Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science (review)

James G. Lennox. Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiii + 321. Cloth, $64.95.

This excellent book is a collection of Lennox's papers, published in the last twenty years, on the structure and methodology of Aristotle's philosophy of biology. In spite of the fact that the papers have had little, if any, re-editing for inclusion in the present volume, the book presents a remarkably seamless and impressively argued interpretation not only of Aristotle's philosophy of biology in particular, but of his philosophy of science in general. As interest in Aristotle's philosophy of biology continues to grow, this book will prove to be essential reading for anyone doing research in the history and philosophy of biology.

The book is divided into three main sections. Part I: Inquiry and Explanation, includes five papers that show how Aristotle's scientific practice, in the Historia animalium (HA) and the De partibus animalium (PA) in particular, is to be reconciled with his theory of scientific knowledge as adumbrated in the Posterior Analytics. According to Lennox, Aristotle distinguishes two sorts of explanation. One (which he calls A-type) searches for inclusion relations among natural kinds in order to show that some trait, such as "suckles its young," can be explained merely by appealing to the fact that the organism in question belongs to a certain natural kind (say, mammal). The other (B-type) attempts to give an account of what it is to be a member of a natural kind. On Lennox's account the HA is concerned primarily with A-type explanations while the PA is concerned primarily with B-type explanations. Further, A-type explanations correspond to what the Posterior Analytics calls explanations of "the fact that," while B-type explanations correspond to what the Posterior Analytics calls explanations of "the reason why." Lennox argues, contra Jonathan Barnes, G. E. R. Lloyd, and others, that Aristotle's own practice in the biological works is fully consistent with the research program that he sets out in the Posterior Analytics and in the first five chapters of the PA. The concluding paper in the first section raises the question of why this research program disappeared shortly after Aristotle's death and did not reappear until the work of St. Albert the Great fourteen centuries later. Familiarity with Aristotle's texts is obviously a necessary condition for the continuation of this research program, but it is not a sufficient condition, according to Lennox, because much of the textual material was available throughout the period. What is needed in addition is a shared sense of Aristotle's causal realism—a philosophical commitment that simply was not present in the same way in the generations after Aristotle.

Part II: Matter, Form, and Kind, includes four papers exploring the relationship between Aristotle's formal realism and his account of biological kinds. Biological kinds are not one by virtue of having the same essence but rather by virtue of sharing certain phenotypes that jointly determine the largest non-dividable kind to which a particular organism belongs. Aristotle's account of biological kinds is not a taxonomy, however. The primary issue determining the various groupings of phenotypes is teleological: which traits are those that will most readily insure that this particular organism will survive to become a fully developed instantiation of an organism that lives as this one does?

Part III contains four papers on Teleological Explanation, the unifying theme, as it were, tying together the various and apparently disparate elements of Aristotle's philosophy of biology. Chance, for example, appears to play a role in certain biological phenomena, such as the spontaneous generation of certain kinds of organisms, and one might wonder how a teleological biology could allow such an element. Lennox notes, first, that chance events, for...