Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
Summary
And just as Heraclitus is said to have spoken to the visitors, who were wanting to meet him but stopped as they were approaching when they saw him warming himself at the oven – he kept telling them to come in and not worry, ‘for there are gods here too’ – so we should approach the inquiry about each animal without aversion, knowing that in all of them there is something natural and beautiful.
(PA 1. 645a17–23)In his famous exhortation to biological study in the last chapter of Parts of Animals 1, Aristotle offers his students several reasons for pursuing the study of plants and animals.
While the study of the heavens has the superior objects, he begins, the information about living things is ‘better and more plentiful’, and their study thus ‘take[s] the advantage in knowledge (epistēmē)’ (645a1–2).
This study is also, Aristotle continues, a source of ‘wonder’ and ‘immeasurable pleasures’, since ‘the non-random, the for-something's sake, is present in the works of nature most of all, and the end for which they have been composed or have come to be occupies the place of the beautiful’ (a9, 17, 23–6). The epistēmē that this study of living things offers is an understanding final causes, and the pervasiveness, and perspicuousness, of the final cause among plants and (especially) animals is another source of the biology's value.
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- Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology , pp. 1 - 4Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987
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