In this chapter I introduce the thesis that Aristotle’s biology was considerably influenced by medical tradition as represented by the so-called Hippocratic writings. I start with a brief discussion of the history of the debate and the state of investigation and introduce the main advocates as well as opponents of the thesis. I then focus on Aristotle’s remarks on distinguished physicians and the relationship between medicine and natural philosophy in Parva Naturalia. With the help of selected passages from the Hippocratic On Regimen, On Flesh and On Ancient Medicine I make the case that Aristotle reflects upon a specific medical debate on the first principles of human (and animal) physiology and clarifies his own position in it, namely that he takes sides with those physicians who practice their discipline “in a more philosophical manner” and who employ heat, cold, and other such qualities as the starting points of their physiological explanations.

Parts of Animals Book 1 is mainly concerned with a discussion of the norms (horoi) that govern natural (biological) inquiry. In the present chapter I examine one of those norms, which concerns “how one ought to carry out an investigation of animals” (PA 1.1.639b3–5). Aristotle examines two alternative methods. The first recommends investigating animals species by species (e.g. sparrow, finch, raven). The second begins by grouping species into wider kinds (e.g. bird) and studies those features that belong to them as members of those wider kinds before going on to study those variations that differentiate one form of that kind from another (e.g. variations in beak shape). While scholars have been tempted to conclude that Aristotle rejects the first method outright, I argue that he thinks both approaches are important tools in the biologist’s tool-kit (PA 1.4.644b1–6). In the final section of the chapter I show how this discussion helps bring into focus the broader controversy surrounding the relation between the scientific theory presented in the Posterior Analytics and Aristotle’s scientific practice in the biological works.

Biology and theology are interdependent theoretical sciences for Aristotle. In prominent discussions of the divine things (the stars and their unmoved movers) Aristotle appeals to the science of living things, and in prominent discussions of the nature of plants and animals Aristotle appeals to the nature of the divine. There is in fact a single continuous series of living things that includes gods, humans, animals, and plants, all of them living and, in a way, divine. Aristotle has this continuum of divine beings, and a theory of value that corresponds to it, in mind not only in key parts of his theology and natural science (including astrophysics and biology), but also in his practical philosophy. Here I can do little more than call attention to some important texts and attempt to offer a coherent account of them, without being able to enter into the usual interpretive disputes. I begin by clarifying the terms “theology” and “biology” and their place in Aristotle’s division of philosophy. Next, I discuss how Aristotle’s theology is informed by his biology, and then how his biology is informed by his theology. I end by discussing some implications of the interdependence of biology and theology for Aristotle’s ethics and exhortation to philosophy.

Aristotle is a political scientist and a student of biology. Political science, in his view, is concerned with the human good and thus it includes the study of ethics. He approaches many subjects from the perspective of both political science and biology: the virtues, the function of humans, and the political nature of humans. In light of the overlap between the two disciplines, I look at whether or not Aristotle’s views in biology influence or explain some of his theses in political science. I show that we should not seek a unified answer to this question, for the relationship between the two disciplines varies depending on the topic. In some cases, for example the nature of the human function, the biological background is likely to be endorsed as one of the presuppositions of the ethical enquiry. In other cases, for example the study of social hierarchies, even though the ethical works and the biological works come to similar conclusions, it is hard to establish that the biological approach is intended to provide support to the ethico-political approach. In conclusion, I show that Aristotle’s political science and his biology are in conflict at least in two important cases: his account of justice towards nonhuman animals and his exhortation to contemplate.

Aristotle’s biology and contemporary evolutionary biology appear to be fundamentally at odds. Any comparative biology seeks to explain the fit and diversity of organismal form, but Aristotelian and contemporary biology do so in very different, evidently incompatible, ways. In this chapter, I argue for a reconciliation between the two biologies. Recent advances in evolutionary thinking suggest that the form of population thinking pursued by twentieth-century evolutionary biology must be augmented by an understanding of the ways in which organisms as adaptive, purposive entities contribute to adaptive evolution. Moreover, the phenomenon of adaptation cannot adequately be understood unless we take into account the ways in which an organism’s “way of life” structures its experience of its conditions of existence. The active role that organisms play in evolution is nicely captured in Aristotle’s concept of bios – way of life.

In eighteenth-century Britain, philosophy was a broader subject than it is today and included many subjects covered elsewhere in this book, such as science, political theory, and theology. This chapter focuses chiefly on those eighteenth-century topics in philosophy that have most shaped present-day philosophical discussion. The first of these is epistemology or the theory of knowledge: the study of what we know and how we know. John Locke, David Hume, and Thomas Reid called this the study of the human mind or understanding. We will also consider another area where the contributions of eighteenth-century British philosophers are widely recognized today: the work in moral and ethical philosophy of a group of thinkers commonly called the ‘British moralists’. From the ancient Greeks and Romans, eighteenth-century thinkers inherited an understanding of philosophy as a way of life and a guide to living well. On what basis do we arrive at moral principles of right and wrong, and what motivates us to follow those principles in our actions: our reason or our feelings? These questions concerned such thinkers as Samuel Clarke, the earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith.

There has been a marked increase in incidents of terrorism – and correspondingly a growth in the study of terrorism – in Africa over the last twenty years or so. Yet a brief survey of the phenomenon in historical context reveals that terrorism in Africa has long been both complex and prevalent. There is clearly novelty, in the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, in terms of external linkages, ideologies and technology at terrorists’ disposal; this is true of both state and non-state actors. However, it is clear enough that some patterns of terrorist activity can be discerned as flowing from Africa’s deeper past. Therefore, it is important to see terrorism, in its historical and its contemporary forms, as part of the totality of violence in Africa. Connected to that, terrorism cannot be removed from the socio-economic and political conditions within which it takes place. Africans have considerable experience of state terrorism – from the slave trade and the state-building exercises of the precolonial era, to imperial partition, to the brutal excesses of authoritarian systems in the recent past. Marginalised, subjugated or otherwise dispossessed communities have sought to curtail these projections of power and resist, using whatever tools available. Terrorism cannot be segregated from wider contingencies – most obviously, economic and political aspiration and desperation, which fundamentally shape attitudes towards human life, or more precisely the taking of it, at particular moments in time.

In this chapter, terrorism is interpreted as a contested concept: as a discursive frame and a political attribution with the power to transform conflicting political, ideological or religious positions into repertoires of action and governmental practices. Terrorist events will be highlighted inasmuch as they were reported on in the Netherlands, or when threats posed by international terrorist organisations or foreign groups were mediatised within the Dutch context. We will also trace when indigenous Dutch radical groups and individuals triggered national debates – and estimate whether this was followed by national policy decisions and actions or not. As will transpire, the Netherlands were more often than not on the receiving end of international terrorism and global terrorist trends. Yet, there were some instances of terrorist groups and attacks originating in and from the Netherlands, inspired by injustice frames generated on the basis of misgivings about Dutch politics. By and large, the history of terrorism in the Netherlands did follow the trajectories of David Rapoport’s ‘four waves’ of terrorism, albeit with some national characteristics, and always situated within the specific confines of the Dutch national context. In the following, we will trace the introduction, trajectories and translations of terrorism as a concept, discourse and influence on concrete security practices into Dutch politics, society and law – and we will ask ourselves how the double-edged nature of terrorism played out in these interactions.

This chapter surveys the origins of aesthetics in eighteenth-century literary criticism, as major poets were examined in the light of concepts such as ‘beauty’. The treatment of art as a topic for moral thought gave a more polite, philosophical turn to the hitherto raucous and satirical character of early eighteenth-century critical practice. The chapter examines the development of thought about form and psychology encouraged by seventeenth-century French critics, followed by Addison, Shaftesbury, and later thinkers such as Burke, who presaged the gothic. Particular attention is given to Hume, Alison and Gerard, together with other Scots theorists of ‘belles lettres’. The discussion charts the increasing influence on criticism of such terms as ‘sublime,’ ‘taste,’ ‘genius,’ ‘originality,’ ‘imagination, and ‘art’ itself. An important element is the place of creative writers as aesthetic theorists, such as Pope, Joseph Warton, and Edward Young. Nor is the period’s greatest critic, Samuel Johnson, immune to the vocabulary of aesthetics. The contribution of visual artists is illustrated by the writings of Hogarth and Reynolds, while a final section examines theory’s relation to practice.

Russia was an integral part of the modern world’s first historical wave of terrorism, which lasted from the final third of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century. Some historians and terrorism experts even consider the Russian Empire to be the ‘birthplace’ of terrorism. Indeed, in Russia, terrorism as a systematic tactic of revolutionary strategy, with its own ideological justification and organisational framework, took shape in 1869–81, is usually dated back to Sergei Nechayev’s ‘Catechism of a Revolutionary’ and was developed and applied in practice by the Narodnaya Volya (‘People’s Will’) organisation. By the start of the twentieth century, terrorist bombings in British India, the Balkans and elsewhere were often referred to as ‘the Russian way’, or ‘the Russian method’. Along with anarchist terrorism in Europe, which started to spread roughly at the same time, and the early resort to terrorist means by some national liberation and anti-colonial movements, Russian revolutionary terrorism of the late nineteenth century was certainly one of the first identifiable forms and clear manifestations of modern terrorism. Placing the Russian case in a global historical context allows us to assess the extent to which its national experience forms, conforms to or deviates from global trends in terrorism.

In Peru, the term ‘terrorism’ is unequivocally linked to the Communist Party of Peru-Sendero Luminoso (PCP-SL), best known in English as the Shining Path. The PCP-SL took up arms in 1980 to unleash the bloodiest and most lengthy insurgency recorded in Peru’s modern history. The ‘time of terrorism’ refers to the years from 1980 to approximately 1998, in which Sendero launched their so-called ‘people’s war’ (guerra popular) with the ultimate goal of taking over the state and establishing the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Because of their systematic attack on all forms of organised society, some have described SL as the opposite of a social movement. Others have likened it to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, in the light of their authoritarian ideology and methods, and their agrarian-based self-sufficient communist utopia. Today, the scars of the war are likely to be unnoticed by foreign visitors and a younger generation of Peruvians. A celebratory mood has taken over since the first decade of the twentieth century, making references to the recent past of political violence an uncomfortable truth that many have preferred not to look at. But this national celebratory mood belies scars of violence that run deep. Terrorism has a history, which should not be detached from the history of terrorism, the term. It is the awareness of this history that will free us from reproducing the state’s repressive gaze and to embrace our citizenship.