James G Lennox
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 597061 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | James G Lennox |
| NOMBRES | James G |
| APELLIDO | Lennox |
| FIRMA | LENNOX J G |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Pittsburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4613-2925 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 46 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 12 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 41 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1976 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Darwin Mythology
Organisms, agency and Aristotle
There is a tension at the heart of Aristotle's understanding of organic activities, created by his appeals to the productive activities of craftsmen and his use of normative language to characterize the goals of such activities. In this paper I discuss two ways of interpreting Aristotle's teleology aimed at resolving this tension, and discuss a closely analogous tension at the heart of a number of contemporary defenses of teleological reasoning i…
Theophrastus on the Limits of Teleology
One of the most distinctive features of Aristotle's philosophy of science is its attempt to defend the use of teleological explanations in accounting for a variety of natural phenomena without assuming some sort of consciousness involved in their causation. Theophrastus questions explanations of the windpipe's position and the location of the blending of the blood by reference to what is honorable. Aristotle's general functional explanation of ho…
Aristotle on Inquiry
Aristotle is a rarity in the history of philosophy and science - he is a towering figure in the history of both disciplines. Moreover, he devoted a great deal of philosophical attention to the nature of scientific knowledge. How then do his philosophical reflections on scientific knowledge impact his actual scientific inquiries? In this book James Lennox sets out to answer this question. He argues that Aristotle has a richly normative view of sci…
Accentuate the negative
Why Animals Must Keep Their Cool
Lennox explores the role of cooling in the regulation of natural heat and the preservation of life with special interest in methodological questions about how Aristotle arrived at his views about the critical role of cooling in the lives of blooded animals and why he insists that both the brain and the lungs are involved in moderating the animal's heat. Lennox concludes that Aristotle was somewhat perplexed by the brain, and that his changing vie…
Aristotle on the Unity of the Nutritive and Reproductive Functions
In De Anima 2.4, Aristotle claims that nutritive soul encompasses two distinct biological functions: nutrition and reproduction. We challenge a pervasive interpretation which posits ‘nutrients’ as the correlative object ( antikeimenon ) of the nutritive capacity. Instead, the shared object of nutrition and reproduction is that which is nourished and reproduced: the ensouled body, qua ensouled. Both functions aim at preserving this object, and thu…
Self-Motion
Aristotle's Generation of Animals
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 …
Aristotle on the biological roots of virtue
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Aristotle on the Emergence of Material Complexity
In this article I defend an account of Meteorology IV as providing a material-level causal account of the emergence of uniform materials with a wide range of dispositional properties not found at the level of the four elements—the emergence of material complexity. I then demonstrate that this causal account is used in the Generation of Animals and Parts of Animals as part of the explanation of the generation of the uniform parts (tissues) and of …
Episteme, demonstration, and explanation
Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge
The Complexity of Aristotle's Study of Animals
Aristotle is the first person in the history of science to see the study of nature as an articulated complex of interrelated, yet somewhat autonomous, investigations. Understanding why goes to the heart of what is philosophically distinctive about him. Why does Aristotle present the investigation of “the common cause of animal motion” (as Aristotle characterizes the subject of De motu animalium) as distinct and independent from a study of the cau…
Aristotle on Norms of Inquiry
Where does Aristotle stand in the debate between rationalism and empiricism? The locus classicus on this question, Posterior Analytics II. 19, seems clearly empiricist. Yet many commentators have resisted this conclusion. Here, I review their arguments and conclude that they rest in part on expectations for this text that go unfulfilled. I argue that this is because his views about norms of empirical inquiry are in the rich methodological passage…
Aristotle’s Natural Science
The unity and purpose of On the Parts of Animals 1
This chapter talks about the unity and structure of Aristotle's investigation of animals, and its place in his wider investigation of nature. The investigation is framed not as exploring methods for an inquiry into animals, but for an inquiry into nature. On the Parts of Animals I is regularly characterized as lacking any overall sense of unity and purpose. These characterizations are sometimes supported by statements about radical differences in…
Aristotle on the Biological Roots of Virtue
Traditionally, attempts to relate Aristotle's well-known passion for biology to his ethical thought have focused on two points of intersection. In Nicomachean Ethics I 7, Aristotle relies heavily on the idea that human excellence (or virtue) must be the excellence of a specifically human functional capacity, and his approach to defining that capacity is reminiscent of De Anima II 2-3: Functions shared with plants and animals are ruled out in favo…
Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle
This volume of essays explores major connected themes in Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of nature, and ethics, especially themes related to essence, definition, teleology, activity, potentiality, and the highest good. The volume is united by the belief that all aspects of Aristotle's work need to be studied together if any one of the areas of thought is to be fully understood. Many of the papers were contributions to a conference at the Univ…
Bios and Explanatory Unity in Aristotle's Biology
This chapter discusses an issue raised in David Charles' Meaning and Essence in Aristotle, Chapter 12: can the intimate relationship between definition and explanation that Aristotle defends in the Posterior Analytics be maintained in a scientific study of animals in the face of their complex natures? It is argued that the concept of bios (way of life) plays a critical role in this respect, accounting for why different animals have the particular…
Form, Essence, and Explanation in Aristotle's Biology
This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Essence and Explanation in Theory and Practice Form, Function, and Biological Essentialism The Priority of Being to Generation Conclusion Notes Bibliography
Darwin, Philosopher
Aristotle
Keith M. Parsons, Drawing Out Leviathan
Clarendon Aristotle Series
Natural selection and the struggle for existence
Robert Boyle's Defense of Teleological Inference in Experimental Science
History and Philosophy of Science
In the aftermath of Thomas Kuhn's The structure of scientific revolutions, there was a great deal of discussion about the relationship between the History of Science and the Philosophy of Science. A wider issue was at stake in these discussions: 'normativism' versus 'naturalism' in Epistemology. If the History of Science, at best, gives us reliable information about what actually occurred historically, how can it inform debates about such things …
Fletcher's Oblique Attack on Ayn Rand's Economics and Ethics
Aristotle on genera, species, and ?the more and the less?
Enc on Harvey and Consequence Etiologies
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On Scientific Discovery
Robert Boyle's Defense of Teleological Inference in Experimental Science
Aristotle on the Generation of Animals
Nature Animated
Aristotle's Philosophy of Action
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action. By David Charles. (London: Duckworth, 1984. Pp. xi + 282. Price £24) James G. Lennox James G. Lennox University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 36, Issue 145, October 1986, Pages 543–549, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219880 Published: 01 October 1986
Divide and explain
A longstanding problem concerning Aristotle's philosophy of science is the extent to which there is a serious conflict between the account of scientific explanation and investigation in the Posterior Analytics and the explanations and investigations reported in treatises such as the Historia Animalium, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals. I shall not here mount a frontal attack on this question, preferring instead a rearguard action. This…
Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology
Aristotle's biological works - constituting over 25% of his surviving corpus and for centuries largely unstudied by philosophically oriented scholars - have been the subject of an increasing amount of attention of late. This collection brings together some of the best work that has been done in this area, with the aim of exhibiting the contribution that close study of these treatises can make to the understanding of Aristotle's philosophy. The bo…
Kinds, forms of kinds, and the more and the less in Aristotle's biology
Aristotle is often characterized, by both philosophers and evolutionary biologists, as the fountainhead of a typological theory of species that is absolutely inconsistent with evolutionary thinking. D'Arcy Thompson, on the other hand, in his remarkable On Growth and Form, claimed that the idea of using quantitative methods to help understand morphological relationships among animals of different species took root in his mind during his work on Ar…
Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology
Aristotle's Physics
Method, Medicine and Metaphysics
Putting Philosophy of Science to the Test
Aristotle's De Partibus Animalium (PA) is, if there ever was one, a classic. It consists, at the broadest level, of four books. The first is devoted to articulating (I'm quoting its introduction) “...standards, by reference to which one will judge the manner of the demonstrations , apart from the question of how the truth has it, whether thus or otherwise.” (639al2-15). Books II-IV, on the other hand, are introduced as attempts to provide causal …
The Disappearance of Aristotle's Biology
L'A. tente de reconstituer le programme de recherches en zoologie d'Aristote et il s'interroge sur les causes de sa disparition. Il rejette l'idee que le programme ait disparu parce que les travaux qui le soutenaient avaient disparu aussi, ainsi que l'idee qu'Aristote n'ait simplement pas trouve de successeurs suffisamment capables de comprendre l'importance de son travail pour le perpetuer. L'A. cherche dans les commantateurs grecs et dans Galie…
Aristotelian Problems
Natural selection and the struggle for existence
The Place of Mankind in Aristotle’s Zoology
Historians of psychology often treat Aristotle's De Anima as the first scientific treatment of their subject; and historians of biology do likewise with his zoological treatises. How are the investigations recorded in works such as the Parts of Animals and History of Animals connected to those in the De Animal More specifically, given Aristotle's views about man's special and distinctive cognitive capacities, what does he think about man as an ob…
Aristotle on the unity and disunity of science
History and Philosophy of Science
In the aftermath of Thomas Kuhn's The structure of scientific revolutions, there was a great deal of discussion about the relationship between the History of Science and the Philosophy of Science. A wider issue was at stake in these discussions: 'normativism' versus 'naturalism' in Epistemology. If the History of Science, at best, gives us reliable information about what actually occurred historically, how can it inform debates about such things …
Clarendon Aristotle Series
Keith M. Parsons, Drawing Out Leviathan
Aristotle
Form, Essence, and Explanation in Aristotle's Biology
This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Essence and Explanation in Theory and Practice Form, Function, and Biological Essentialism The Priority of Being to Generation Conclusion Notes Bibliography
Philosophy (40 obras) · Epistemology (36 obras) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (32 obras) · Computer Science (16 obras) · History (13 obras) · Biology (12 obras) · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies (9 obras) · Psychology (9 obras) · Sociology (9 obras) · Philosophy of science (8 obras)