This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

Generation of Animals is one of Aristotle's most mature, sophisticated, and carefully crafted scientific writings. His overall goal is to provide a comprehensive and systematic account of how animals reproduce, including a study of their reproductive organs, what we would call fertilization, embryogenesis, and organogenesis. In this book, international experts present thirteen original essays providing a philosophically and historically informed introduction to this important work. They shed light on the unity and structure of the Generation of Animals, the main theses that Aristotle defends in the work, and the method of inquiry he adopts. They also open up new avenues of exploration of this difficult and still largely unexplored work. The volume will be essential for scholars and students of ancient philosophy as well as of the history and philosophy of science.

This volume presents an interconnected set of sixteen essays, four of which are previously unpublished, by Allan Gotthelf—one of the leading experts in the study of Aristotle's biological writings. Gotthelf addresses three main topics across Aristotle's three main biological treatises. Starting with his own ground-breaking study of Aristotle's natural teleology and its illuminating relationship with the Generation of Animals, Gotthelf proceeds to the axiomatic structure of biological explanation (and the first principles such explanation proceeds from) in the Parts of Animals. After an exploration of the implications of these two treatises for our understanding of Aristotle's metaphysics, Gotthelf examines important aspects of the method by which Aristotle organizes his data in the History of Animals to make possible such a systematic, explanatory study of animals, offering a new view of the place of classification in that enterprise. In a concluding section on 'Aristotle as Theoretical Biologist', Gotthelf explores the basis of Charles Darwin's great praise of Aristotle and, in the first printing of a lecture delivered worldwide, provides an overview of Aristotle as a philosophically-oriented scientist, and 'a proper verdict' on his greatness as scientist.

Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.

In addition to being one of the world's most influential philosophers, Aristotle can also be credited with the creation of both the science of biology and the philosophy of biology. He was the first thinker to treat the investigations of the living world as a distinct inquiry with its own special concepts and principles. This book focuses on a seminal event in the history of biology - Aristotle's delineation of a special branch of theoretical knowledge devoted to the systematic investigation of animals. Aristotle approached the creation of zoology with the tools of subtle and systematic philosophies of nature and of science that were then carefully tailored to the investigation of animals. The papers collected in this 2001 volume, written by a pre-eminent figure in the field of Aristotle's philosophy and biology, examine Aristotle's approach to biological inquiry and explanation, his concepts of matter, form and kind, and his teleology.