This chapter considers the place of the four books of the Parts of Animals (PA) within Aristotle’s envisaged sequence of biological writings. It argues that PA I belongs integrally with II–IV (rather than being a self-standing theoretical essay) and that the entire project of PA I–IV presupposes key theoretical and factual discoveries made in the Historia Animalium (HA), contra the ‘Balme hypothesis’ according to which HA postdates the explanatory treatises and represents a more advanced stage of inquiry. Finally, it shows that the mantra “being is prior to coming-to-be” (which governs the PA–GA axis) has important implications for our understanding of the explanations in PA II–IV. It concludes with some remarks on the overall structure of Aristotle’s biological corpus.

In the Extra Help, you’ll keep learning how to tackle any Greek sentence, including the next ‘branch’: the adjective. This chapter includes some extra work for consolidation, for those who have a mid-term break.

The Extra Help covers different Greek verb ‘tenses’, showing you some patterns that will save you time in the long run, and will help you relate every stage of parsing a verb to the information the verb communicates. In the Extra Material, you’ll discover some major uses of the imperfect tense.

In PA I.5, Aristotle encourages his audience to engage in a novel kind of philosophy: the scientific inquiry into animals and plants. What Aristotle is exhorting his readers to do, biology, is newly and originally conceived, but the literary technique employed – protreptic speech – is one of the oldest and most traditional kinds of philosophical discourse. In his earlier popular dialogue the Protrepticus, Aristotle had defended and promoted the Academic conception of philosophy and its preoccupation with theoretical and mathematical sciences such as astronomy by discussing the clarity of such sciences and the excellence of their objects. In the later protreptic to biology, he adapted these earlier arguments, arguing that biology also has excellent objects and offers a kind of clarity that may even surpass astronomy. These arguments turn out to be part of a general rhetorical strategy for comparing and rank-ordering sciences that was theorized in the Topics and Rhetoric.

This final chapter on Israel’s writing prophets highlights those whose messages supported postexilic restoration during the Persian period. As in earlier chapters, we will need to consider the conditionality of prophecy as well as its “forthtelling” rather than “foretelling” nature.

In 539 bce, the Persian king Cyrus allowed the first group of Israelite exiles to return to Jerusalem, now part of the administrative province of Yehud. The prophets Haggai and Zechariah serve to inspire this rebuilding process, particularly of the temple. We will observe in Zechariah growing evidence of a messianic hope in a future Davidic king as well as a literary shift from eschatology to apocalyptic forms. Malachi, dated around 470 bce, builds on earlier Old Testament prophetic themes of purity and covenant faithfulness. Much harder to date is Joel, as it contains sections indicative of two entirely different periods of Judah’s history; however, we will note the “day of Yahweh” theme in Joel, portrayed this time as a terrible day of reckoning for the nations. Jonah is unique as a narrative, conveying through rather humorous form the serious concern of Yahweh for all peoples.

While there is a dependency on some ancestry, there is also an effort to go beyond ancestors in terms of style and poetic meaning or thought in concomitance with transformations that enforce new lifestyles and new ways of expression and thinking. The understanding of adab as a combined effort of learning and refinement and the contributions of critics to understand the field as an entangled discursive space minimize the random application of saraq, theft, and initiate a counter understanding of production whereby inventiveness stands out as a challenge to conservative philology. The consolidation of literary criticism with a terminological arsenal in order to define theft, borrowing, and shared script was not an isolated occurrence. It was part of a mounting library of books on expressions, alfāẓ, and poetic meanings, maʿānī. It is also in line with the rising wave of poetic inventiveness and newness as a literary endeavor to escape the ordeal of an apparent dearth and depletion of expressions.

This chapter focuses on those parts of animals that are deformed, useless, harmful, or ‘weird,’ and that thereby challenge Aristotle’s teleological view that the sublunary world and the animals in it are beautiful on the grounds that they are functional, and that they are therefore worthy of our study as well. My account will present three different types of teleological failure that Aristotle identifies in the production processes of animals with such ‘bad’ parts, one of which attributes ‘genuine’ mistakes or oversights to the formal natures crafting these animals. The chapter argues that especially this third type of mistake signals a methodological weakness in the explanatory project of the Parts of Animals as a whole, namely that it overextends Aristotle’s theory of natural teleology to features that could have been explained more satisfactorily by reference to chance or necessity alone.