The Architecture of the Science of Living Beings Aristotle and Theophrastus on Animals and Plants

About this book

Scholars have paid ample attention to Aristotle's works on animals. By contrast, they have paid little or no attention to Theophrastus' writings on plants. That is unfortunate because there was a shared research project in the early Peripatos which amounted to a systematic, and theoretically motivated, study of perishable living beings (animals and plants). This is the first sustained attempt to explore how Aristotle and Theophrastus envisioned this study, with attention focused primarily on its deep structure. That entails giving full consideration to a few transitional passages where Aristotle and Theophrastus offer their own description of what they are trying to do. What emerges is a novel, sophisticated, and largely idiosyncratic approach to the topic of life.

Contents

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Conventions
Tables
Transliterations

Introduction
1. Aristotle's de anima and the study of perishable living beings
2. Aristotle's Parva Naturalia and the study of animals and everything that has life
3. Pre-explanatory and explanatory strategies in Aristotle's study of animals
4. Theophrastus' history of plants i: the transition from the study of animals to the study of plants
5. Theophrastus on the generation of plants;
6. The invention of biology?

Appendix A - Aristotle on plants
Appendix B- Theophrastus on animals
Appendix C- [Aristotle], on plants
References
General Index
Index of Passages

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Biography

Andrea Falcon is Professor Emeritus at Concordia University, Montreal) and currently lecturing at the University of Milan). He is the author, editor, and co-editor of many books, with his two most recent co-edited books on Aristotle being: Aristotle's De Incessu Animalium (Cambridge, 2021) and Aristotle's Generation and Corruption II (Cambridge, 2022).