Abstract

Among the more important contributions to late twentieth-century Aristotle studies was Pierre Pellegrin’s La Classification des animaux chez Aristote: Statut de la biologie et unité de l’aristotélisme, which appeared in 1982. This revisionist reading of the Historia animalium not only directed scholarly attention to Aristotle’s hitherto little-studied biological works, but it also discouraged the attempt to understand these works solely in terms of developments in modern biology. The result was a flurry of activity on the part of scholars who attempted to reread the corpus in light of the biology and the biology in light of the corpus. Thus was born a new development in Aristotle studies that redirected attention toward finding unity within the corpus through the integrating value of key concepts, descriptions, and methods of the biological works. One of the best examples of this development can be found in the work of James Lennox who, over the past twenty years, has written extensively on Aristotle’s philosophy of biology.