Sex Differentiation, Inheritance and the Meaning of Form in Generation

Sex differentiation raises problems for the account of the import of matter for semen’s capacity to animate. Critics of the view that matter matters for semen’s formal work argue that the male contributes a principle and not a material product and so its material is irrelevant. This chapter shows how the specifics of sexual differentiation and trait inheritance support the view that the male contribution works as form on material through the material capacity of heat. The female contribution is similarly shown to be capable of resisting the male contribution and can loosen the male’s ability to produce an offspring like itself because the male’s form is working through material and affected by other matter. The chapter concludes by showing the limits of contradiction and contrariety for thinking the relationship between form and matter beyond opposites to show how the Möbius strip model presents another alternative.

Disputes over the Material Contribution of Semen

Critics argue that the formal work of semen cannot be done through material because material cannot do the work of form. This chapter examines the restricted material view and the robust material view in the literature as it coalesces around the role of what Aristotle calls vital heat in semen. The second part of the chapter examines Aristotle’s account of form in conversation with Plato and Neoplatonic views of form. It makes a case for individual form in Aristotle that can work through matter in semen.

Introduction: Aristotle and the History of Sex

The Introduction considers how Aristotle’s normative view of form and matter, associated with male and female, makes for a metaphysics of gender that construes the male as what has meaning and definition and the female as what is in need of such definition. The one- and two-sex models in the history of thinking of sexual difference are explained to show how Aristotle seems to fit in both and neither by construing matter as what is not form on the one-sex model but also considering form and matter separate and distinct causes. This framing points to the problem that matter has posed to the history of philosophy—matter is posited to fill a role that it seems only capable of fulfilling by having no power of its own—and offers the Möbius strip as a model for thinking matter’s relation to form.

Conclusion: On Material in Aristotle’s Biology

The conclusion returns to the concern over whether material in Aristotle is subordinated to form, and thus whether Aristotle promulgates a normative metaphysics that maligns matter. The chapter draws together the various aspects of the argument to conclude that Aristotle gives material its own power. The Conclusion considers the implications of this argument for fitting Aristotle into the one-sex and two-sex models and shows how the Möbius strip is a useful model for conceiving the relationship of form to matter.

Craft and Other Metaphors

This chapter examines Aristotle’s numerous uses of analogies to craft in his account of generation to argue that Aristotle uses these analogies to explain specific aporiai rather than to assign nature a structure of craft. The tool analogy explains how semen takes over the form from the male parent, but Aristotle’s use of further analogies such as building points to how the semen’s formal activity is like the act of building, an activity of animating, which itself animates the embryo. Aristotle’s account of the tool in other contexts points to how semen does the work of the male parent’s soul while enabling the generation of a new being with its own soul. Other images such as the earth and sun, the rennet, and the good householder, in the last part of the chapter, point to other models that Aristotle offers for explaining the work of semen specifically and generation in general.

Semen, Menses, Blood: Material in Generation

This chapter presents the central argument of the book: the material capacities of semen contribute to its capacity to animate menses. The chapter considers how semen’s material produces formal capacities by comparing semen to blood: blood is hot through dependence on something external to it, while semen’s heat is internal to it. This internal power is what makes it formal power. The case is made for how matter can have power without being teleological. The particulars of how semen causes by comparison to the positions of pansomatism and preformationism, which Aristotle rejects, are laid out and the central aspects of the material composition of semen are considered with a focus on the role of vital heat. Vital heat is a source of fostering life beyond the generation of animals, in stomachs, earth and sun, which points to a further sense of its materiality.

The Feminine and the Elemental in Greek Myth, Medicine and Early Philosophy

This chapter offers historical background and context of ancient Greek conceptions of the female, the feminine, and matter, including the elemental in Greek myth, medical texts and the Pre-Socratic philosophers. The chapter examines the role of female divinities in reproduction and the gods said to be born of Zeus and thus without a female goddess or mortal woman in Greek myth to show the anxiety in Greek myth over female fecundity coupled with the recognition that reproduction without women was impossible. Depictions of Pandora as the beginning of a separate race of women point to Greek understandings of woman as a belly in both productive and consumptive ways. The chapter further considers how Pre-Socratics thematize the elemental to think about the association of moisture with the female in medical treatises and Aristotle. The last part examines the Hippocratics views of elemental forces in the body and their effect on women for whom their excess can become a problem as well as the focus on the belly as the source of power in the body.

Aristotle on Material

This chapter argues against the existence of prime matter in Aristotle’s metaphysics and biological works by analysing the key passages supporters of the prime matter view draw on to make their case. Aristotle’s case for change from a substratum, his rejection of matter as substance viewed as a substratum, his account of elemental change are shown not to require prime matter, but rather to point to the power that matter has on its own. Aristotle views matter as multiple and the multiple sense of matter forecloses the possibility of prime matter. The chapter concludes by considering how separate form and matter in generation can be construed through Aristotle’s account of the soul’s relation to body and his account of different ways of being acted upon to further the case for matter’s independent power and intimacy with form in natural generation and in natural substance.

Feminist Critics of Aristotle’s Biology and Metaphysics

This chapter looks at the many issues that feminist critics have raised both to accuse Aristotle of misogyny and to defend Aristotle’s conception of the female, matter, and the feminine. This chapter thus lays out the questions that set up the book: To what extent is Aristotle’s biology offering a positive role for the female and for matter in generation? To what extent does Aristotle’s biology influence the rest of his corpus? To what extent is Aristotle’s metaphysics normative, privileging form—and thus male—over matter—and thus female? To what extent is artifice the proper model of generation for Aristotle? The chapter thus looks at feminists who say Aristotle’s biology is sexist, those who say it is not, and thus who find the problem more fundamentally rooted in Aristotle’s metaphysics.