew what kinds of pain women could endure, and had a special word for the pangs of childbirth. Be that as it may, I shall instead focus on what I take to be the crux of Leunissen's view that a biological approach is essential to understanding how virtues of character are developed. This argument comes in her chapter 5. Leunissen writes, "In Physics VII 3, Aristotle provides one of the lengthiest discussions of the physical process of virtue acquisition in the corpus" (110). At the beginning of this chapter of the Physics, Aristotle distinguishes alteration, where an existing object persists while taking on a new property, from what Aristotle elsewhere treats as substantial change, where a new object, for example, a bronze statue, comes into being. If bronze becomes fluid, that is an alteration, but if a statue comes into being, we have a new object, the statue, which is made out of the bronze and which we say is "brazen." Nor are dispositions of body and soul alterations along this line of thinking. Now one might think that Aristotle's point is that bronze spheres cannot be reduced to their matter; and dispositions cannot [End Page 552] be reduced to their material basis. Aristotle also here treats dispositions as relational and he goes on to say that acquiring or losing a disposition involves alterations of other things. In the case of virtues and vices of character, they are related to bodily pleasures and pains that are alterations of the sensory part of the soul. (Physics VII 3 is four pages long in the Oxford Classical Text, but Leunissen omits the discussion of virtues of thought at the end of the chapter.) Leunissen suggests that virtues of character may be related to elements of the soul, as health is related to bodily elements. It is not clear what the elements of the soul are, but if they include desires, feelings, and thinking, none of which Aristotle describes in purely physiological terms, the Physics is silent on their relationship to virtue of character. Nor do we have a discussion in the Physics about how particular feelings (that are types of pleasure or pain) so arise that they are appropriate in particular contexts, or how practical reasoning so develops that virtue of character involves deliberative desire and practical wisdom. In short, there is no account of virtue acquisition in the Physics. True, we are told that virtues and vices relate to pleasures and pains, but that point is already noted and refined in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Furthermore, according...

Political Animals Revisited

Political Animals Revisited

Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature (review)

Reviewed by: Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature Miira Tuominen Mariska Leunissen. Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xiii + 250. Cloth, $85.00. Mariska Leunissen’s study focuses on teleology in Aristotle’s theory and practice of science. She proceeds from Aristotle’s general defense of teleology (chapter 1) to a more detailed discussion of how teleology works in the science of soul (chapter 2), of animal parts (chapter 4), and of cosmology (chapter 5). She also argues that Aristotle’s study of animal parts is a demonstrative science, in accordance with the model of the Posterior Analytics (chapter 3). In the brilliant final chapter 6, Leunissen argues for a new view of how final causes figure in scientific syllogisms: not as middle terms but as major terms that are the predicates of the conclusions of scientific demonstrations. The middle terms then pick out the causal features that bring about the final cause. The book is of outstanding quality. The level of scholarship is very high, the solutions convincing and well argued, and the whole engaging. The highlights, I find, are Leunissen’s distinction between primary and secondary teleology and her discussion of the final cause in scientific syllogisms. The former enables her, among other things, to give a more independent role to material necessity than has previously been argued, while at the same time preserving its compatibility with teleology: not all material necessity is subordinated to teleology, but rather on its own it produces residue—selected and retained teleologically by nature—from which nature then produces functional animal parts. Such parts are not strictly necessary for the animal’s substantial being and are thus not conditionally necessary, but they have a function and serve the animal’s good. By means of the latter, Leunissen manages to integrate Aristotle’s examples of teleological explanation and inquiry into his theory of scientific demonstration. One of the general conclusions of the study is that biology, not mathematics, was Aristotle’s central model for science and that his scientific practice in fact follows his theory: the practice is more rigorous in searching for patterns of teleological explanation realized through material, efficient, and formal causes, and the theory more flexible than has often been supposed. Leunissen’s discussion operates with a distinction between cause and explanation, briefly commented on at the beginning of chapter 1 (10, n. 2). In that context, correctly taking Aristotle as a realist concerning both cause and explanation, Leunissen contends that the answers given to “why” questions will be explanatory and hence productive of scientific knowledge “if they pick out real causes.” She argues that whereas teleology for Aristotle enjoys explanatory priority, other cause-types are causally prior. One might then ask whether such a distinction between explanatory and causal priority coincides with Aristotle’s distinction between what is prior to us and prior in nature. Leunissen’s conclusion offers a closer account of cause and explanation and a partially affirmative answer. The view that final causes occur in the conclusions of demonstrations is coupled with their being “closer to us” (211), that is, better known to us in Aristotle’s distinction. Therefore, final causes provide us with starting points for the discovery of causally prior factors, that is, the middle terms of scientific demonstrations that are further away from us and hence, supposedly, better known in nature. However, ends and functions are also identified as being “prior in nature,” whereas formal, efficient, and material causes are prior in generation (214). This indicates that the correspondence with Aristotle’s distinction is not quite complete. [End Page 611] The discussion also invites some speculation about such teleological principles as “nature does nothing in vain.” Leunissen argues convincingly (especially in section 4.2) that Aristotle uses them as heuristic tools for searching for the causally primary factors, but that they do not occur as premises of demonstrations—being formally unsuited for that as well (not being of the form ‘A of B’). However, Aristotle also supposes that such principles produce adequate results in the search for causes, and Leunissen grants that they are “generalizations over . . . the observed outcomes...

Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's Science of Nature par Mariska Leunissen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. 250.

190 PHOENIX is true, then it can be coherently articulated and defended. Castagnoli acknowledges that Plato probably endorsed this view, at least implicitly, since he “never asks the portentous question ‘what if reality, in all its unintelligibility, does indeed require our silence?’” (233). It is deeply unsettling, but perhaps the answer is yes, or at least a wagging of one’s finger. In my opinion, the high point of this study is the subtle and penetrating interpretation of Sextus’ apparent acceptance of self-refutation as a dialectical tool to be employed against his opponents rather than an admission that Pyrrhonian practice logically undermines or refutes itself. The latter view is inspired in part by Sextus’ evocative metaphors, especially involving purgatives: the skeptic’s expressions can be cancelled (or destroyed) along with what they are applied to, just as purgative drugs eliminate themselves along with the offensive humors (PH 1.206; cf. PH 2.188, M 8.480). The mature skeptic, securely in possession of his tranquility, has no need of such purgatives. He will report how he is affected without thereby committing himself to any belief regarding external reality. This applies equally to his characteristic admission that none of the dogmatic claims he has so far encountered seems more persuasive than its contradictory. This admission, like all of the skeptic’s admissions, induces no disturbance in him, so it is not something he would seek to purge. Nevertheless, as Castagnoli argues, the skeptic’s opponent may stubbornly insist that the skeptic’s behavior commits him to the belief that the things he reports are as they seem. Sextus’ ingenious dialectical counter is to argue concessively: even if things are as I (the skeptic) report, for example, no more one way than another (ouden mallon), then, and only then, will my characteristic expressions and arguments be brought within their own scope. Taken as a report about how he is affected, ouden mallon does not refer to itself. Taken as a dogmatic assertion about external states of affairs, it does. But one cannot coherently maintain that things are no more one way than another, including this very state of affairs. Crucially, this is not a matter of deriving the falsity of the original assertion, but rather eliminating it altogether. One who dogmatically proposes ouden mallon ends up proposing nothing. In effect, by drawing out the dogmatist’s complaint, Sextus shows that it eliminates itself. Many readers will take issue with the details of the interpretation of specific arguments , for they are some of the most controversial in ancient philosophy. Nevertheless, developing Burnyeat’s seminal work on the topic,4 Castagnoli makes a compelling case for his main contention regarding the dialectical purpose and function of those arguments. The prose is clear and precise, if vertiginous at times given the inescapably dizzying nature of the logic. The analyses are consistently rigorous and sensitive to philological detail. Ancient Self-Refutation is a tour-de-force. Agnes Scott College Harald Thorsrud Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's SCIENCE OF NATURE. Par Mariska Leunissen . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. 250. Aristote affirme à plusieurs reprises que tous ses prédécesseurs ont conduit leurs recherches sans une véritable compréhension de l’ensemble des causes possibles et de 4 See, especially, M. Burnyeat, “Protagoras and Self-Refutation in Later Greek Philosophy,” Philosophical Review 85 (1976) 44–69. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 191 leurs interrelations systématiques. Dans le contexte de ce compte rendu je ne peux me pencher sur la question de savoir si cette opinion d’Aristote est bien fondée. Je la rappelle néanmoins pour souligner le fait que dans ses écrits Aristote présuppose la compréhension systématique des causes qui, selon lui, manquait aux enquêtes présocratiques. Autrement dit, les études aristotéliciennes présupposent une théorie de la causalité qui stipule comment établir des explications causales. La science naturelle ne fait pas exception à cette règle générale. Cette science constitue même un excellent exemple de la façon dont les écrits d’Aristote sont traversés par sa conception de la causalité. Une étude sur la...

Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's Science - by Mariska Leunissen

Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's Science - by Mariska Leunissen

The Ends of Weather: Teleology in Renaissance Meteorology

Renaissance natural philosophers believed that meteorological phenomena were imperfect mixtures that lacked their own essences or substantial forms. This contention, along with the lack of any significant discussion of teleology in Aristotle's Meteorology , left Renaissance natural philosophers with several options in discussions of the final causes of weather. Some, particularly Italian scholars, contended that there were no final causes for meteorological events. In contrast, Pietro Pomponazzi argued that, while meteorological phenomena were accidental, they were purposeful as part of God's ordering of the universe, even though humans are unable to understand these purposes. Many Lutheran scholars believed that these ends could be known, arguing that their purpose derived from their being divine signs of the future and God's will.

God and the Good in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

By examining the systematic integration of theology, ethics, and teleology in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, I address four key interpretational aporiai: the apparently illogicality of the opening lines, the apparent contradiction between practical virtue and contemplation being the highest good, the dominant v. inclusivist views of eudaimonia, and the immanence v. transcendence of God. I show how proper attention to the link between Aristotle's conception of the Good as at which all things aim and God as the prime unmoved mover, as well as an appreciation of the overall aristocratic context of Aristotelian philosophy, provides a new way of dealing with these aporiai that renders them less perplexing and problematic, while avoiding un-Aristotelian, anachronistic readings.

The Poetry of Genetics: On the Pitfalls of Popularizing Science

The role genetic inheritance plays in the way human beings look and behave is a question about the biology of human sexual reproduction, one that scientists connected with the Human Genome Project dashed to answer before the close of the twentieth century. This is also a question about politics, and, it turns out, poetry, because, as the example of Lucretius shows, poetry is an ancient tool for the popularization of science. “Popularization” is a good word for successful efforts to communicate elite science to non-scientists in non-technical languages and media. According to prominent sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, “sexual dominance is a human universal.” He meant, of course, that men dominate women. Like sociobiology, genetic science is freighted with politics, including gender politics. Scientists have gender perspectives that may color what they “see” in nature. As the late Susan Okin Miller suggested in an unpublished paper tracing the detrimental impact of Aristotle's teleology on Western thought, scientists accustomed to thinking that men naturally dominate women might interpret genetic discoveries accordingly. Biologists have good, scientific reasons to fight the effects of bias. One must be critical of how scientists and popularizers of science, like Genome author Matt Ridley, frame truth and theory. Ridley's “battle of the sexes” metaphor and others have a doubtful place in serious explanations of science.

Consequence etiology and biological teleology in Aristotle and Darwin

Aristotle’s biological teleology is rooted in an epigenetic account of reproduction. As such, it is best interpreted by consequence etiology. I support this claim by citing the capacity of consequence etiology’s key distinctions to explain Aristotle’s opposition to Empedocles. There are implications for the relation between ancient and modern biology. The analysis reveals that in an important respect Darwin’s account of adaptation is closer to Aristotle’s than to Empedocles’s. They both rely on consequence etiological considerations to evade attributing the purposiveness of organisms to chance. Two implications follow: (l) Darwinian explanations of adaptation are as teleological as Aristotle’s, albeit differently; and (2) these differences show how deeply resistant Aristotle’s version of biological teleology is to descent from a common ancestor.

Natural Right and the Problem of Aristotle's Defense of Slavery

Many social theorists, appalled at the moral enormities made possible by the modern scientific conquest of nature, now look to a restoration of classic natural right as a standard for human affairs. But the key role of slavery in Aristotle's magisterial exposition of natural right is typically overlooked. Commentators on Aristotle's account of natural slavery add to the perplexity, charging that this account is culturally biased and logically inconsistent. Such charges play into the hands of the opponents of natural right, whose common theme is the inability of reason to overcome such biases in its search for what is right by nature. Lacking a defense of the moral and theoretical respectability of Aristotle's account of slavery, the restorationists' cause must remain unpersuasive. To provide this defense, I suggest that Aristotle's teleology implies that the natural slave, generally speaking, is made not born. Childrearing and other cultural practices, which ordinarily promote the natural destiny of mankind, may instead subvert this telos by inculcating a dysfunctional, slavish second nature. Despotic rule may be said to be natural in such cases, and only insofar as it aids the slave in better realizing the telos proper to a human being. Aristotle quite consistently condemns all employments of the slave that are uncongenial to the reformation of slavishness and allows for emancipation in the event of this achievement. C lassic natural right is rooted in a teleological account of human nature and nature as a whole (Strauss 1953, 7-8; 126-33). There are, of course, several variations on this classic theme, but each characteristically grounds its moral and political judgments in an objective and ontologically prior account of the distinctively human vocation. The exponent of classic natural right attempts, then, to describe the quality and operations characteristic of mature human nature and to prescribe how-given our individual circumstances-I, you, or the next person can get there from here. Natural right neither requires nor furnishes a guaranty that any particular being will attain this goal of perfect maturity; on the contrary, it entails the possibility of developmental failure. In fact, natural right recognizes the complete spectrum of diversity as to the manner and the extent to which a given person, at any given time, may fall short of the finality of perfect maturity. The precise adjustment necessary to bring a particular individual into a condition of objective maturity is necessarily, then, a matter of prudential judgment. One may say that a natural right prescription exists for every circumstance, even though all such prescriptions are mutable. But the prudential excellence, as distinguished from the mere cleverness, of such prescriptions is rendered all but invisible to us by modern science. For modern science vilifies any consideration of final

Aristotelian Rainfall or the Lore of Averages

David Furley has recently argued that regular rainfall in the Aristotelian world is teleological.' Furley demonstrates the failure of all attempts to exclude winter rain from the scope of Aristotle's apparently exclusive disjunction coincidence or for the sake of something (198b34-199a8).2 It is clear that Furley ascribes regular rain to purpose, and that that purpose is crop growth; but his further commitment to cosmic teleology in Aristotle remains obscure.3 David Sedley displays no such reticence.4 Starting from the presumption that Aristotle's teleology is interactive or global,5

Substantive and Methodological Teleology in Aristotle and Some Logical Empiricists

SUBSTANTIVE AND METHODOLOGICAL TELEOLOGY IN ARISTOTLE AND SOME LOGICAL EMPIRICISTS "MEN DO NOT THINK they know a thing till they have grasped the 'why' of it," observes Aristotle in the Physics.1 "Why?" however, is not a simple question. According to Aristotle there are four different senses in which the question may be taken, each determined by a different kind of causal condition for being and change. One might, for instance, seek to discover that out of which a thing is composed, or what agent produced it, or what its essential features are, or what its function is. Of the four senses of the question the most important for Aristotle is the last: What is that for the sake of which it is? Or more simply: What is its final cause? In opposition to Aristotle many contemporary philosophers of science, particularly the Logical Empiricists/ contend that teleological categories are eliminable from the substantive analysis of goal-directed systems and that, consequently, the explanatory framework for such systems can-and some say should-avoid a teleological construction. On the contrary, I believe that teleological categories and explanations are logically acceptable and in important ways indispensable not only for goal-directed systems but for all explanatory analyses in science. In order to test these convictions I propose in this study first to investigate Aristotle's doctrine of finality, and 1 194bl9-20. Throughout this study I have used the Hardie and Gaye translation of the Physics as found in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). 2 " Logical Empiricists " is not an altogether precise designation. By it I mean especially to refer to those philosophers of science who accept the covering law model of scientific explanation. Thus Braithwaite, Carnap, Feigl, Hempel, Nagel, Oppenheim, Pap, Reichenbach, Rudner, etc. 702 SUBSTANTIVE AND METHODOLOGICAL TELEOLOGY 708 then to measure its suggestive implications against the considerations of Nagel, Braithwaite, and Hempel in their interpretations of and objections to teleological categories and explanations . I. THE .ARISTOTELIAN DocTRINE OF TELEOLOGY A. Explanation according to the conditions of change. Since science for Aristotle is not simply a catalogue of empirical observations of natural phenomena but reasoned demonstrations according to the necessary conditions of things, a methodological requisite is that those conditions be distinguished with respect to their type. There are four kinds of condition which must be determined before we may be said to have full scientific knowledge of any natural object: the material condition, "that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists"; the formal condition, " the statement of the essence, and its genera, . . . and the parts of the definition"; the efficient condition, "the primary source of the change or coming to rest"; and the final condition, " [the] end or ' that for the sake of which ' a thing is done." 3 Of the four kinds of condition the physicist must consider in order to fully explain the changes which natural objects undergo, the formal and telic coincide both in the ontological and logical orders. In the ontological order it is the essential structures of things which dynamically determine them to develop into all that they potentially are. The paradigm example for Aristotle of this kind of form-end identification is the biological development of an individual of a certain species: each member of a given species carries the plan of its own evolvement within itself, and through the course of its transformations it becomes structured according to that plan.4 In the • Phys., 194b24-34. • The notion that species, just as individuals, evolve and assume new genotypic characteristics would be foreign to Aristotle. It was his consistent view that end-directed activity is engaged in only by individuals, not by their substantial forms. However, insofar as teleology is understood in an Aristotelean, non-vitalistic fashion, there seems to be no reason for not analyzing species evolution using 704 ROBERT J. RICHARDS logical order it is the same description of the structure of each object which, according to the use made of it, can be considered now the essential description of the species, now the plan of development for members of the species, that is, the description of the set...