Introduction.

Mouracade, John

As convener of the Aristotle on Life Conference, I had three goals. The first was to gather a group of skilled scholars doing interesting work. The second was to gather people working on topics and papers that were interrelated. The third was to have a dynamic and interactive conference characterized by collaboration. The conference was wonderfully successful on all three counts, thanks to the participants. Their hard work, collegiality, and insight made the conference and this volume very successful.

The format for the conference was fairly rigorous. Each participant presented a paper, served as commentator on another paper, and had to give a brief presentation on the last day that outlined responses to questions or objections from the original presentation. I designed the conference in this way because I have found that all too often when we present our ideas to our colleagues, we do so from behind a bunker. We approach conference presentations as opportunities to outwit the objector or display our thorough knowledge of the topic. While such showmanship can be enjoyable to watch or perform, it does not improve the quality of our work. I wanted to create a setting that focused more on developing and improving our work than digging in and defending what we have already figured out. While the format of the conference suggested openness, reflection and development, the content of the conversations really made it happen.

This volume opens with Paul Studtmann's paper 'On the Several Senses of "Form" in Aristotle'. Studtmann details a variety of Aristotle's uses of 'form' while showing how problematic it is for such a key term to be linked with so many seemingly disparate concepts. Studtmann's taxonomy of the uses of 'form' is worth studying in its own right. However, Studtmann's useful analysis of the problem also yields an insightful recommendation on how to resolve this difficulty. His position that there is a central meaning of 'form' as a principle of order is interesting and well supported. It deserves to be a useful starting point for future scholarship on 'form' in Aristotle.

The next paper, Margaret Scharle's 'Material and Efficient Causes in Aristotle's Natural Teleology', aligns nicely with Studtmann's treatment of form. Scharle argues, against the scholarly tradition, that Aristotle is dissatisfied with material and efficient causal explanations across the board and not solely when dealing with living things. Scharle argues quite convincingly for the novel thesis that on Aristotle's view material causes are dependent on formal causes. She also argues that efficient cause is dependent on formal and final causation. This two-pronged argument shows that teleological and formal elements are crucial to Aristotle's understanding of nature.

Devin Henry's paper transitions from nature in general to the nature of living things. In 'Organismal Natures', Henry argues that teleology in living things does not require intelligence, yet, contrary to Galen's criticisms, it still has explanatory power. In developing his response to Galen, Henry insightfully points out that natures can be understood as causal powers. However, this seems to open Aristotle to Moliere's virtus dormitva example that threatens to renders explanations in terms of causal powers vacuous. Henry identifies five different ways to construe this objection and artfully shows that Aristotle's theory has the resources to avoid all five charges of vacuity. Having rescued the theory of organismal natures from this family of objections, Henry engages in an interesting exploration of the causal powers inherent in individual and species forms or natures showing how the interaction between formal and material natures explain a wide range of an individual's properties.

Julie Ward picks up the thread of discussion with a focus on capacities or causal powers in her paper, 'Is Human a Homonym for Aristotle?' Ward identifies Aristotle's claims about human nature and capacities as the source for the question she raises in her title. This question arises because of two problems. Ward astutely notices that Aristotle is committed to the idea that humans are equally human, hence equally rational, while he denies equal rationality across the species. Ward also notes a distinct, though closely related, tension between Aristotle's ascription of the capacity for virtue to all humans in EN II and his categorical exclusion of some groups from having the capacity for virtue in the Politics. After taking careful note of texts and arguments for 'human' being homonymous, Ward crafts an argument for the synonymy of 'human' that depends on a very subtle understanding of deliberation.

Ward's emphasis on the unity of human beings is picked up in the final three papers, which all focus on the unity of living things. Errol Katayama in 'Substantial Unity and Living Things in Aristotle' presents rigorous and thought provoking arguments for the claim that not all living organisms exhibit the unity characteristic of substances. Thus, contrary to dominant view of Aristotle's metaphysics, not all organisms are substances. Katayama makes his case by identifying and reviewing many senses of 'unity'. It is through the elucidation of Aristotle's various uses of 'unity' in conjunction with a lucid analysis of the criteria for substantiality that Katayama is able to make the case that hybrids and spontaneously generated organisms are unified in many ways, but not in the relevant way of being substantially unified.

Whereas Katayama focuses on attacking the view that all organisms are substances in Aristotle's scheme, Christopher Shields in 'Substance and Life in Aristotle' defends the view that only organisms are substances. While many commentators allow that living things are paradigmatically substances and place artifacts further down on a scalar conception of substance, Shield argues for a binary notion of substance in which organisms are substances and artifacts are not. Shields' arguments for this view weave together important and subtle aspects of Aristotle's positions on unity, life, substance, and soul. In particular, Shields draws on these aspects of Aristotle's thought in a particularly unique and interesting way to show how Aristotle explains growth. It is the Aristotelian position on growth, which, in turn, yields organisms as the only substances.

In discussing growth, Shields emphasizes Aristotle's position on humans internally regulated, goal oriented systems, which pursue some non-conventional good. John Mouracade in 'Aristotelian Hylomorphism and Non-Reductive Materialism' attempts to put that Aristotelian view to work in the contemporary debate on persons. Mouracade reviews a variety of non-reductive materialist positions in order to show that all rest heavily on biology without providing the philosophical framework for transforming biology into metaphysics. Mouracade argues that the framework that is needed is none other than Aristotle's hylomorphic account. After a substantive review of Aristotle's hylomorphism and the role of form in particular, Mouracade argues that form is not merely a theoretical placeholder, but can be understood as realized in genetic code. Mouracade ends his paper with an explication of form as DNA and places this discussion in the context of contemporary philosophy of biology.

The scholarship in this volume was brought together at the Aristotle on Life Conference convened at the University of Alaska Anchorage August 7-10, 2007. This conference was supported through the University of Alaska Anchorage's Chancellor's Fund for Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity, with additional support for travel being supplied by participants' home institutions and Alaska Airlines. Special thanks are owed to Jim Hankinson for reviewing and accepting this volume and to Roger Shiner for his editorial work that moved this volume to press. Thanks most of all to my lovely wife Sarah whose patience and encouragement along with her assistance shuttling people between the hotel and university, delivering lunches, acting as a gracious co-host, and scrupulous editing contributed greatly to the conference and to this volume. As is so often the case, I am tremendously indebted to her.