Aristotle's Generation of Animals: A Critical Guide(Cambridge Critical Guides)

Generation of Animals is one of Aristotle's most mature, sophisticated, and carefully crafted scientific writings. His overall goal is to provide a comprehensive and systematic account of how animals reproduce, including a study of their reproductive organs, what we would call fertilization, embryogenesis, and organogenesis. In this book, international experts present thirteen original essays providing a philosophically and historically informed introduction to this important work. They shed light on the unity and structure of the Generation of Animals, the main theses that Aristotle defends in the work, and the method of inquiry he adopts. They also open up new avenues of exploration of this difficult and still largely unexplored work. The volume will be essential for scholars and students of ancient philosophy as well as of the history and philosophy of science.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; Aristotle's philosophy and the Generation of Animals Andrea Falcon and David Lefebvre; Part I. The Unity and Structure of Aristotle's Generation of Animals: 1. 'One long argument?' The unity of Aristotle's Generation of Animals Allan Gotthelf and Andrea Falcon; 2. Parts and generation: the prologue to the Generation of Animals and the structure of the treatise David Lefebvre; 3. Order and method in Aristotle's Generation of Animals 2 Mariska Leunissen; Part II. The Principles of Animal Generation Reconsidered: 4. What is Aristotle's Generation of Animals about? Pierre Pellegrin; 5. Aristotle on epigenesis: two senses of epigenesis Devin Henry; 6. A latent difficulty in Aristotle's theory of semen: the homogeneous nature of semen and the role of the frothy bubble Marwan Rashed; 7. Function and instrument: toward a new criterion of the scale of being in Aristotle's Generation of Animals Cristina Cerami; Part III. Hybrids, Male and Female, Particular Forms, and Monsters: 8. Hybridity and sterility in Aristotle's Generation of Animals Jocelyn Groisard; 9. Females in Aristotle's embryology Jessica Gelber; 10. Something(s) in the way(s) he moves: reconsidering the embryological argument for particular forms in Aristotle Gregory Salmieri; 11. Aristotle's explanations of monstrous births and deformities in Generation of Animals 4.4 Sophia Connell; Part IV. Methodology in Aristotle's Generation of Animals: 12. The search for principles in Aristotle: Posterior Analytics 2 and Generation of Animals 1 Robert Bolton; 13. Aristotle, dissection, and generation: experience, expertise and the practices of knowing James G. Lennox.

About the Author :
Andrea Falcon is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University, Montréal. He is the author of Corpi e Movimenti. La fortuna del De caelo nel mondo antico (2001); Aristotle and the Science of Nature: Unity without Uniformity (Cambridge, 2005); Aristotelianism in the First Century BCE: Xenarchus of Seleucia (Cambridge, 2012); and Aristotelismo (2017). He is the editor of the Brill's Companion to the Reception of Aristotle (2016). David Lefebvre is Professor of Philosophy at the Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA) in Clermont-Ferrand. His publications include a new translation of Aristotle's Generation of Animals (2014), and he is co-editor of Dunamis. Autour de la puissance chez Aristote (2008) and La Métaphysique de Théophraste. Principes et apories (2015) and author of DYNAMIS. Sens et Genèse de la notion aristotélicienne de puissance (2017).