It is widely believed that one of Charles Darwin’s most important accomplishments was to have banished teleology from biology. Darwin’s view of teleology was a much-debated question in the 19th century, when both advocates and opponents of teleology equated it with divine design (Asa Gray and Karl Ernst Von Baer, for example). Darwin himself, however, did not think he had done so, and didn’t think that teleology should be banished from biology. This chapter will challenge the myth of Darwin the anti-teleologist by looking at two distinct kinds of evidence. First, we will look at his correspondence with Harvard Botanist Asa Gray, who praised Darwin’s use of teleological explanation. While Gray and Darwin agree on the value of teleological thinking in biology, Darwin disagrees with Gray that this counts as evidence for divine design in nature. Then we will look at Darwin’s own biology, especially his botanical works written after the publication of On the Origin of Species, to better understand his use of teleological explanation in biology.

In the decades following the forging of the so-called Neo-Darwinian Synthesis in the 1940s, a number of its philosophical defenders created a myth about what Charles Darwin was up against, a viewpoint called “typological essentialism” often attributed to Aristotle. In this chapter I first sketch the history of how this myth was created. I then establish that it is a myth by providing an account of Aristotle’s essentialism as it is actually displayed in his philosophy of biology and in his biological practice. It has nothing to do with the ‘mythic’ version. We then turn to what Darwin was really up against—a creationist anti-evolutionary way of defining the species concept that was common in Darwin’s time (that owes nothing to Aristotle), and to his attempts to re-orient thinking about it. I will close by reconsidering Aristotle and Charles Darwin: Does it make any sense to think about the relationship between two thinkers separated by more than two millennia living in such vastly different cultures? What did Charles Darwin himself think about Aristotle?

Unlike those rationalists in the history of philosophy – from Plato, through Augustine and Descartes, to modern idealists – who define reason in opposition to perception, Rand stands in the Aristotelian tradition, according to which reason is based on perception and forms concepts inductively, from the materials provided by the senses, allowing human beings “to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate concretes of any given, immediate moment” (Rand 1970, 19).

In this chapter, I focus on three different topics to illustrate the complicated and often surprising ways in which Aristotle’s investigations of animals and of the heavens are related to one another. After an introductory discussion of how Aristotle differentiates these different scientific investigations of nature from one another, this chapter looks at (1) the dependence of Aristotle’s account of cosmic directionality (in De caelo II.4) on his discussion of directional concepts in his account of animal locomotion (De incessu animalium 1-6); (2) the relationship between his account of gestation periods in De generatione animalium IV.10 and his understanding of the complex relationship between the solar and lunar cycles; and (3) his teleological explanation of why there are distinct male and female contributors to animal generation (and why animals generate at all) at the beginning of De generatione animalium II as it relates to his discussion of the cyclical nature of all generation that closes Generatione et Corruptione II.11.

As the publication of this Cambridge Companion indicates, Aristotle’s biological inquiries are now accepted as an integral part of Aristotelian studies. The publication of Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology in 1987 is generally acknowledged to have been an important factor in bringing this change about. In this afterword, I briefly outline the events that led to that publication, and then describe, from a personal perspective, the remarkable growth of scholarly activity focused on Aristotle’s biology from 1987 up to the publication of the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Biology.

Chapter Summary. Part i made a case for seeing the Posterior Analytics ii in a new light. In that new light, it does not provide poor answers to questions people bring to it about the path by which inquiry takes us from perceptual experience to first principles of demonstration. Rather it provides very good answers to questions about what questions ought to shape any inquiry aimed at knowledge and about how the answers to those questions are related to one another – it provides, that is, an erotetic framework for inquiry. Many of the norms that guide scientific inquiries, however, are domain-specific, and are not to be found in APo., though they are best seen as different ways of specifying the framework provided by the Analytics.

Chapter Summary. In this chapter and the next I explore the ways in which Aristotle uses the results of one natural inquiry as starting points for inquiry in another area. This is a practice in which Aristotle routinely indulges, and yet there is, at least prima facie, a problem with him doing so, given his views about how we arrive at first principles and the propriety of those principles to specific domains. In APo. i.7–13, he allows that geometric and arithmetic premises can be used in a range of fields of inquiry he refers to as ‘subalternate’ branches of mathematics, which he elsewhere describes as ‘the more natural of the mathematical sciences’ (i.e., optics, astronomy, mechanics, and harmonics). However, whether and, if so, how this practice might apply within the science of nature is never explicitly addressed. In this chapter, I address this question by exploring the dependence of Aristotle’s discussion of the application of the concepts ‘right’ and ‘left’ to the motions of the heavens on his discussion of directional dimensions in De incessu animalium.

Chapter Summary. The long, introductory chapter of the De anima provides a detailed and complicated erotetic structure for a norm-governed inquiry into the soul. Answering the complex list of questions laid out in that chapter provides the norms that govern Aristotle’s critical discussion of his predecessors in de An. i and his own positive account of the soul in de An. ii–iii. In this chapter, I will begin with a careful study of that introductory chapter from the standpoint of what we can learn about Aristotle’s methodos for an inquiry into the soul, and then turn to a study of the way in which the norms derived from answering the questions laid out in de An. i.1 govern the inquiry that ensues. One surprising result of this study is that, contrary to a widespread assumption, the de An. is, for good reason, not simply one of a number of contributions to natural science.

Chapter Summary. Metaph. Ε.1 provides a deceptively clean map of scientific knowledge, differentiating three forms of theoretical knowledge (first philosophy, mathematics, natural science) from each other and theoretical knowledge as a whole from practical and productive knowledge. The focus of this chapter will be on natural science (ἡ φυσικὴ ἐπιστήμη, 1025b19), considered as the ultimate goal of natural inquiry. Given the results established up to this point about Aristotle’s general account of inquiry, my aim in this chapter is to answer two related, more specific questions about natural inquiry

One should explain in the following way, for example, breathing exists for the sake of this, while that comes to be from necessity because of these. But ‘necessity’ sometimes signifies that if that – that is, that for the sake of which – is to be, it is necessary for these things to obtain, while at other times it signifies that things are thus in respect of their character or nature. For it is necessary for the hot to go out and enter again upon meeting resistance, and for the air to flow in. This is directly necessary; and it is as the internal heat retreats during the cooling of the external air that inhalation and exhalation occur. This then is the manner of proper inquiry, and it is concerning these things and things of this sort that one should grasp the causes.

Chapter Summary. Book i of the Posterior Analytics articulates necessary and sufficient conditions for the achievement of unqualified scientific knowledge, among which is being in possession of first principles of demonstration that themselves are indemonstrable. Book ii, an investigation of inquiries leading to knowledge of essences and causes, describes stages on the way to that goal, each stage looked at from two different perspectives: definitions expressing knowledge of essences and demonstrations expressing knowledge of causes. It has proven difficult to read this second book as a unified discussion, and that has led to a great deal of literature focused almost exclusively on its last chapter, on the assumption that this is where Aristotle provides his answer to the question of how we achieve knowledge of those indemonstrable first principles. But the description of that process in ii.19 is widely viewed as insufficiently robust to explain how first principles arrived at by such a process could possess the epistemic authority Aristotle claims for them.

Dante refers to Aristotle as “il maestro di color che sanno,” the master of those who know. But Aristotle typically refers to the works that have come down to us as ‘inquiries’ or ‘investigations,’ and in the pages that follow, I will make a case for Aristotle as “il maestro di color che cercano,” the master of those who inquire. The chapters to follow attempt to get clarity on Aristotle’s conception of inquiry, insofar as the goal of inquiry is scientific knowledge (ἐπιστήμη). Does Aristotle see inquiry, as he clearly sees explanation, as a process constrained by epistemic norms – norms of inquiry, as I am calling them? That is, given that Aristotle has clearly articulated ideas about what the goal of scientific inquiry looks like, does he also have clearly articulated norms that must be adhered to if one is to achieve that goal?