Marguerite Deslauriers - Aristotle On Sexual Difference - Metaphysics, Biology, Politics

Aristotle on Sexual Difference

Metaphysics, Biology, Politics
MARGUERITE DESLAURIERS
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s
objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a
registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford
University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the
appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of
the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any
acquirer.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021911778
ISBN 978–0–19–760618–6
eISBN 978–0–19–760620–9
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197606186.001.0001
For Clara Lewis and Théophile Deslauriers
“ . . . Thou that begett’st him that did thee beget”
Shakespeare, Pericles 5.1.197
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Translations
Introduction: The Philosophical Problem of Sexual Difference

1. Precursors to Aristotle’s Account of Sexual Difference
1.1 Why are there two sexes?
1.2 The origin of the sexes
1.2.1 Introduction to the questions
1.2.2 The origins of the two sexes
1.2.2.1 Hesiod
1.2.2.2 Empedocles
1.2.2.3 Plato
1.2.2.4 Sexual difference, sexual reproduction, and
matter
1.3 The assessment of women as inferior or flawed
1.3.1 Introduction
1.3.2 Female as even
1.3.3 Female as unlimited
1.3.4 Female as moist
1.3.5 Female as left
1.3.6 Moral failings of women
1.4 The biology of sexual difference
1.4.1 The sexed body as a biological phenomenon
1.4.2 The role of male and female in reproduction
1.4.3 The determination of sex in the embryo
1.5 Sexual difference in the political context
1.5.1 The legal status of women in Athens
1.5.2 Aristophanes
1.5.3 Socrates
1.5.4 Comparison of Aristophanes and Socrates
1.5.5 Interpreting the Socratic proposals
1.5.6 The question of women as a genos
1.6 Conclusion
2. Sex Is a Difference in the Matter
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Sexual difference in the Metaphysics
2.3 The definitions of male and female
2.4 The organs that differentiate the sexes
2.4.1 Organs and capacities
2.4.2 Sexual organs
2.4.3 The heart as a sexual organ
2.5 The concoction of sperma in male and female
2.5.1 Concoction in the Meteorology
2.5.2 Concoction of sperma in the Generation of Animals
2.6 Potentialities and capacities of spermata
2.6.1 Introduction
2.6.2 Capacities of male semen
2.6.3 Capacities of katamênia
2.6.4 Capacities of the fetation
2.6.5 The value and the inferiority of the katamênia
2.7 Conception and generation of an animal
2.7.1 Introduction
2.7.2 Two analogies with conception and embryonic
development
2.7.3 The role of movements in conception and embryonic
development
2.7.4 Conception and final causation
2.8 The determination of sex in the embryo
2.8.1 Introduction
2.8.2 The formation of organs in the embryo
2.8.3 Two questions about the determination of sex
2.8.4 The different kinds of movements in the semen
2.8.5 How sex is determined in the embryo
2.8.6 The formation of sexual organs
2.9 The female as natural, necessary, and defective
2.9.1 Introduction
2.9.2 Material and conditional necessity in biological
phenomena
2.9.3 Sexual difference is a telos
2.9.4 Female animals are necessary
2.9.5 The female as a deformity
2.9.5.1 Deformity and species form
2.9.5.2 Deformity and frequency
2.10 The unity of the soul in transmission
2.10.1 The unity of animal soul
2.10.2 The unity of human soul
2.11 Conclusion
3. Sexual Difference in Social and Political Life
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The rule of men over women is a form of natural rule
3.2.1 What it means to rule
3.2.2 Rule over women as an element of the household
3.2.3 There are different kinds of rule
3.2.4 Rule, household, and polis as natural
3.2.4.1 Rule in composites
3.2.4.2 Rule is toward a telos
3.3 Women are capable of virtue
3.3.1 Women and phronêsis
3.3.2 The virtue of natural subjects
3.4 The political inferiority of women: a deliberative faculty without
authority
3.4.1 Three lines of interpretation
3.4.2 The rule of men is both aristocratic and constitutional
3.4.3 Women’s deliberative faculty is without authority
3.5 The political benefit of sexual difference
3.5.1 Introduction
3.5.2 Aristotle’s criticisms of the Socratic proposals
3.5.3 The household as a community
3.5.4 Sexual difference promotes unity
3.5.5 Sexual difference contributes to the full range of human
virtue
3.5.6 The virtues of natural rulers and natural subjects
3.5.7 Living well requires the household
3.6 Conclusion
4. The Relation between Biological and Political Sexual Differences
4.1 Introduction
4.1.1 The question
4.1.2 Basic principles governing the question
4.1.3 Two hypotheses to explain how the female body might
compromise the deliberative capacity
4.1.4 Refining the question: what exactly is the political
deficiency of women?
4.2 The first path: cold, sensation, and rational capacity
4.2.1 Introduction
4.2.2 Heat and purity in blood
4.2.3 Pure blood and sensation
4.2.4 From sensation to deliberation
4.2.5 Imperfect memory and the lack of deliberative authority
4.3 The second path: heat, thumos, and rule
4.3.1 Introduction
4.3.2 Thumos as physical
4.3.3 Thumos as psychological
4.3.3.1 Thumos is a desire
4.3.3.2 Thumos is affect
4.3.3.3 Thumos and virtue
4.3.4 Thumos and rule
4.3.5 Thumos as the source of political sexual difference
4.4 The better path
4.4.1 The argument from precision
4.4.2 The argument from rule
4.4.3 The argument from the contrast of women with slaves
4.4.4 The better path is through thumos
4.5 Conclusion
Conclusion: The Value of Females and Women
Notes
References
Index Locorum
General Index
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the many colleagues in ancient philosophy from

whose work, conversation, and comments I have benefited over time,
including Emanuela Bianchi, Sara Brill, Andrea Falcon, Michael Ferejohn,
William W. Fortenbaugh, Cynthia Freeland, Jessica Gelber, Jim Hankinson,
Devin Henry, Annick Jaulin, Joseph Karbowski, Melissa Lane, Mariska
Leunissen, Thornton Lockwood, Sara Magrin, Stephen Menn, Karen M.
Nielsen, Pierre Pellegrin, C. D. C. Reeve, Andrés Rosler, Thanassis
Samaras, John Thorpe, Denis Vlahovic, Charlotte Witt, and Marco Zingano.
Three former students, now valued colleagues, have been particularly
influential in forming my thinking on sexual difference in Aristotle: Sophia
Elliott, Edwin Z. Filotas, and Rebekah Johnston. Thoughtful comments
from anonymous readers for Oxford University Press helped me to correct
many errors and clarify my argument; I am grateful to them.
Undergraduate and graduate students at McGill University have
approached Aristotle’s work with both insight and a willingness to
challenge his views, and their questions and interventions have kept alive
for me the pleasure of philosophical exchange. I am especially grateful to
Léa Derome, who persuaded me to simplify my interpretation of the
transmission of soul; to Kosta Gligorijevic, whose work was helpful to me
in thinking about deformity; and to Jeanne Allard, Moritz Bodner, Hacan
Genc, and Andre Martin for hallway conversations that made a difference.
A number of exceptionally talented undergraduate research assistants
provided philological, philosophical, and editorial support to the project of
this book; I would like to thank in particular Vivian Feldblyum, who
improved my understanding of thumos; Alexandra White, who led me to
think more carefully about Plato and Aristophanes; and Norah Woodcock,
who kept me focused on the evidence, and is always right about the text. I
look forward to their future work.
This book draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill University granted me
several sabbatical leaves that provided time for reflection, research and
writing. In 2017 Harvard University awarded me a Robert J. Lehman
Visiting Professorship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian
Renaissance Studies, during which I benefited from the learning and the
collegiality of that community of scholars and its Director, Alina Payne. I
would like to acknowledge the importance of these opportunities and
resources.
I am grateful to the feminist colleagues who have encouraged my
research. In the philosophy department at McGill, Alia Al-Saji, Hasana
Sharp, and Natalie Stoljar have enriched my perspectives on philosophy and
kept me company. In the wider world, Lisa Shapiro, as the lead researcher
of the project “Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy,”
and Christia Mercer, as the editor of Oxford New Histories of Philosophy
and Director of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy, have created a
network of scholars and students interested in re-thinking the history of
philosophy. I am very grateful to them for establishing a context—both
structures and a culture—in which feminist approaches to the history of
philosophy might flourish. They and other members of that network have
been supportive and inspiring, making the salt mines of philosophy less
lonely. My thanks in particular to Sandrine Bergès, Jacqueline Broad, Karen
Detlefsen, Andrew Janiak, Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin, Martina Reuter, and
Anne-Lise Rey.
I would like to acknowledge some personal debts of gratitude. Thanks to
Enrico Palandri and Jenny Condie for the loan of Ca’ Sottana, where I first
started thinking about Aristotle on sexual difference; to Kim Turner and
John Connolly for giving me time at Sydenham and at Métis-sur-Mer to
work, and feeding me so well; and to Ajay Heble and Sheila O’Reilly for
the house at Coin du Banc, with its view of L’Île Bonaventure, where this
work was completed. Thanks to Eric Lewis, as always, for professional
advice, personal support, and especially all those dinners.
This book is dedicated to my children, Théo and Clara, both of whom
have been sources of great joy to me as I worked. One of those joys is
seeing how different they are as they become themselves; sex is the least
interesting of those differences.
Abbreviations
English titles are followed by Latin titles (when in common use) in square
brackets.
Works of Aristotle
A.Po. Posterior Analytics [Analytica posteriora]
Cat. Categories [Categoriae]
Const. Ath. Constitution of Athens [Atheniensium respublica]
DA On the Soul [De anima]
DC On the Heavens [De caelo]
Div. On Divination in Sleep [De divinatione per somnum]
EE Eudemian Ethics [Ethica Eudemia]
EN Nicomachean Ethics [Ethica Nicomachea]
GC Generation and Corruption [De generatione et corruptione]
GA Generation of Animals [De generatione animalium]
HA History of Animals [Historia animalium]
IA Progression of Animals [De incessu animalium]
Juv. On Youth and Old Age, Life and Death [De juventute et senectute, De vita et morte]
MA Movement of Animals [De motu animalium]
Mem. On Memory and Recollection [De memoria et reminiscentia]
Met. Metaphysics [Metaphysica]
Meteor. Meteorology [Meteorologica]
PA On the Parts of Animals [De partibus animalium]
Phys. Physics [Physica]
Physiog. Physiognomics [Physiognomica]
Pol. Politics [Politica]
Prob. Problems [Problemata]
Rhet. Rhetoric [Rhetorica]
Sens. On Sense and Sensibilia [De sensu et sensibilibus]
Somn. On Sleep and Waking [De somno et vigilia]
Top. Topics [Topica]
Vir. Virtues and Vices [De virtutibus et vitiis libellus]
Works of Plato
Criti. Critias
Polit. Statesman [Politicus]
Rep. Republic [Respublica]
Smp. Symposium
Tht. Theaetetus
Ti. Timaeus
Hippocratic works
Aph. Aphorisms [Aphorismata]
Epid. Epidemics [Epidemiae]
Genit. Generation [De semine/De genitura]
Gland. Glands [De glandulis]
Mul. Diseases of Women [De morbis mulierum]
Nat. Mul. Nature of Women [De natura muliebri]
Nat. Puer. Nature of the Child [De natura pueri]
Prorrh. Prorrhetic [Prorrhetica]
Steril. Sterility/Barrenness [De sterilibus]
Superf. Superfetation [De superfetatione]
Vict. Regimen [De diaeta/De victu]
Other works
Ag. Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Ch. Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers [Choephoroi]
De die nat. Censorinus, The Natal Day [De die natali]
De E Plutarch, On the E at Delphi [De E apud Delphos]
DK Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker
D. L. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
Ekkl. Aristophanes, Assemblywomen [Ecclesiazousae]
Eq. Aristophanes, The Knights [Hippeis]
Hippocr. Epid. Galen, Commentary on Hippocrates’ ‘Epidemics’ [In Hippocratis Epidemiarum]
II. Homer, Iliad
Is. et Os. Plutarch, Isis and Osiris [De Iside et Osiride]
Lys. Aristophanes, Lysistrata
Od. Homer, Odyssey
Oec. Xenophon, Economics [Oeconomicus]
Pyth. Pindar, Pythian
Ref. Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies [Refutatio omnium haeresium]
Symp. Xenophon, Symposium
Thesm. Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae
Translations
Unless otherwise noted, quotations in English from Aristotle’s works are

drawn from the following translations, sometimes modified.
Categories. Translated by J. L. Ackrill. In The Complete Works of
Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 3–24. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1984.
Constitution of Athens. Translated by F. G. Kenyon. In The Complete
Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 2341–83. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
De Anima. Translated by Christopher Shields. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2016.
De Generatione et Corruptione. Translated by C. J. F. Williams.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
De Motu Animalium. Translated by Martha C. Nussbaum. Princeton,
Eudemian Ethics. Translated by Brad Inwood and Raphael Woolf.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Generation of Animals. Translated by A. L. Peck. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1942.
History of Animals: Books I–III. Translated by A. L. Peck. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
History of Animals: Books IV–VI. Translated by A. L. Peck.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.
History of Animals: Books VII–IX. Translated by D. M. Balme.
Cambridge:, MA Harvard University Press, 1991.
Metaphysics Translated by W. D. Ross. Revised ed. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1966.
Meteorologica. Translated by H. D. P. Lee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Nicomachean Ethics. Edited by Sarah Broadie and Christopher Rowe.
Translated by Christopher Rowe. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002.
On the Heavens. Translated by J. L. Stocks. In The Complete Works of
Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan
Barnes, 447–511. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
On the Parts of Animals I–IV. Translated by James G. Lennox. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2001.
Parva Naturalia. Translated by W. S. Hett. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Physics. Translated by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye. In The Complete
Politics. Translated by Carnes Lord. 2nd ed. University of Chicago
Press, 2013.
Posterior Analytics. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. In The Complete
Problemata. Translation by Robert Mayhew. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Rhetoric. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts. In The Complete Works of
Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 2152–2269. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1984.
Topics. Translated by W. A. Pickard-Cambridge. In The Complete
Unless otherwise noted, quotations in English from Plato’s works are drawn
from The Complete Works of Plato, edited by John M. Cooper
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), sometimes modified.
Introduction
The Philosophical Problem of Sexual Difference
Aristotle makes two remarks about the differences between the sexes that
have become infamous. The first occurs in the Generation of Animals,
where he says that “we must accept that the female nature (τὴν θηλύτητα
φυσικήν) is, as it were, a deformity (ἀναπηρίαν)” (GA 6.4 775a15–16). In
this context he is speaking of ways in which offspring may be produced
perfectly or imperfectly, claiming that females in utero develop more slowly
because they are colder and treating that coldness as a kind of defect. The
second is a remark in the Politics about women in their relation to men in
the household. In discussing the difference between natural rulers and
natural subjects, he treats women as one kind of natural subject and justifies
their subjection to the rule of men by saying that “the woman has [a
deliberative faculty], but it is without authority (ἄκυρον)” (Pol. 1.13
1260a14).
Each of these remarks requires analysis and interpretation. What is
striking at the outset, however, is that they bear no obvious relation to each
other. Aristotle does not suggest in the Generation of Animals that the
defect in the female caused by the colder temperature of her body has
cognitive or moral manifestations; it seems to be evident only in a slower
pace toward achieving physical maturity. The discussion of women as
natural subjects in the Politics makes no mention of the coldness of the
female or any other bodily feature distinctive of women. It treats the lack of
authority of the deliberative faculty of women as a natural fact, without
specifying any physical cause. Although it is common to suppose that the
defect Aristotle attributes to women as political beings must somehow
emerge from the biological defect he identifies in females, no clear picture
has emerged of a causal connection between these defects, or of the
conception Aristotle has of the differences between men and women. The
project of this book is to construct such a picture.
This book approaches that project through a number of questions:
(1) What were the contexts in which Aristotle came to explain the role and the origin of female
animals in his biology, and the role of women in political life in the Politics? How did he see
the philosophical significance of these discussions?
(2) How did he understand sexual difference in biological terms as a difference in the matter of
males and females? Which questions did the biological account help him to resolve? Which
resources, from his predecessors and from his own prior philosophical commitments, did he
draw on in formulating that account?
(3) How did Aristotle understand sexual difference in political terms? If women are females, they
are also, on his account, persons. How does sexual difference express itself in human beings
and in particular in the social structures—household and polis—that Aristotle thinks are
natural to people? How does Aristotle argue that a distinction in the roles of the sexes in the
political realm is both required by nature and justified by pragmatic considerations of the
collective good?
(4) If the rule of men over women is based on psychological differences, in particular differences
in the deliberative capacities of the sexes, are those derived from physiological differences or
independent of them? Are the political roles of men and women ultimately based on their
material differences? Can we trace a causal connection between those features that Aristotle
identifies in his biological works as characterizing the bodies of male and female and the
features that he takes to distinguish men and women? That is, did Aristotle believe that
women’s bodies somehow caused them to have intellectual or moral deficiencies that rendered
them less fit than men for the activities of political life?
(5) Finally, how are we to interpret the ambivalence Aristotle expresses about the worth of the
female and of women? Can we reconcile his claims that they are inferior with his arguments
for their value ?
In addressing these questions, this book has several aims. The first is to
provide a comprehensive analysis of Aristotle’s conception of sexual
difference in animal bodies and in political life. The second is to
demonstrate that Aristotle takes sexual difference to be valuable to an
animal species, and to the city-state; this is true even though he maintains
both that females are physiologically deficient relative to males and that
women should naturally be ruled by men. The third is to establish the link
between the explanation Aristotle offers for the deficiencies of the female
body and his justification of distinct roles for the sexes in the household and
the city.
I maintain two theses. The first is that Aristotle, in his discussions of
sexual difference, is primarily concerned to defend the idea that sexual
difference is valuable, and as a corollary that females and women are
valuable (even as he claims that they are inferior to males and men).
Although female bodies are defective relative to male bodies, and the
deliberative capacities of women are limited relative to those of men,
Aristotle makes the case that, viewed from a larger perspective, these
defects and limitations are good in two senses. First, and primarily, they are
good for the structures in which sexual difference occurs: the reproductive
couple, the household, and ultimately the genus of animals and the polis;
and second, they are good for females and women, in allowing them to
carry out the tasks nature assigns to them. The second thesis is that Aristotle
did believe the bodies of women were responsible for their status as natural
subjects under the rule of men, but that the defect that bestowed that status
on them was not so much an intellectual as a moral incapacity. This account
of sexual difference in Aristotle makes two points that may be
controversial. First, it challenges the idea that Aristotle’s assessment of
females and women was wholly negative, without disputing that he
maintained a hierarchy of sex in which the female is inferior to the male.
Second, it reconceives the inferiority that Aristotle believes distinguishes
women from men as a limited failure of moral authority rather than a case
of akrasia or a comprehensive intellectual failing.
I argue that for Aristotle the philosophical problem of sexual difference
emerges from the tension between his view that the female is imperfect
relative to the male and that men by nature should rule over women, and his
commitment to two other claims: (1) that sex is a division in the matter and
not in the form of the genus animal—so there is no difference in essential
form between the male and female members of a sexually differentiated
species, and (2) that sexual difference, and by implication the existence of
sexed individuals, is good, both for generation and for the political life
characteristic of human beings; and as a corollary, that females and women
are valuable. I begin by identifying just how Aristotle would describe both
the physiological and the psychological defects of women; I then ask how
those defects might also in his view be benefits, and how they might be
causally connected.
Aristotle does not argue for the inferiority of women, either in the
biology or in the political writings. He did believe in their inferiority, but he
largely represents that view as self-evident. What he took to be less obvious
was their value and usefulness, or, more precisely, the value and usefulness
of sexual difference, both in the generation of offspring and in political life,
and so his discussions of females, women, and sexual difference focus on
their contributions to different aspects of the lives of animals, both non-
human and human. In this he is opposing his viewpoint to that of his
predecessors, many of whom associated sexual difference with affliction
and represented women as an evil, if a necessary one. Prior to Aristotle,
most discussions of the sexes suggest that it would be better if there were
no sexual generation, no females, and no women. Against that background,
Aristotle is arguing for the value of sexual difference and of females and
women.
One way in which Aristotle articulates the value of sexual difference and
of females is by offering teleological explanations for the generation of
females, for the concoction of the female’s fertile residue, for the social role
played by women, and for sexual difference both as a biological and as a
political phenomenon. The framework for those explanations is Aristotle’s
account of natural teleology, that is, of the operation of final causes in the
generation and the existence of natural phenomena.1 A final cause is
defined by Aristotle at Physics 2.3 194b33 as “that for the sake of which”
(το οὗ ἕνεκα), and is often described as a goal (telos). In natural philosophy
“that for the sake of which” usually falls into one of three categories: (1) a
natural substance as the goal of a process of generation in which a potential
for form is realized, (2) a function performed by a natural being, or (3) an
object of desire for an animal or a person.2 So a teleological explanation is
generally one that appeals to a natural substance as a goal, to the function of
an entity, or to a desire in order to account, respectively, for (1) the process
of formation of the substance, (2) the parts or features of the natural being
and their constitutive materials insofar as these support the functions, and
(3) the actions of a person or animal. In discussions of sexual difference it is
final causes as natural substances and as functions that concern us. To claim
that the female is a final cause of animal generation is to say that the nature
of an animal kind has the female animal as a goal in the generation of the
kind. And to claim that sexual difference is valuable is to say that there is
some function for the sake of which that difference exists. These are not
self-evident claims, but I argue that they are justified by Aristotle’s
discussions of sexual difference.
Three features of that discussion deserve highlighting insofar as they
bear on teleological explanation. The first is that while Aristotle generally
opposes final causation with material necessity (that things “are thus in
respect of their character and nature,” as he says at PA 1.1.642a35), so that
something produced by final causation is not produced by material
necessity, he claims that the female fertile residue, the menses, is produced
both by conditional necessity and by material necessity—that is, both as a
condition necessary for the realization of a telos and as a result of the
coldness of the female body. In chapter 2, section 2.9, I discuss this claim
and argue that the female animal similarly is a result not only of material
necessity operating in the course of the generation of an animal, but also as
a result of the final causes that govern generation.
The second feature of the discussion of sexual difference as teleological
that should be emphasized is that the notion of “function” is not restricted to
the functions that an individual animal or person might perform. The
functions of an animal are generally those that are carried out by the
individual animal; sensation, digestion, and the concoction of a fertile
residue are all functions that any well-formed animal performs as an
individual. But there are other functions that are equally natural to the
animal but require collaboration: for example, the generation of another
animal like itself, or, in the case of political animals, collaborative activities
such as dam building among beavers. This means that some of the functions
that are final causes for an animal kind are not achievable by the individual.
In sexually differentiated species these collaborative functions include not
only the generation of another animal like themselves, but also the
separation of efficient and material causes of generation, and the
management of households and political communities. My discussion of the
value of female animals and women, and of sexual difference as a
biological phenomenon, emphasizes the importance of these collaborative
functions (see chaps. 2 and 3, sections 2.9 and 3.2).
A third point about teleology in discussions of sexual difference is that
Aristotle extends the notion of the natural to political functions and
institutions, describing, for example, the polis as a telos or goal that is
natural to human associations (Pol. 1.2 1252b30–32). This makes clear that
natural teleology is not restricted to biological phenomena, but it raises a
question about how to understand the notion of a natural telos in the case of
social entities like households and city-states, which do not themselves have
natures. I address that question in chapter 3 (section 3.2.4) and argue that
there are social functions that Aristotle treats as final causes, and that are
the teloi that help to explain his view that it is good that there should be
women in the household and in the polis.
A word about Aristotle’s motivations, and mine, in exploring the
conception of sexual difference. Some commentators have attributed
vicious motives to Aristotle in his discussion of females and women.3
Others have defended Aristotle by minimizing the evidence of misogyny in
his works as a mere reflection of his time, or attempting to show that he
adopted a pro-woman stance.4 But most assume that Aristotle was
motivated, at least in part, by an unexamined prejudice rather than an active
animus against women.5 The evidence seems to me to suggest a somewhat
different attitude: Aristotle asserts without argument that females and
women are inferior—a prejudice, although hardly an unthinking one, as I
will argue. He acknowledges and rejects the idea that women might be
suited for political authority, and he rejects contemporary theories of
generation according to which the contributions of male and female are
equally formative. But in all these cases his primary motivation is to explain
and justify the phenomenon of sexual difference as a benefit, either to an
animal species or to political community. His views on sexual difference are
neither to be explained nor excused, then, simply by dismissing them as
those of a man of his time; there were other men at the same time who did
not hold them.6 Rather, while provoked undoubtedly by a prejudice against
the female, they emerged from certain philosophical positions to which he
was committed—for example, that the better should rule the worse, that
form should, when possible, be kept separate from matter, and that
composite wholes should be made up of parts that differ in value. All these
commitments have a normative aspect, and the discussions of sexual
difference are as a result thoroughly imbued with questions of value.
This book examines the ambivalence Aristotle expresses about females,
his sense that they are inferior and yet valuable. The point is not to
exculpate him from charges of misogyny, but to treat his views about sexual
difference, females, and women as serious philosophical discussions—to
investigate the structure of the problem of sexual difference as Aristotle
understood it, to examine his conceptualization of sexual difference in both
physiological and political terms, and to consider how he might have traced
the political inferiority of women to causes in the constitution of their
bodies.7
Achieving clarity on Aristotle’s claims about females and women, their
context, and the contentious history of their interpretation is important on
its own terms. It is also important because the question of the relation
between sexed bodies and social and political roles is of abiding interest,
and in many respects Aristotle’s discussion of sexual difference has set the
terms of a historical debate that is ongoing. This is evident in the sorts of
arguments produced to explain sexual difference: those who continue to
think that women are peculiarly emotional or irrational are appealing to a
tradition that began with Aristotle of suggesting that women’s deliberative
capacities are somehow compromised (although, on my interpretation,
Aristotle did not think women were less rationally competent than men).
But it is also evident in the structure of such debates: when we assume that
something about the sexed body might be responsible for the psychological
differences that are supposed to track gender, we are drawing on a tradition
according to which limitations on women’s political participation might be
justified by pointing to defective features of their bodies. Almost all
arguments that aim to exclude women from citizenship, political
participation, or governance have asserted that women have imperfect
reasoning capacities, and they trace that imperfection to women’s bodies. In
understanding Aristotle on sexual difference, we understand the structure,
and the sources, of these arguments.
This book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 begins with accounts
of the origins of the sexes, as the background to Aristotle’s interest in the
purpose and value of sexual difference. These origin stories typically imply
that sexual difference is a misfortune, and that women in particular are bad,
and the chapter analyzes the metaphysical, physiological, and moral failings
that were supposed to characterize women. I consider early accounts of the
biology of sexual difference, from which Aristotle drew certain elements
for his own more systematic account. The chapter concludes with a section
on proposals in works by Aristophanes and Plato to grant women a role in
political governance, which provide the context for Aristotle’s account of
political sexual difference. He rejects the idea that sexual difference is a
misfortune and disputes the notion that the female is unqualifiedly bad, but
he also objects to the suggestion that there might be no difference in the
roles of men and women in political governance. In subsequent chapters
Aristotle’s positive views on the nature of sex as a distinction that manifests
itself both in the bodies and in the souls of men and women are explored.
Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of sex as a distinction in the matter of
the genus animal, as Aristotle formulates it in the Metaphysics, and then
explores sex as a phenomenon that is manifested in the bodies of individual
animals—in their matter. The rest of the chapter pursues two themes. The
first is the character of the sexes, and so it examines Aristotle’s definitions
of the sexes, the organs that differentiate them, and their generative
capacities. The second is the origin of the sexes—both how sex is
determined in the embryo, and whether the female as well as the male in a
species should be understood to be a natural telos. The conclusion of the
chapter is that Aristotle has the resources to argue both that females are
inferior to males and that they serve a natural purpose.
Chapter 3 turns to sexual difference in the political life of human beings.
Aristotle treats the rule of men over women as natural, and in the first two
sections I analyze this notion of natural rule and its implications for our
understanding of the differences that distinguish men and women, arguing
that the defect Aristotle attributes to women that determines them as natural
subjects does not make them incapable of virtue. The core of the chapter is
an examination of that defect; I argue that Aristotle’s claim that women’s
deliberative faculty is without authority should be interpreted as a limited
incapacity that allows women to participate in deliberation but makes them
unsuited to decision-making and hence to political rule. The chapter
concludes with a discussion of Aristotle’s arguments for the benefit of
sexual difference and the inclusion of women in the household and the
polis, despite their inferiority relative to men.
Chapter 4 considers the relation between sexual difference, as manifest
in male and female bodies, and sexual difference in the political context, as
manifest in the differing deliberative capacities of men and women. I
explore two paths one might pursue to establish a causal connection
between the physiology of the sexes and the different political roles that
should, on Aristotle’s account, be assigned to men and women. The first
moves from the colder temperature of the female body to compromised
sensory capacities to a defective deliberative capacity. The second moves
from the colder temperature of the female to a lower degree of spiritedness
to an incapacity for rule. I argue that the second is how Aristotle is likely to
have understood the link between the physiology of sex and its psychology.
It has greater explanatory power, for two reasons: first, it better explains the
particular defect that Aristotle attributes to women, and second, it allows us
to distinguish the imperfection of women from the imperfection of natural
slaves, a point on which Aristotle insists.
The conclusion addresses the coherence of Aristotle’s account of sexual
difference. It is an account that captures his sense that it is worse to be
female than male—because the condition of the female prevents her from
engaging fully in the best possible activity either of the nutritive or of the
rational soul—but also his insistence that it would be worse if there were no
females, and worse because the existence of sexually differentiated
individuals makes better not only the generation of animals but also the
political life characteristic of human beings.
1
Precursors to Aristotle’s Account of Sexual
Difference
1.1 Why are there two sexes?

Before Aristotle, most of those who had something to say about sexual
difference did not make a systematic attempt to describe the sexes or
determine their distinguishing features. They may have thought—as
perhaps many people do now—that the facts of sexual difference are
obvious, and that it is not difficult in practice to distinguish females from
males or women from men. If we believe that sexual difference is an
obvious phenomenon, then we may think that there is no need to describe
male and female or to articulate with precision the differences between
them. This may explain why most discussions of the sexes in ancient Greek
mythology, literature, history, and medicine assume not only that there is a
difference between male and female, but also that we have an intuitive
grasp of that difference that allows us to distinguish them with ease.
In these early discussions the question was not so much what constituted
sexual difference, but rather how to explain the emergence of sexual
difference and understand its purpose. What was not obvious was why there
should be two sexes. The question was posed in a range of contexts, and in
different forms. In mythological writing it is often presented as a question
about the origins of the sexes, or of sexual reproduction, and is usually
accompanied by a creation myth.
This chapter begins, then, in section 1.2, with a discussion of accounts of
the origins of the sexes, since such accounts offer the best understanding of
how sexual difference was conceptualized prior to Aristotle. To describe the
creation of women, either from men or independently of the creation of
men, was to explain, however speculatively, the purpose of sexual
difference, and in so doing to indicate the content of sexual difference.
These descriptions manifest the negative assessment of females and women
that pervades many ancient accounts. Women are generally described as
inferior to men in a myriad of ways; this is true although women are
sometimes depicted as necessary in a number of ways—not only for
reproduction, but also for certain forms of social and political life. In
section 1.3 I collect the representations of women as bad, pernicious, or
defective together with the evidence that women were also depicted as
good, useful, or necessary for some purpose. Most authors make no attempt
to reconcile these apparently conflicting assessments, appearing to accept
the ambivalence that their work displays toward women.
Aristotle is remarkable precisely for his attempt to address,
systematically, this ambivalence. As is his usual practice, he aims to respect
received opinion so far as possible, at the same time advancing a
comprehensive and coherent account of sexual difference, which he thought
required an analysis of the physiological, anatomical and psychological
traits of animals. While detailing the way in which females and women are,
in his view, inferior, he also insists that the female is not only necessary, but
also good, although not as good as the male. Aristotle, I will argue, adopts
this position in two contexts: in the discussion of the nature of the sexes, the
physiology of sexual generation, and the determination of sex in his
biological works, especially the Generation of Animals, and in his
discussion of the role of women in the household and their exclusion from
the public life of the polis in his Politics. To provide the background to
Aristotle’s views in these two domains, I consider the precedents to his
biological account of sexual difference in section 1.4, and the precedents to
his political views in section 1.5.
There is a great deal of evidence available in various genres to help in
constructing a picture of commonly held views about the purpose or
function of sexual difference prior to Aristotle. There are plays, both tragic
and comic, the poetry of Hesiod, Homer, and Semonides of Amorgos, the
medical writing of the Hippocratic authors, the speeches of Thucydides,
fragments from the pre-Socratic philosophers (most importantly, for my
purposes, from Democritus and Empedocles), and the dialogues of Plato, to
whom Aristotle is often responding. But the status and reliability of many
of these sources as evidence for contemporary states of affairs or
contemporary thinking is very much in question. It is difficult to draw out
the implications of our sources in many cases. For example, if a poet
(Aristophanes) takes political corruption as his theme and constructs a
comedy on the premise that women might take over political rule in a city-
state, what should we deduce about the status of women in the political
community to which that author belongs? Should we suppose that women
are utterly excluded from political life, even its informal practices, by a
deeply rooted belief among men that women are incapable, so that the
suggestion that they might rule would be received as ridiculous and
entertaining by the audience for whom it was intended? Or should we
suppose, rather, that there is enough contemporary discussion of the frailty
of men and the strengths of women that the premise by itself counts as witty
and provocative? Consider another example: if a natural philosopher
(Empedocles) attempts to explain human reproduction in terms of a
commingling of female and male seed, does that suggest that he believes in
the equality of the sexes in some more general way? Or should we be
cautious in our interpretation and assume only that he is trying to account
for the resemblance of offspring to their mothers in the simplest possible
way?
It is difficult to answer these sorts of questions with any authority given
the nature of the extant evidence, and I do not aim to answer them here. My
purpose in this chapter is not to uncover the intentions of the authors of
these early discussions of sexual difference, nor to determine the reception
their works received. It is, rather, to sift through the discussions of sexual
difference prior to Aristotle in order to identify the central questions, and
the elements of certain replies to those questions, that constitute the
backdrop against which Aristotle built his accounts of sexual difference in
his works on biology, ethics and politics. For example, in discussions of
reproductive physiology prior to Aristotle the question is often: what do
male and female contribute to the offspring? In many answers to that
question there is a preoccupation with heat and cold as agents of change, a
recurring emphasis on the notion of mastery, and an intense interest in
“seed” (σπέρμα) and its origins. In political discussions, there are a number
of issues of broad concern: the questions of virtue and its sex-specificity (do
men and women have the same virtues?); the relation of the oikos or
household to the polis and the implications for women of their confinement
to the oikos (is rule in the household the same as rule in the polis? are
women confined because of their incapacity for public life, or are they
incapable of rule because of their confinement?); and the nature of reason
and its importance for political life (do women and men have the same
capacity for reason? does political rule require particular forms of reason?).
By considering these early accounts, we will see more clearly one of the
purposes of Aristotle’s own account of sexual difference and its
significance. In his descriptions of females and women, and especially in
the analysis of their functions, Aristotle aims to reconcile what he perceives
to be the inferiority of women relative to men with what he understands to
be the value of the female and of women. That he does attribute value to the
existence of females in all species is often overlooked and needs to be
emphasized.1 By considering Aristotle’s views against the backdrop of his
predecessors, we can discern a coherent and consistent account of sexual
difference that bridges physiological and political contexts.
1.2 The origin of the sexes
1.2.1 Introduction to the questions

In ancient discussions two questions predominate when sexual difference is
raised as a topic. The first is: what is the origin of the sexes? Attempts to
answer that question are also efforts to determine what the roles of men and
women are, and to explain why it might be better, or even necessary, that
there should be women. The second question is: what is the origin of sexual
reproduction? These questions may seem strange, but they recur in ancient
and more modern contexts because non-sexual forms of reproduction have
long been recognized.2 Because we know that in some species there are
sexually differentiated individuals, if we assume that nature does nothing in
vain, we have to ask why such differentiation appears.
In ancient accounts these two questions are sometimes phrased in
teleological terms. What aim is nature pursuing in creating sexually
differentiated species, or in introducing sexual forms of reproduction
alongside non-sexual forms? This is how Aristotle poses the questions
when he comes to review his predecessors’ accounts. But the questions are
sometimes phrased in terms of the historical origin of sexual difference, or
the origin of sexual reproduction as an activity, and in that case they are
open to answers cast as myths.
The stories and theories proposed in response to these questions in
ancient Greek literature seem often to have been motivated by a pair of
concerns that are usually implicit, but may be seen as two sides of one coin.
One concern is how to distinguish the roles of male and female in
conception and generation. Aristotle seems to be motivated by a desire to
demonstrate that males are useful in the generative process; if women
produce seed, provide a place for the development of the offspring, and
nourish it, then what function does the male perform? Earlier authors
sometimes assume that the father is more properly the parent, while the
mother is merely the “nurse” who cares for the child or the “field” from
which it has sprung (see, e.g., Aeschylus, Eumenides 655–65, and
Euripides, Orestes 552–54). Given the relatively limited knowledge of the
human body during this period, these explanations always involve
speculation and sometimes an awareness of the speculative nature of the
explanation.
A second concern motivating these questions, especially evident in
moral and political contexts, is the role and the value of women in human
communities. While some authors argue that women are necessary or even
beneficial in some way to political life, others speculate that women were
created neither because they are necessary nor because they are good, but
rather because some misfortune intervened in the history of our human
collectivities: women were imposed on men as a punishment (Hesiod) or
introduced to make reproduction possible when the gods withdrew from
governance of our world and relinquished to us the task of creating human
offspring (Plato).
In biological and medical contexts, the demand for explanation focuses
more often on the male; in political contexts, it focuses more often on the
female. These emphases track what seemed more mysterious about the
purpose or function of each sex. It was not clear to ancient authors what,
physiologically, men contribute to the generation of offspring, and it was
not clear to them what women contribute to political community. But in
both biological and political discussions of sexual difference, the need to
understand the role of one sex carries with it a demand to articulate and
explain the role of the other in opposing terms. If that demand is not met
explicitly, then it is provided implicitly. So we can often infer from an
account of, say, the function of the male in reproduction what the function
of the female must be.3
Texts that address either sexual difference or sexual reproduction will
often at least indirectly address the other. So, for example, as we will see
later in this chapter (section 1.2.2.3), the myth at the beginning of Plato’s
Statesman takes up the question of the origins of sexual reproduction, but in
so doing it also raises the possibility that there was no sexual difference
prior to the introduction of sexual reproduction into the world in one of its
“turnings.” In principle, we might conceive of sexual difference as a
metaphysical question and of sexual reproduction as a biological one. In
practice, how ancient authors thought about one influenced how they
thought about the other.
1.2.2 The origins of the two sexes
1.2.2.1 Hesiod
Some early accounts of the origins of the sexes represent the creation of
women as a response to the actions of men. The most influential of these
accounts is that of Hesiod in Works and Days and the Theogony. In the
Theogony men are supposed to have preceded women in creation, although
Hesiod does not provide an explanation of their origins; men seem always
to have been there. In Works and Days men are created (in five
progressively degraded stages) by “the immortals” but are said to have
come from the same origin as the gods (107–76). Women are created only
after Prometheus steals fire from Zeus, who then directs Hephaestus to
fashion a being from earth and water, and to “put the voice and strength of a
human into it, and to make a beautiful, lovely form of a maiden similar in
her face to the immortal goddesses” (Works and Days 61–63).4 Athena
teaches this being needlework and weaving, Aphrodite bestows charm on
her, and Hermes provides her with “a dog’s mind and a thievish character”
(Works and Days 67). The being is Pandora, who was offered to men as a
gift but proved to be a source of anxiety and evil: “It was only after he
accepted her, when he already had the evil, that he understood” (Works and
Days 89)—recognized, that is, that woman in the person of Pandora was an
evil, despite her charming appearance.
This story is repeated in the Theogony, with many of the same elements
(535–84).5 Hesiod adds that from Pandora all other women are descended.
Women are described as a “deadly race” or “tribe” (τῆς γὰρ ὀλοίιόν ἐστι
γένος καὶ φῦλα γυναικῶν) (Theogony 591). There is no corresponding
“race” of men, although Hesiod does refer to people as a whole as a kind
(ἀνθρώπων τε γένος) (Theogony 50).6 In Hesiodic myths, then, there is no
claim to a coordinate status for the sexes: men are contemporaneous with
the gods, and women are created at a later moment as a distinct kind, and as
a form of punishment for men.
There are indications in Hesiod’s works of some ambivalence with
respect to women and an unwillingness to depict them as unqualifiedly bad.
First, Pandora herself is described as “a beautiful evil” or a “good evil”
(καλὸν κακὸν) (Theogony 585). Certainly καλὸν in this phrase might have
strictly aesthetic or sexual import and thus might not impute any moral
value to Pandora. But even if Pandora herself should be supposed to be
entirely evil, with the implication that all women, insofar as they are
descended from Pandora, are morally worthless, Hesiod makes it clear that
there is a second and greater evil that awaits any man who manages to
evade the evil that is woman: childlessness (Theogony 603–7). In this very
early account of the origins of women as a kind separate from men, women
are already represented as bad. They are not, however, the worst evil, and
they are necessary in some sense—necessary in order to allow men to avoid
the one fate worse than an association with women, which is the prospect of
having no descendants. Moreover, Hesiod holds out the possibility that a
man might acquire a competent wife (although everyone will find such a
good to be mixed with misfortune) (Theogony 607–10). So perhaps some
women will evade the inheritance of evil from Pandora to some extent. This
is faint praise, to be sure, but it may be that “Hesiod is more accurately
condemned as a misanthropist, rather than only as a misogynist.”7
However faint the praise, it is significant if we compare Hesiod to the
poet Semonides of Amorgos (7th century bce). In the fragment of an untitled
iambic poem on women, Semonides sets out a kind of typology of women,
classing them as comparable to animals or elements and making general
remarks that are unfavorable to women. Two of those remarks are
suggestive in their associations with Hesiod’s depictions of the origins of
women: “In the beginning the god made the female mind separately (χωρὶς
γυναικὸς θεὸς ἐποίησεν νόον τὰ πρῶτα)” (Semonides, 1–2), and “Zeus has
contrived that all these tribes (φῦλα) of women are with men and remain
with them. Yes, this is the worst plague (μέγιστον κακόν) Zeus has made—
women; if they seem to be of some use to him who has them, it is to him
especially that they prove a plague (κακόν)” (Semonides, 94–98).8
1.2.2.2 Empedocles
Hesiod, as I have said, offers an account of the origins of women, but seems
to take for granted the existence in the world of men, who precede women
and are different in origin and in kind. By contrast, Empedocles, in his
poem On Nature, posits contemporaneous origins for men and women
while still treating them as different kinds. The poem raises many
contentious issues of interpretation, not least because it must be
reconstructed from fragments collected from diverse ancient sources, the
ordering of which is difficult to establish. I am assuming the commonly
accepted reading of the poem according to which it offers two zoogonies,
one under the rule of Love and the other under the rule of Strife.9
Empedocles is trying to reconcile two ways of understanding the
universe: in one, the cosmos is in fact as it appears to us, changing and
variable, and in the other, the cosmos is not as it appears but rather as
reason suggests it should be, unchanging and undifferentiated. On Nature
suggests that the cosmos might be both—not simultaneously, but in
alternating phases that recur over time. Empedocles names two principles,
Love and Strife, that govern the universe in these alternating phases. The
two phases are described by Aetius (V 19.5) as occurring in four stages (or
four “comings-to-be [γενέσεις]”).10 Under Love, the four elements or “roots
[ῥιζώματα]” (earth, fire, water, and air) are blended progressively until they
become a single, undifferentiated entity; under Strife, these same elements
are progressively separated out from one another. When the rule of Love is
passing into Strife, or that of Strife is passing into Love, there are periods of
conflict during which living beings are created. For my purposes here, the
question is when, and how, sexual difference and sexual reproduction are
introduced during the creation of living beings.
Under the rule of Love, living things are brought into being by “the
coming-together and the unfolding of birth [ξύνοδόν τε διάπτυξίν τε
γενέθλης]” (Empedocles 294; trans. Sedley, Creationism, 36).11 Love first
mixes the elements to create the materials from which living things are
constituted: flesh, feathers, leaves (DK B96, B98, B92). She then produces
“single-limbed [μουνομελῆ]” creatures (B57–58; trans. Sedley,
Creationism, 42). These might be either detached body parts or simple
organisms. Finally, these body parts or simple organisms are thrown
together haphazardly (B59) and combine into more complex organisms. Of
these, some are incapable of sustaining life, while others survive. This
zoogony suggests two points about sexual difference. First, human beings
seem to be sexually differentiated from the beginning, as soon as they
emerge as viable beings; Empedocles refers to what is created as “trees and
men and women and beasts and birds and water-nourished fish [δένδρεά τ’
ἐβλάστησε καὶ ἀνέρες ἠδὲ γυναῖκες, θῆρές τ’οἰωνοί τε καὶ ὑδατοθρέμμονες
ἰχθῦς], and long-lived gods first in their prerogatives” (B21). Second, the
sex of the beings produced under the rule of Love (along with all other
combinations of features of these beings) can only be a chance occurrence;
there is no purposiveness in the actions of Love.
Empedocles describes a second zoogony under the principle of Strife.12
It is a variant of a common myth according to which people are generated
spontaneously from the earth, concocted by heat.13 Initially, the beings
generated in this way are not sexually differentiated. They have a mix of
sexual features: “There came up androids with ox-heads, mixed in one way
from men and in another way in female form, outfitted with shadowy
limbs” (B61).14 (These must be the “whole-natured beings” (ὁλοφυεῖς) of
Aetius’s third stage.) In a subsequent stage, however, Strife divides these
beings into men and women (in fragment DK B62): “Separating fire
brought up the nocturnal shoots of both men and much-lamenting women
[ἀνδρῶν τε πολυκλαύτων τε γυναικῶν ἐννυχίους ὅρπηκας ἀνήγαγε
κρινόμενον πῦρ]” The adjective πολυκλαύτων (“full of lamentations” or
“much-grieving”) suggests that the human beings created under the rule of
Strife suffer, and perhaps that women suffer more than men.
Four points about sexual difference in the poem need to be emphasized.
First, it is clear that from their origins men and women are different kinds
or tribes both in the zoogony under Love and in the zoogony under Strife.
There is a question concerning the interpretation of the line in the new
fragment (numbered as a(ii)27 = 297 by Martin and Primavesi), which
reads, “This there is in the twin birth of mankind” (τοῦτο δ’ ἀν ἀ[νθρώ]πων
δίδυμον φύμα) (trans. Sedley, Creationism, 36). What does the “twin birth”
(or possibly “twin nature,” “twin offspring,” or “double race”) refer to?
Martin and Primavesi take it as a reference to sexual difference—so that the
line means that men and women are created as distinct kinds of being from
the outset.15 Sedley notes that this is a natural reading, especially because
Plato, in the Timaeus at 42a1–2, in introducing the notion that men might be
reincarnated as women, mentions the double nature of humankind (διπλῆς
δὲ οὔσης τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης φύσεως)—clearly a reference to the two sexes.16
There is no question but that both men and women appear in both
zoogonies, but if the term “twin-birth” at 297 is a reference to sexual
difference, the notion that the sexes are different kinds of beings, with
different natures, is emphasized even further.
Second, there is a strong association between the more wretched phase
of human life under Strife and the origins of sexual desire and sexual
reproduction. With the emergence of men and women under the rule of
Strife, sexual reproduction is also introduced: “Upon him comes also,
through sight, desire for intercourse [τῷ δ’ ἐπὶ καὶ πόθος εἶσι δι’ ὄψιος
ἀμμιμνῄσκων]” (B64). This desire seems to emerge from the way in which
Strife has torn apart beings that were previously united.17 A testimony of
Aetius also reflects this:
The fourth [stage of coming-to-be of animals and plants] no longer from homogeneous stuffs,
such as earth and water, but by now through copulation, for some because the animals had gone
over to solid nourishment, for some also because the beauty of women produced in them the
stimulation of spermatic motion. (Aetius V 19.5)18
So sexual reproduction, rather than reproduction from the earth and other
elements, becomes the norm. The reasons for this are illuminating; we are
told that it is because animals (as opposed to plants) had started to consume
solid, rather than liquid, nourishment. This explanation is somewhat
mysterious, but perhaps the point is that by consuming solid nourishment
animals become capable of supplying the necessary stuff for the creation of
offspring. In some, who must be human because of the reference to women,
there is a second reason for sexual reproduction: sexual desire is born, the
beauty of women stimulating that desire physiologically as “spermatic
motion.”19 So in the zoogony under Strife, not only are women and men
distinguished as different kinds of beings, but they begin to reproduce
sexually, and men (and possibly also women and other animals) begin to
experience sexual desire.
Third, the origins of men and women under the rule of Strife also have
associations with temperature: men are produced in “the warmer part of the
earth” (B67) while women emerge from colder earth (B65). This
association of men with heat and of women with cold will prove enduring,
and it will be taken up by Aristotle in a more systematic way to explain the
different roles of male and female in the generation of offspring.
Finally, in both zoogonies there is an absence of intention on the part of
the creative forces: neither Love nor Strife seem to act with the intention of
creating sexual difference. They appear only to be responsible for bringing
things together or separating them out from one another. What emerges
from those processes of combination and separation are matters of chance
—the kinds of beings that emerge as viable, including the “kinds” of men
and women, are an accidental outcome of the physical forces at play.
Certainly Aristotle interpreted Empedocles as suggesting that the parts of
beings were organized “spontaneously [ἀπὸ τοῦ αὐτομάτου]”—that is, by
chance (Physics 2.8 198b29–33), referring to the phrase “man-faced ox
progeny [βουγενῆ ἀνδρόπρῳρα]” at DK B61, beings that emerge under the
rule of Strife.20
1.2.2.3 Plato
In Plato’s dialogues there are several accounts of the origins of sexual
difference and sexual reproduction that reflect the influence of Hesiod and
Empedocles both in their mythological settings, and in some of their details.
The most striking is found in the Symposium, in the speech of Aristophanes,
who describes an original time in which human nature encompassed three
kinds of beings: male, female, and androgynous (189d5–e6). These beings
were spherical, taking their origins from the sun (male), the earth (female),
and the moon (androgynous); and they were double, with two sets of each
characteristically human feature (four hands, two faces, etc.) (Smp. 189e6–
190b6). Those who were androgynous had a set of male genitals as well as
a set of female genitals. To reproduce, “they cast seed and made children,
not in one another, but in the ground, like cicadas” (Smp. 191b8–9). They
were powerful, and when they grew ambitious and attempted an attack on
the gods, Zeus decided to cut them in two as a way of reducing their power
(Smp. 190b6–d8). The halved beings “each longed for its own other half”
(ποθοῦν ἓκαστον τὸ ἣμισυ τὸ αὑτοῦ συνῄει) (Smp. 191a8), which explains
the sexual desire that human beings experience, whether they, or the objects
of their desire, are women or men. They were unable to reproduce in their
halved state until Zeus moved their genitals from the back to the front of
their bodies, “and in so doing invented reproduction in one another, by the
man in the woman [καὶ διὰ τούτων τὴν γένεσιν ἐν ἀλλήλοις ἐποίησε, διὰ
τοῦ ἄρρενος ἐν τῷ θήλει]” (Smp. 191c1–3). On this account, then, male and
female came into being simultaneously, and originally, but were
accompanied by a third, androgynous, sex compounded out of them. This
myth is unusual in its suggestion that men and women are equal in origin
and in status, since men are not prior to women and the sexes are two
halves of a single whole. But in this myth, as in many of the others we are
considering, men and women as we know them only came into being after a
time of crisis, and owing to the displeasure of the gods.
The myth of the Statesman repeats the idea that men and women emerge
after a crisis, and after a rupture in our relationship with the gods. The myth
describes two eras during which, in alternation, (1) the gods direct and rule
the cosmos (in the era of Kronos) and (2) the cosmos is left to direct itself
(in “our time”).21 People exist in both of these eras but reproduce through
different mechanisms in each. When the gods govern, people are made from
the earth as mature beings and regress over time until they eventually return
to the earth as infants (Polit. 271b4–c2, 272a2–3). Plato makes explicit that
reproduction in the era of Kronos is not sexual: “Reproduction from one
another was not part of the nature of things then [τὸ μὲν ἐξ ἀλλήλων οὐκ ἦν
ἐν τῇ τότε φύσει γεννώμενον]” (Polit. 271a5–6). So non-sexual
reproduction was possible when the gods ruled us, presumably because if
people are to be fashioned from the earth it will require a divine craftsman.
In “our time,” by contrast, we are not ruled by gods, but hold
responsibility for our own governance. As with the era of Kronos, “our
time” is initiated by a crisis during which many living creatures die (Polit.
273a1–4). Those who survive the crisis grow older, die and return to the
earth as aged beings (rather than regressing in age and returning to the earth
as infants, as in the time of Kronos). Along with the necessity of governing
ourselves, “there was a change to the mode of conception, birth and rearing,
which necessarily imitated and kept pace with the change to everything; for
it was no longer possible for a living creature to grow within the earth under
the agency of others’ putting it together” (Polit. 274a2–5).22 So the era of
self-governance requires sexual reproduction by human beings; the gods
(the “others” in this passage) no longer assume that responsibility. The
transition from divine to human governance and from divine creation to
sexual reproduction is associated in the myth with a change in human
circumstances from ease and comfort to misery: we become weak and
helpless, begin to be savaged by wild beasts, lack all tools and crafts, no
longer have food supplied spontaneously by the earth, and in general are in
“great difficulties” (Polit. 274b5–c5).23
The origin of sexual reproduction is also addressed in the Critias. The
myth of the Critias concerns two cities rather than two eras: ancient Athens
is contrasted with Atlantis. But this myth draws a distinction between
divine creation and sexual reproduction that resembles the contrast between
the creation of people in the time of Kronos and in “our time” in the
Statesman myth. According to the myth of the Critias, the earth was
divided into portions assigned to be governed by different gods (109b1–6),
who directed everything mortal by persuasion rather than by force (109b6–
c4). In Athens it was Athena and Hephaestus who ruled, and they
“fashioned in it good men sprung from the land itself” (Criti. 109c5–d2).24
These people were not, then, sexually generated, but created by gods. The
citizens of Athens fell into different groups: a class of “god-like men” who
separate out a warrior class from the classes of those engaged in
manufacture and farming (Criti. 110c3–6). The warrior class, described as
beautiful in body and virtuous (Criti. 112e3–4) lived at the top of the
Acropolis (Criti. 112b3–5) and ruled with justice the citizens of Athens as
well as the leaders of the rest of the Greek world, who agreed to their rule
(Criti. 112d4–e2).
Atlantis, by contrast, was ruled by Poseidon, who divided it among the
children he engendered with a mortal woman, Clito, whose parents had
been born from the earth (Criti. 113c1–114b2). The rulers of Atlantis were,
then, less divine from the outset than the rulers of Athens. Each son of
Poseidon became king of one of the districts into which Poseidon’s portion
of the earth was divided, and the decline of harmony among the districts
occurred “when the divine portion in them began to grow faint as it was
often blended with great checkers of mortality [ἐπεὶ δ᾿ ἡ τοῦ θεοῦ μὲν
μοῖρα ἐξίτηλος ἐγίγνετο ἐν αὐτοῖς πολλῷ τῷ θνητῷ καὶ πολλάκις
ἀνακεραννυμένη]” (Criti. 121a9–b1). This resembles the description of the
decline of the cosmos in “our time” in the myth of the Statesman: when
human beings are generated from and by mortal parents, the decrease in the
proportion of the divine in the cosmos as a whole and in people as a kind is
responsible for the degradation of the cosmos and of people.
The origins both of sexual difference and of sexual reproduction are
described also in a passage in the Timaeus at 90e6–91a5. Socrates has been
“tracing the history of the universe down to the emergence of humankind”
(Ti. 90d9–e2). He says: “According to our likely account, all male-born
humans who lived lives of cowardice or injustice were reborn in the second
generation as women. And this explains why at that time the gods fashioned
the desire for sexual union, by constructing one ensouled living thing in us
as well as another one in women” (Ti. 90e6–91a5).25 The account here is
perplexing, but the “ensouled living thing” in men seems to be the genitals,
and in women to be the uterus.26 What is clear in this account is (1) that
men are created first, and women introduced only in a second generation,
(2) that women were created as a human form for those who have been
unjust and cowardly to inhabit in a subsequent incarnation, where being a
woman is understood to be a kind of punishment for moral wrongs
committed, and (3) that once women were introduced sexual reproduction
was also introduced—or rather, the desire for sexual intercourse was
introduced—as a new, and inferior, mechanism for the generation of people.
These mythical accounts of the origins of sexual difference and sexual
reproduction in Plato’s works have elements that strongly resemble the
accounts we find in both Hesiod and Empedocles. First, in the Timaeus, as
in Hesiod’s Theogony, men exist as a kind before women, who are
introduced in a second moment or generation, and in response to the actions
of men. And while we cannot be certain that in the time of Kronos, as
described in the Statesman myth, men existed before women—it is possible
that the human beings in the era governed by Kronos were asexual, and
even that both men and women existed—the evidence in the descriptions of
the two eras suggests that human beings in the era of Kronos were men, and
that sexual difference along with sexual reproduction was introduced only
in “our time.”27 The myth of the Statesman suggests that the withdrawal of
divine governance that precipitates the crisis introducing “our time”
necessitated sexual reproduction—and that when there is sexual
reproduction, there must also be sexual difference, and if sexual difference,
then women. In the Statesman as in the Timaeus and the Theogony, it seems
that women are introduced into the world only after men (but note, as we
saw earlier, that in the myth told by Aristophanes in the Symposium, the
creation of men and women is contemporaneous).
Second, in Plato’s various accounts of the origins of sexual difference
and sexual reproduction, women are represented as bad or are associated
with the evils that accompany human life. As we have seen, the Timaeus
could not be clearer that a life as a woman is a kind of punishment or
retribution for wrongdoing, and that to be a woman is worse than to be a
man. Women are a sort of degenerate kind introduced to accommodate
souls that are now imperfect. In the Statesman myth of alternating eras, the
Critias myth of alternative cities, and the antecedents for these myths in
Hesiod and Empedocles, the worse of two eras or places always includes
sexual difference or sexual reproduction, as contrasted with a happier time
or place in which sexual reproduction was unnecessary and women and
sexual difference did not exist. The human beings of the era of Kronos in
the Statesman, who, I have suggested, should be understood to be men, are
better than the sexually differentiated persons of “our time,” since they are
happier, untroubled by the worries characteristic of human lives in “our
time.” And in the myth recounted by Aristophanes in the Symposium,
sexual difference is introduced as a form of mutilation and makes
humankind less powerful, and less happy. The association between the
introduction of women and the origins of evils and human misery is
reminiscent of the story of Pandora as Hesiod tells it in both the Theogony
and Works and Days.28 Moreover, there are strong resemblances between
Hesiod’s account of a golden race of people living in the age of Kronos
(Works and Days 109–19) and Plato’s account of the lives of the human
beings during the era of Kronos in the Statesman myth: men without
women, living like the gods or under the governance of gods, without care
and without evils.29
It is not only from Hesiod that Plato might have been familiar with an
account of two eras, one idyllic and one plagued with now-familiar evils, or
with an association between sexual reproduction and degeneration. We have
seen in Empedocles too a description of two eras—alternating eras, unlike
Hesiod, but similar in this way to the eras of the Statesman myth—one
characterized by progressive unity, the other by progressive disunity.
Although Empedocles seems to envision sexual difference in both eras, he
introduces sexual reproduction only in the second era, governed by Strife.
The testimony of Aetius makes clear that the generation of persons under
Strife is brought about through sexual intercourse, associating the misery of
life under the rule of Strife with the origin of sexual desire and the necessity
for sexual reproduction. Moreover, Empedocles counseled against
heterosexual intercourse, marriage, and childbearing on the grounds that
these are all mechanisms through which Strife operates, and all are
obstacles to Love’s creation (Hippolytus Ref. 7.30.3–4),30 so he clearly
viewed sexual reproduction as inherently opposed to Love and its unifying
force.31
1.2.2.4 Sexual difference, sexual reproduction, and matter

The question, then, is why Plato and his predecessors associate women,
sexual difference more generally, and sexual reproduction with the evils of
human life as they knew it, often contrasted in these mythical accounts with
an ideal time or place in which we lived out a golden age. The answer to
that question lies in the way in which sexual reproduction introduces an
increasing proportion of matter into the human species; we see this in the
Statesman, in the Critias, in the association of sexual reproduction and solid
nourishment in Empedocles’ poem, and also in Hesiod’s poems. In the
Statesman “the cause of this was the bodily element (τὸ σωματοειδὲς) in its
mixture [i.e., the mixture of the cosmos] . . . because this element was
marked by a great disorder before it entered into the present world-order”
(273b4–6). This explanation makes clear that even if sexual reproduction
did not initiate the misery of “our time,” it did precipitate it, in that it
introduced the bodily element increasingly into the human population and
thus into the cosmos. As time goes on, the divine is forgotten, the human
beings who populate the cosmos are more and more “bodily” (where this is
contrasted with “divine”), and the ancient condition of chaos begins to hold
sway, in which many living creatures die (Polit. 273a4–b6). So an increase
in the bodily factor is effectively an increase in materiality, and a decrease
in the divine, in human beings. And in the Critias, as we have seen, in
Atlantis under the rule of Poseidon, political conflict emerges precisely
when “the divine portion in them [the inhabitants of Atlantis] began to grow
faint as it was often blended with great checkers of mortality” (121a9–b1).
So once again human misery is initiated at the time that sexual reproduction
becomes the mechanism for the creation of human beings, and that misery
is attributed to an increasing portion of what is bodily and a decreasing
portion of what is divine in the people produced through sexual
reproduction.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, moreover, Chaos produces Erebos and Night
asexually, and Night produces, again asexually, a long list of baleful deities:
Doom, Fate, Death, Blame, Woe, the Fates, Nemesis, Deceit, Old Age, and
Strife (123–25, 211–25). Chaos is a kind of disorganized, changeable matter
and is probably the precursor of Plato’s “receptacle” in the cosmogony of
the Timaeus.32 Since both Chaos and the receptacle play the role of a
material substrate from which other beings emerge, the idea that Chaos is
the source of many evils (in Hesiod’s Theogony) resembles the idea that
evil increases as the material component of the cosmos increases (in the
Statesman myth). But it is only with the appearance of women (as opposed
to men, or sexually undifferentiated human beings) that evil arrives
definitively in the cosmogonies of both Hesiod and Plato.33
There is further evidence in Plato’s Symposium that women, rather than
men, are associated with the bodily factor, and that sexual reproduction is a
mode especially associated with women (and not just with sexual
difference). Diotima claims that the object of love is to possess the good
forever, and that is why love seeks reproduction and birth in beauty (Smp.
206a4–e7): “Reproduction goes on forever; it is what mortals have in place
of immortality [ἀειγενές ἐστι καὶ ἀθάνατον ὡς θνητῷ ἡ γέννησις],” and
love desires immortality because that is the only way to possess the good
forever (Smp. 206e8–207a4). There are two strategies one might use to
possess the good forever through reproduction. Diotima distinguishes at
Symposium 208e3–209b5 between those who have conceived something in
their bodies and those who have conceived something in their souls.
Conception of both sorts is an attempt at immortality, but the former is less
divine in the sense that it produces something that is itself changeable and
perishable, rather than offspring that are “fairer and more deathless”
(καλλιόνων καὶ ἀθανατωτέρων παίδων) (Smp. 209c5–7). As Diotima tells
it, men conceive in both ways. The cause of the different reproductive
impulses—the true and the false—is the location of the different
“conceptions”; in one case, men seek women because they have
“conceived” something in their body, and in the other, men seek men
because they have “conceived” something in their souls. This distinction
obliquely suggests something about sexual difference: that a woman is
someone who can only reproduce sexually, while a man can reproduce
psychically as well as sexually. This is not explicit, and it is just possible
that Diotima meant to say that either men or women might conceive in
either way; but she certainly does not say so, and the force of the account
seems to tie women to the bodily while suggesting that men are sometimes
able to free themselves to some extent from the bodily.
The speech of Diotima reinforces the idea that sexual reproduction is
inferior to asexual reproduction because it introduces more of what is
material or bodily into human beings, distancing them from the divine
(although we should note that the guardians of the Republic will pursue
sexual as well as asexual reproduction; see Rep. 5 458d3–e5). It is not only
that sexual activity is an inferior form of the pursuit of immortality, but that
it is so because the product of sexual activity, the human infant, is inferior
to the product of the superior forms of the pursuit of immortality (forms of
intellectual intercourse)—the products of the conceptions in the soul. There
is an echo in the myth of the Statesman of this notion of a better, more
divine form of reproduction through intellectual and philosophical
exchange when Socrates suggests that people during the reign of Kronos
might use the leisure granted to them (since the gods are providing them
with all necessities, including offspring) to engage in philosophical
conversation and reflection (272b6–c7).34 And in drawing the analogy of
philosophy with midwifery at Theaetetus 148e1–151d, Socrates says that
the work he does in bringing philosophical ideas to birth is more important
than the work of midwives, because it requires him to distinguish between
true and false offspring, which midwives do not have to do (150a8–b4).
Once again a parallel is evoked between the process of gestation and birth
on the one hand, and intellectual creation on the other, and there is a
suggestion that at least the best of the products of intellectual activity are
better than the offspring of sexual generation.
The evidence from Plato’s discussions of sexual difference thus
reinforces certain elements of the accounts of the origins of women and of
sexual reproduction that we have seen in Hesiod’s and Empedocles’ works.
First, while both sexual reproduction and the activity of philosophy are
attempts to secure the good forever, and hence to secure immortality, sexual
reproduction is clearly worse than the activity of philosophy. Second, the
products of sexual activity, because they are mortal and bodily, are clearly
worse than the products of philosophy, which are immortal and immaterial.
And it is only when sexual reproduction and its more bodily offspring are
introduced, in the myth of the Statesman and in the speech of Diotima, that
women enter the picture, associated with both the worse activity and the
worse product in a way that men are not. In the next section I explore
further the sources for the negative normative assessment of women in
Greek philosophy before Aristotle.35
1.3 The assessment of women as inferior or flawed

1.3.1 Introduction
We have seen in the mythical accounts of the introduction of women and
sexual reproduction into human life that women were treated as a kind
separate from men and often described as originating only when the gods
were displeased with men or absent from their lives. In some of these
stories it is sexual reproduction that comes into being when the gods (or
benevolent forces) withdraw from human life; but the association between
sexual reproduction and sexual difference, and between sexual difference
and the existence of women in particular, is clear. So it is not surprising to
find negative assessments of women among our ancient sources.
Pythagorean sources of the philosophical view that women are bad, or at
any rate worse than men, are among the earliest and most important.36 The
evidence for that comes from Aristotle, who cites the list of opposing
principles in which women are aligned with the bad. Aristotle says that
some Pythagoreans “say that there are ten principles, which they arrange in
two columns of cognates—limited and unlimited, odd and even, one and
plurality, right and left, male and female, resting and moving, straight and
curved, light and darkness, good and bad, square and oblong” (Met. 1.5
986a23–28).37 G. E. R. Lloyd points out that although we cannot know just
which Pythagoreans accepted these as a set of principles, it is nonetheless a
list that seems to capture normative judgments found, at least implicitly, in
many early Greek writers.38
According to this list of principles, the female is aligned with the even
and hence with the unlimited, the left, the moving, the curved, darkness, the
bad, and oblong. It is clear that each pair of contraries links something good
(or better) with something bad (or worse) and that the female is not only
opposed to but worse than the male—just as darkness is worse than light
and moving is worse than resting. It is hard to know with certainty whether
in this series of associations females were first identified as bad and then
associated with other bad items because they were bad, or whether there
were independent ways to associate the female with at least some of these
items. That is, it is difficult to determine whether the female was identified
as bad and then associated with the left, moving, and so on, or associated
first with the left, moving, and so on and thereby identified as bad, but it is
probable that men were first associated with the good and women were then
characterized in opposition as bad.39 And although we cannot conclusively
reconstruct the causal relations, it is possible to say something about the
female’s association with some of the other items in the column that
includes the bad (pace Ross, and following Lovibond and Carson).40
The female is associated most fundamentally with two features: the even
and the unlimited (which are themselves features of number). It is not clear
how these associations arose. First, how did the even come to be associated
with the unlimited? One possibility is offered by Simplicius, who explains
that all even numbers may be divided into two equal parts so that they are in
a sense unlimited in virtue of being divisible into equal parts ad infinitum.
But if we add an odd number to an even one it “limits” it by preventing its
division into equal parts: “What is divided into equal parts is unlimited
through bisection” (see Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 3, 455.10–30).41
A second possibility is suggested by Aristotle’s mention of the Pythagorean
Eurytus at Metaphysics 14.5 1092b10 in connection with the spatial
representation of numbers as groups of points with pebbles (“imitating the
figures of living things with pebbles, as some people bring numbers into the
forms of triangle and square”).42 If the triangle represents the number 3
(odd) and the square the number 4 (even), the odd may be associated with
the limited since the triangle cannot be divided into other figures, whereas
the square can.
1.3.2 Female as even

Why, then, is the female associated with unlimited and even? There do not
seem to be early sources that provide an explanation; in fact, the first
attempt at an explanation appears in Plutarch’s Moralia, and it is not
convincing. He tries to explain the association of the male with the odd and
of the female with the even by allusion to the spatial representations of
numbers, saying that when numbers are divided “the even number separates
completely and leaves a certain receptive opening and, as it were, a space
within itself”; when odd numbers are divided, by contrast, “there is always
left over from the division a generative middle part. Wherefore it is more
generative than the other [i.e., than the even] and in combination it is
always dominant (κρατεῖ) and never dominated (κρατεῖται)” (De E. 8 388a–
b).43 The “receptive opening” and the “space within itself” that an even
number displays when divided is supposed to put us in mind of the vagina
and uterus of a woman; the “generative middle part” that results when an
odd number is divided is supposed to remind us of the male genitals.44 The
reasons Plutarch cites for the claim that an odd number is “more
generative” and “always dominant” are (1) that all combinations of even
and odd numbers produce odd numbers and (2) no even number added to
another even number produces an odd number (and so it is “impotent
through its weakness to produce the other [i.e., an odd] number”), but odd
numbers added to odd numbers produce even numbers “because of their
omnipresent generative function” (De E. 8 388b–c). The suggestion of (1) is
that men and women should routinely generate male offspring (which,
although strange, is sympathetic to one interpretation of Aristotle’s account
of generation); the suggestion of (2) is that females are reproductively
impotent unless they are joined with males (although we might point out
that males are also reproductively impotent unless they are joined with
females). On this view, not only are male and female represented
morphologically by odd and even numbers, they are also represented
physiologically, just as the addition of odd to even generates a different
kind of number (an odd one), whereas the addition of even to even is unable
to generate at all.45 The association of the male with the kind of number
that is more generative, always dominant and never dominated, leads to the
quasi-philosophical assertion that the male has more generative power, is
active, and is an agent of change, in contrast with the female, who is
passive.
1.3.3 Female as unlimited

In this interpretation of the Pythagorean opposites by Plutarch, however
conjectural, we see a slide from a claim about the features of number to a
claim about the features of organic beings, from odd and even to male and
female animals. In a similar way, the association of the female in the
Pythagorean list with the indefinite, unlimited, or unbounded (ἄπειρον), and
of the male with the definite, limited, and bounded (πέρας), is interpreted by
ancient sources as pertaining not only to quantities, but also to animals. To
understand how the female came to be identified with the unlimited, we
should notice that “ ‘the unlimited’ in these contexts can mean not only
what is undetermined in the numerical sense—that to which no definite
number has been assigned—but also that which is undetermined in the more
general sense of being formless, of not possessing a definite character” and
hence that “to be male is, generally, to be a bearer of form, order or
structure; and that to be female is, generally, to be devoid of these things.”46
The point is that to be apeiron is to be indeterminate not only with respect
to number but also with respect to character.
The first philosophical work that elaborates on the association of the
female with the unlimited in character is Plato’s Timaeus. In that dialogue
the association is represented in the comparison of a third “kind” (γένος) to
a “wet nurse” (τιθήνη), where the kind is described as a receptacle of all
becoming (“receptacle” is ὑποδοχή at Ti. 49a and 51a, and δεχόμενον at
50d). This receptacle is “characterless” (ἄμορφος) and “invisible”
(ἀνόρατος), and it “receives all things” (πανδεχές) (Ti. 51a); moreover, “it is
modified, shaped and reshaped by the things that enter it” (κινούμενόν τε
καὶ διασχηματιζόμενον ὑπο τῶν εἰσιόντων) (Ti. 50c).47 The passivity of the
receptacle is indicated by the suggestion that it receives motion and shape
from whatever enters it; we have seen this passivity associated with the
even as well. Plato asserts that “this thing upon which the imprints are to be
formed could not be well prepared for that role if it were not itself devoid
(ἄμορφον) of any of those characters (τῶν ἰδεῶν) that it is to receive from
elsewhere” (Ti. 50d–e). Lovibond interprets this to mean that “the
receptacle of becoming is female because it confronts the Platonic forms
(the paradigms and sources of determinate being) in a condition of perfect
indeterminacy”; “perfect indeterminacy”—that is, an absence of character
—is also the correct state for a young woman offered in marriage.48 So the
receptacle, the wet nurse of all becoming, is unlimited in the sense of
formless, lacking in character, without definite boundaries. It is not, we
should note, useless—indeed, it is a necessary condition of all becoming—
but it is clearly inferior to the intelligible and unchanging mode associated
with the male (the moral implications of the conception of the female as
undetermined are considered in section 1.3.6).
1.3.4 Female as moist

This association of the female with what is unbounded or indeterminate,
without a fixed character, is the source of a number of associations between
the female and certain physical traits. The female comes to be associated
with the unbounded in later philosophy through the intermediary of τὸ
ὑγρόν: “the wet” or “the moist.” Ancient medical writers sometimes drew a
link between the wet and the female. So, for example, one of the
Hippocratic authors differentiates male from female in terms of the hot and
the cold, the wet and the dry, writing: “The female flourishes more in an
environment of water, from things cold and wet and soft, whether food or
drink or activities. The male flourishes more in an environment of fire, from
dry, hot foods and mode of life,” (Vict. 1.27).49 Prospective parents should
adopt a “watery diet” if they wish to produce female offspring, and a “fiery
diet” if they wish to produce males (Vict. 1.27). Moreover, the same
Hippocratic author conceives of warmth and dryness in their stable forms as
particularly characteristic of the adult male: “The maturity of the male
physique is achieved when it attains and keeps its proper dry form [ἀνήρ,
ὁκόταν στῇ τὸ σῶμα, ξηρὸς καὶ ψυχρός],” which occurs when the element
of fire within “is no longer overmastering but standing still and the body no
longer trembles with growth [οὐκ ἔτι ἐπικρατεῖ, ἀλλ᾿ ἕστηκεν, ἀτρεμίζον δὲ
τὸ σῶμα τῆς αὐξήσιος ἔψυκται]” (Vict. 1.33). In several other ancient
authors, dryness is especially associated with intellectual capacity and
moisture with its opposite. For example, see Heraclitus (DK B118) and
Homer’s Iliad xiv 165, where “the efficiently functioning mind of Zeus is
characterized as ‘dry’.” Moisture, by contrast, affects intellectual
functioning badly (see, e.g., Heraclitus (DK B117) and Aristophanes Eq.
95–96). In fact, wine, sleep, or self-indulgence, any of which make a person
more moist, can diminish mental alertness (see Diogenes of Apollonia (DK
A19): “Understanding [φρονεῖν] is the work of the pure and dry air [τῷ ἀέρι
καθαρῷ καὶ ξηρῷ]. For moisture hinders intelligence [κωλύειν γὰρ τὴν
ἰκμάδα τὸν νοῦν], wherefore in sleep and in drunkenness and in surfeit
understanding [φρονεῖν] is diminished”).
Aristotle, perhaps influenced by Hippocratic authors, also places
emphasis on the opposition of the moist and the dry in developing his
account of sexual difference and draws a link between the moist, the
unbounded and the female. At Generation and Corruption 2.2 329b31–33,
he says that the moist is not limited by any boundary of its own but can
readily be bounded. By contrast, the dry is that which is already limited by
a boundary of its own. So for Aristotle what is dry has a form or character
of its own, whereas what is moist is formless. This is evident, for example,
in the Generation of Animals, where he describes the differentiation of body
parts in embryological development; the embryo solidifies and acquires its
formal features as the moisture in the uterus evaporates (GA 2.6 743a4–16).
Since Aristotle believes that the male is hot and dry and the female cold and
moist (GA 4.1 765b17–22; see also 4.1 765a35–b5), it follows that the
female will be relatively formless or characterless.50 But the male is
associated with the dry and the female with the moist in a straightforward
way only in the Problemata (at 4.25 879a33–34); in the Generation of
Animals, Aristotle is less clearly committed to those identifications.51
Thus, one set of physical opposites often invoked in discussions of
sexual difference is the moist and the dry. As we have seen, there is some
evidence that allows us to connect the moist with the unbounded and hence
with the formlessness and passivity often attributed to the female. Another
set of physical opposites used to distinguish the sexes, and connected to the
moist and the dry (as in the passage at Vict. 1.33 cited earlier), is the hot and
the cold. Although many ancient authors prior to Aristotle suppose that one
sex must be hotter than the other, there is no agreement about which sex is
hotter. And the claim that the female is more moist—on which there is
agreement—is consistent both with the view that she is hotter and with the
view that she is colder. According to Aristotle, Parmenides believed that
women were hotter than men, Empedocles that they were colder:
“Parmenides . . . and certain others assert that women are hotter than men,
saying that the menstrual discharge comes about on account of their heat
and from their having a great deal of blood (διὰ τὴν θερμότητα καὶ
πολυαιμούσαις), while Empedocles says the opposite [i.e., that women are
colder than men]” (PA 2.2 648a30–33).52 Aristotle goes on to explain this
by saying that the term “hotter” is being used in different senses, and so
although their claims are contradictory, each has something to be said for
it.53 In chapter 2 we will see that in developing his own views on the
relative temperature of the sexes Aristotle aligns himself with Empedocles
in asserting that the female is colder, but he also attempts to be more precise
about the nature of heat and its effects on the sexually differentiated body.
1.3.5 Female as left

We have been considering the physical traits associated with the female that
seem to have their basis in the Pythagorean lists of opposites, insofar as
these traits are supposed to follow on the originally mathematical traits of
even and unlimited. Aristotle associates these traits, the moist and the cold,
with the left (as opposed to the right) and, since the female is aligned with
the moist and the cold, she is also associated with the left (although, as I
have said, any causal relations among these predicates are difficult to
determine). The female is often allied with the left in the context of a
discussion of the determination of sex in the embryo. For example,
Parmenides believed that males were conceived on the right side of the
body, females on the left (DK B17; Galen, Hippocr. Epid. VI. 48 [XVII A
1002 K.]).54 And Anaxagoras, Aristotle reports, thought that “the male
comes from the right side (ἐκ τῶν δεξιῶν) and the female from the left (ἐκ
τῶν ἀριστερῶν), and, as regards the uterus, that the males are in the right
side and the female in the left” (GA 4.1 763b34–764a1). That is, male
offspring come from seed emitted from the right testis, females from the left
(Aristotle refers to the “secretion” (ἀπόκρισιν) from the left or the right at
GA 4.1 765a36).55 Aristotle may also have had in mind the Hippocratic
author of Aphorisms 5.48.56
Aristotle rejects the view that sex is determined according to whether
semen is emitted from the left or right testis, probably because he thinks it
implies a preformationist account which would in turn imply that the male
parent contributed some of the matter to the offspring, a position he argues
against. Although Aristotle believes that female embryos usually develop
on the left and males on the right (HA 7.3 583b3–5), he also rejects the view
that the sex of the embryo is caused somehow by its placement in the
uterus, pointing out that there is no reason that an animal should develop a
uterus because it is placed on the left side rather than the right (GA 4.1
765a12–17). But he seems to assume that the moist, the cold, the left and,
presumably, the female belong to the same column in the list of sustoichia
(coordinates or columns). Moreover, he seems to believe that parts on the
left side of the animate body are moist and cold because (in part) they are
on the left; that is, he sees the left as responsible in some way for making
parts more moist and colder. For example, he says that the heart is placed
on the left in the body in order to balance out the coldness of the left side
(PA 3.4 666b6–10). His explanation of the placement of other organs also
appeals to these considerations:
But in those [animals] having a bladder and a blooded lung the spleen is moist both owing to the
cause already mentioned and because the nature of things on the left side is generally more
moist and cold [διὰ τὸ τὴν φύσιν τὴν τῶν ἀριστερῶν ὅλως ὑγροτέραν εἶναι καὶ ψυχροτέραν].
For each of the opposites has been divided into its kindred column, e.g. right opposed to left and
hot to cold; and the columns are related to one another in the way mentioned. (PA 3.7 670b18–
23)
Aristotle does not make clear here why “the left side of the body is
generally more watery and colder than the right”; he offers no explanation
for what is represented as a fact, but refers us to columns of contraries,
which he seems to accept as authoritative.57 Nor does he explain here why,
if female offspring are not conceived on the left side of the uterus, the
female should be associated with the left. We must assume that the female
is for him associated with the left because she is associated on his account
with what is more moist and colder.58
What is most interesting in Aristotle’s treatment of the association of the
female with the left is the insight it provides to the normative claims he will
make about the female. He says that “the distinctions [in bodies] are three,
namely, above and below (τὸ ἄνω καὶ τὸ κάτω), front and its opposite (τὸ
πρόσθεν καὶ τὸ ἀντικείμενον), right and left (τὸ δεξιὸν καὶ τὸ ἀριστερόν) –
all these three oppositions we expect to find in the perfect body – and each
may be called a principle” (DC 2.2 284b21–25). That is, we should expect
to find the left, along with the back and what is below, in the perfect body.
This is true not only at the level of the individual, but also with respect to
animal species and genera. Aristotle considers one sign of the deformity of
the testacea as a genus to be that they lack the differentiation between right
and left (IA 19 714b8–16).59 So the distinction between right and left in a
body is not only a difference that tracks certain physical variations (between
moist and dry or hot and cold); it is also a normative distinction, in two
senses. First, it distinguishes between what is better (the right) and what is
worse (the left). But second, the distinction has itself a certain value; it is
better for an animal to have the distinction between what is better and what
is worse than not to have it (as in the case of the testacea)—and a similar
argument is used to show that it is better to be a species with the distinction
between male and female, although that too is a distinction between better
and worse (see GA 2.1 732a5–9).
There is some evidence for the value of these distinctions in Aristotle’s
estimation of people as the best kind of animal. He says that animals that
are more perfect are hotter and more moist (ὑγρότερα) by nature, and
human beings are hotter (GA 2.1 732b32–33). Moreover, the difference
between right and left is most pronounced in the human body (at IA 4
706a21–22 Aristotle says that “the right is most right sided (μάλιστα δεξιά)
in people”) because people are more natural than other animals (IA 4
706a19).60 So although the left is worse than the right, a perfect body will
exhibit the distinction between left and right, and so the left is a part of a
perfect body. This provides us with some insight into how Aristotle will
eventually reconcile the inferiority of the female principle with the natural
occurrence of female animals. If a distinction between right and left is a
good thing in a perfect body, then the existence of the left is at least a
conditional good, and not an unqualifiedly bad feature of an animal body.
In accepting that the left is worse than the right, Aristotle is following a
tradition from earlier Greek literature. There is a history of characterizing
the right side as lucky (Homer II. xxiv 315–21; Od. ii 146–54) and the left
as unlucky (Sophocles, Ajax 1225) and awkward (Aristophanes, Wasps
1265).61 Aristotle himself associates the superiority of the right with that of
the male at Parts of Animals 2.2 648a9–13, where he says that “the upper
parts differ in this way [i.e., are better] compared with the lower parts, and
again the male compared with the female, and the right side of the body
with the left.” But he does more than assert the superiority of the right: he
founds the superiority of right over left on the role of the right side of a
body in movement. This is one aspect of his conception of orientations in
an axiological system of oppositions, in which up is better than down, and
front better than back, and up, right and front are all principles (IA 6
706b25). His view may have been influenced by Plato’s claim that the lucky
direction is from left to right (so, toward the right) at Symposium 223c (see
also Homer, II. i 597 where wine is served from left to right, and II. vii
181ff., where lots are drawn from left to right).62 At any rate, for Aristotle
the right is a principle in the sense of a starting point for locomotion. At PA
4.8 684a27–28 he says that “all animals naturally do more things by means
of the parts on the right side [τοῖς γὰρ δεξιοῖς πάντα πέφυκε τὰ ζῷα δρᾶν
μᾶλλον]” in order to explain why in crayfish and crabs the right claw is
larger and stronger. The right side of the body is nobler than the left, then,
because it is the starting point of action, thus more active, while the
“nature” of the left side is to follow or to be moved (IA 4 705b13).63
1.3.6 Moral failings of women
From this reconstruction of these associations a picture emerges: the male is
hot, dry, right, bounded, and odd—all attributes that are associated with
activity, directly or indirectly; the female is cold, moist, left, unbounded and
even—all of which are associated with passivity.64 The view that the female
is somehow worse than the male clearly pre-dates Aristotle, and some of the
attributes that are supposed in these early accounts of sexual difference to
lead to or to constitute the inferiority of the female are attributes that
Aristotle himself will attribute to her (the cold and the moist in particular).
Allusions to the Pythagorean list of opposites in these early accounts
suggest certain links (however implausible) between the supposed
metaphysical deficiencies of the female and her physical deficiencies (for
example, the claim that the generative incapacity of the female stems from
her association with the even rather than the odd, or that what is unbounded
or indeterminate is what is moist). But it is less apparent how one might try
to explain the intellectual and moral deficiencies often attributed to women
on the basis of these physical and metaphysical deficiencies. There is no
doubt that most of the authors we have considered believed women to be
morally inferior to men, but little evidence to demonstrate a link between
the moral inferiority of females and women in particular and their
associations with the even, the moist, the cold, the unbounded, or the left.
How might these qualities that are attributed to the female be responsible
for her purported moral defects?
Women were most often accused of two moral failings: passivity and
lasciviousness. The first of these we have already seen represented as a
metaphysical and physical fact about women: the even number is associated
with a lack of generative power, the left opposed to the right as the passive
side with respect to the initiation of movement in a body, the moist as acted
upon by the dry, the unbounded as given form by the bounded. As a moral
failing, passivity is associated with timidity, a lack of courage, inconstant
beliefs, and disloyalty; we will see in chapter 4 that Aristotle attributes
timidity to women.
The second moral failing women were commonly accused of,
lasciviousness, is a particular case of a more general phenomenon.
Unlimited appetite, or ungoverned desires, were commonly attributed to
women in Greek literature before Aristotle.65 And physical explanations for
this moral phenomenon are sometimes proffered. In medical texts the
phenomenon of a uterus that is displaced (sometimes called the “wandering
womb”) is taken to be evidence that women are constitutionally lewd, with
difficulty controlling their sexual appetites (see the Hippocratic text Mul. I
and Plato’s Ti. 91c1–8; although Plato seems to think that men as well as
women struggle to control their sexual desires, the Symposium suggests
that women are less likely to have the more divine forms of desire).66 The
moisture attributed to women was often supposed to be a source, more or
less inexhaustible, of desire, although the causal connection is unclear (see
Pseudo-Aristotle, Prob. 4.25 879a32–35, and Hesiod, Works and Days 582–
88). On this view, women’s physical nature causes them to experience
stronger or more numerous appetites than men, especially sexual appetites.
Moreover, women are often represented as less well able to submit their
desires to the control of judgment or reason because they are unbounded or
incapable of determining their own boundaries. “From its first uses in
Homer, sōphrosynē is the activity of checking some natural impulse or
closing the boundaries of the phrenes (‘wits’) by will”;67 and if women are
less fixed or constant in their character, they will also be less able to check
their impulses. So not only do women have more numerous or excessive
desires, but they are less well able to control those desires, and that lack of
control over desire is also a lack of control over their boundaries.
This suggests that it is their moisture and their character as unbounded
that is responsible somehow for the moral inadequacy of women. Moisture
is associated not only with unregulated desire and a consequent absence of
boundaries on the wits (or the self), but more generally with emotion.
Emotion is in turn linked to a lack of control that correlates to the
unbounded, and results in the lack of sōphrosynē.68 But the evidence for
these connections seems slight.69 For example, one piece of evidence that is
sometimes taken to imply a link between moisture and over-emotion in the
female is a passage at History of Animals 9.1 608b1–19.70 Here women are
said to be softer (μαλακώτερα), more impetuous (προπετέστερα), and more
given to tears (ἀρίδακρυ), compassion (ἐλεημονέστερον), jealousy
(φθονερώτερον), despondency (δύσελπι), and lack of spirit (δύσθυμον).
Book 9 does not directly mention the moisture of the female, and some
doubts have been raised about its authorship (but see Balme, who argues
that it should be attributed to Aristotle).71 However, it does attribute to
women a range of unchecked emotions (they are easily moved to tears and
impulsive). And perhaps we can connect the idea that women are subject to
unregulated desires and emotions with the idea that they are unbounded; if
women are susceptible to being buffeted by emotion and desire, and less
able to control those affects, they will be more malleable by outside forces,
less definite in their own judgments and actions. Thus there may be some
connection in Greek literature before Aristotle between the notion of the
female as passive, and the idea that she has more, and more unruly, passions
and desires (although these may be the passions associated with cold natural
characters—e.g., fear and bitterness). One who is passive is easily shaped
by forces other than the self, and when the self is identified with a rational
capacity (the “wits”), these outside forces include her own desires. But this
is speculative.
The connection between the metaphysical or physical deficiencies of
women and their inferior political status in these early Greek accounts is
also a matter for speculation. It is clear that there is some connection
between the association of women with the unbounded and the confinement
of women to the household, and their exclusion from public life and
political participation. We might understand that confinement as an attempt
to control the unboundedness of women, in which case the political
exclusion is a response to a perceived fact about women’s nature.72 But we
might also interpret the unboundedness of women as a product of their
political exclusion, in which case it is not so much a fact of their nature as a
social fact.73 The view that women ought to be restricted to their
households is widespread in early Greek literature: we find it in Herodotus
where, in the bizarre, reversed world of the Egyptians, men stay home and
work at the loom while women go out to the market (Histories 2.35); in
Xenophon, where a man should be ashamed to stay at home (Oec. 7.2,
7.30–31); and in Plato’s Phaedrus at 239c, where the domain of women is
shadow-filled interiors.74 And while we can construct plausible accounts of
how the metaphysical and physical deficiencies attributed to women
(moisture, unboundedness, and passivity in particular) might be connected
to their political exclusion, there is no clear and explicit account of such a
link in the early literature. If Aristotle thought that there was such a link, he
would have to formulate an account of it himself.
1.4 The biology of sexual difference
1.4.1 The sexed body as a biological phenomenon

We have been considering the ways in which women were evaluated as
physically and morally inferior to men in much of ancient Greek literature
prior to Aristotle and tracing the origins of this view back to Pythagorean
tables of opposites. Turning to accounts of the biology of sexual difference,
the medical literature, particularly the Hippocratic corpus (a collection of
works by different authors), is an important source of empirical claims
about sexual differences, and speculative explanations of those
differences.75 The Hippocratic corpus includes treatises concerned with the
nature of women and diseases peculiar to women (e.g., Nature of Women,
Diseases of Girls, Diseases of Women, On Sterility), the processes of
generation and birth (e.g., Generation, Nature of the Child, Superfetation),
and other treatises that make a number of claims about sexual differences
(e.g., Regimen). Three features of the Hippocratic understanding of sexual
difference that emerge from these works are likely to have informed
Aristotle’s views: their claims about bodily structures, the physiological
differences they attribute to the sexes, and their understanding of
menstruation.
First, the female body is distinguished on Hippocratic accounts by two
structures. There is a hodos, “a route extending from the orifices of the head
to the vagina”; while there is no description of the hodos as an anatomical
feature in the Hippocratic corpus, many passages link events in the orifices
of the head to the vagina, in a way that suggests that in a healthy woman
there is an unobstructed path.76 For example, if the mouth of the uterus
closes and tilts, a woman’s nostrils will be “dry, blocked, and contracted.
Breathing decreases, the sense of smell is lost, and although there is no pain
in their ears, sometimes a stone forms there” (Mul. 2.133).77 The female
also has a uterus, described as a “vessel” (ἄγγος), which may have been
conceived as a jug or a wineskin.78 The author of Superfetation describes
the uterus as having two “horns” (κέρατα), which later medical writers took
to be the fallopian tubes, although it was probably a reference to a partition
within the uterus (Superf. 1 [viii.476.3]).
Second, in Hippocratic treatises the physiology of the female was
characterized by its texture. Women’s bodies were thought to be more moist
than men’s because they retained water “due to being loose-textured
(araios), spongy (chaunos) and like wool (eirion)” (Gland. 124).79 The
sponginess of the female body allows it to absorb and retain more fluid
from the food it ingests than does the male body. This, presumably, is why
women are more moist than men (Nat. Puer. 4 [vii.494], Vict. 1.34). The
functions of the uterus were, in the first instance, to draw excess fluid from
the body and to serve as its receptacle.
Third, Hippocratic treatises place an emphasis on menstruation as a
process necessary to the female body. Menstruation begins when, as growth
slows in a girl at puberty, she produces more blood from her food than is
required, and that excess blood accumulates in her body, drains into her
uterus and, so long as the girl is healthy, is evacuated in menstruation.80
Aristotle too, as we will see, understands menstrual fluid to be the residue
of excess blood.
The Hippocratic understanding of these three features informs responses
to two questions concerning sexual difference that dominate in the
philosophical and medical literature. The first concerns the role of male and
female in sexual reproduction; the second concerns the determination of sex
in the embryo. Most accounts of these phenomena that pre-date Aristotle
make use of some of the terms of opposition that we have already seen
associated with male and female in the tables of opposites. Aristotle
endorses some features of the views put forward by his predecessors and
rejects others; we will see that he preserves in his own explanations of the
phenomena connected with sex some of the elements found in the accounts
of his predecessors—notably, an appeal to temperature, to the moist and the
dry, and (on occasion) to the left and the right as explanatory factors.
The human sexual differences that were the focus of scientific attention
were not primarily morphological features of sexed bodies, but rather the
physiological functions that distinguished female from male: menstrual
flow, pregnancy, and lactation.81 In general—and this remains true with
Aristotle—sexual difference was understood as a difference in sexual
function or physiology in the first instance, and only secondarily as a
difference in the structure or appearance of the body, or morphology.
In most accounts of sexual difference prior to Aristotle, the physiological
differences between the sexes were attributed to two features: differences in
temperature, and differences in the level of moisture in the body (these two
were often linked). For example, in the philosophical literature, as we have
seen, Parmenides and Empedocles believed that females differed in
temperature from males—although disagreeing as to whether they were
colder, or hotter (according to Aristotle; see section 1.3.4 and note 53 of this
chapter). In both cases, the evidence for the lower or higher temperature of
women was found in the menstrual flow. In the case where menstruation
was supposed to be evidence that women were hotter, it was because heat
was expected to allow the body to produce more blood, some of which
would then need to be expelled as menses. If, however, menstruation was
taken to be evidence that women were colder, this was because heat was
believed to be necessary to reduce the amount of excess blood in the body,
so that less heat would yield more blood, which would then need to be
expelled as menses.
In the medical literature of the time, too, there was agreement that the
sexes were different in temperature. But among the Hippocratics, as among
pre-Socratic philosophers, there was no consensus on two questions about
heat: (1) whether women were more or less hot than men and (2) what the
cause of the difference in temperature between the sexes might be. So, for
example, the author of Diseases of Women I states simply and without
explanation that women are hotter because “a woman has hotter blood
[θερμότερον . . . τὸ αἷμα ἔχει ἡ γυνή]” (Mul. 1.1 [viii.12.21]);82 the author
of Nature of the Child says that the womb is heated by menstrual blood,
which in turn heats the rest of the body only when the blood is trapped for
longer than usual (Nat. Puer. 15 [vii. 494.22–23]). But the author of Sterility
implies that the female is colder than the male (Steril. 216 [viii.416.20ff.]),
and the author of Regimen says that women are colder than men because
they purge the heat from their bodies once a month (Vict. 1.34 [vi.512.13–
19]). These sources make clear that the appeal to temperature differences is
introduced in order to explain the phenomenon of menstruation, and that the
point of dispute is whether it is heat or cold that is more likely to cause
there to be extra blood in the body (which, on these views, would explain
the need for menstruation).83
In seeking for explanations of menstruation, philosophers and medical
writers before Aristotle also placed emphasis on the relative moistness or
dryness of the bodies of men and women, as we have seen. Moisture, even
more than temperature, figures largely in Hippocratic explanations of
menstruation and conception.84 For example, the author of Regimen 1–3
attributes purported sexual differences in temperature in part to differences
in the diets of the sexes. The diet of males, which is more rigorous,
laborious, or difficult (ἐπιπονωτέρῃσι), causes them to be hotter and drier,
whereas that of females, which is less strenuous or easier (ῥᾳθυμοτέρῃσι),
makes them more moist and colder, and menstruation draws heat out of
their bodies (Vict. 1.34).85 The evidence that women were constitutionally
more moist than men was precisely the phenomenon of menstruation,
construed as a means of eliminating excess fluid. We will see that Aristotle
concurred in this view but understood the fundamental, and hence
explanatory, difference between male and female animals to be one of
temperature—the evidence for which is once again the elimination of
menses.86
1.4.2 The role of male and female in reproduction

Some ancient authors suggested that women were not parents of their
offspring at all, but simply containers for the offspring of men (Aeschylus’s
Eumenides 658–61, and Anaxagoras along with other natural philosophers,
according to Aristotle at GA 4.1 763b30–764a1).87 Most ancient authors,
however, conceived of the process of generation as one that required some
contribution from each parent. A theory of the roles of the sexes in
generation had to explain a variety of phenomena: the possibility that
offspring might resemble either parent, the fact that conception could only
occur at certain times, and the necessity of a contribution from the male
parent although the offspring would grow within the female parent.
Formulating a theory that would account for all these features of
reproduction proved difficult. In the theories that circulated prior to
Aristotle, two questions focused the discussion: the question of female seed,
and the question of pangenesis. These are the two questions that Aristotle
himself poses at Generation of Animals 1.17 721b6–12.
Everyone recognized that women’s bodies produced a menstrual fluid,
which was expelled when conception did not occur, and many medical texts
are concerned with menstruation. For example, the Hippocratic authors, in
discussing treatments for infertility, focus on menstruation.88 Most of
Aristotle’s predecessors believed that women also produced a kind of seed
that was separate from the menses. On this sort of view, the seed has a
formative role in the generation of offspring, and the menses serves the
embryo (constituted from the male and female seed) for nourishment and
growth. Some (including some Pythagoreans [according to Diogenes
Laertius 8.28], Anaxagoras [according to Aristotle at GA 4.1 763b30–
764a1], and Diogenes Appollionates and Hippon [according to Censorinus;
see De die nat. 5.4]) believed that the menses was the only contribution
made by the female to the process of generation, and that it did not include
seed.89 Aristotle, we know, understands the menses as the matter that will
become the offspring, identifies it as the fertile residue contributed by
women to the process of generation, and sometimes calls it sperma, or seed.
Still in question is whether he attributes to it the role that was usually
associated with seed.90
Despite these exceptions, in most accounts of generation prior to
Aristotle there is a hypothesis that the female parent produces seed just as
does the male parent: Anaxagoras, Alcmaeon, Empedocles, and Parmenides
(according to Censorinus; see De die nat. 5.4), and Democritus (according
to Aetius V 5.1), all posited some form of female seed, and this tradition
informs most Hippocratic gynecological treatises.91 Seed was conceived as
a material entity, which served as the origin of the offspring. Consider three
Hippocratic treatises. In Generation 3, male semen is produced by the
agitation caused by friction on the penis, which in turn causes the potent
part of the humors to separate out into foam; and Generation 1.4 (vii.
474.16–20) says that women’s seed is emitted into the uterus. The author of
the History of Animals 10 (which may be a Hippocratic text),92 while
agreeing that both male and female seed are produced, disagrees with the
author of Generation about the place at which seed is deposited in
intercourse:
For the woman’s emission too is into the region in front of the uterus, as is evident when they
have erotic dreams which reach completion: for then this place requires treatment by them,
having become wet as if during intercourse with a man, since the man’s emission also comes
here, to the same place and not into the uterus within. But when they emit here, the uterus draws
the seed (τὸ σπέρμα) from here by means of wind, like the nostrils. Hence too they become
pregnant through intercourse in any position, because the emission of the seed (ἡ πρόεσις τοῦ
σπέρματος) both by them and by the men is to the front of the uterus in its correct state. (HA
10.2 634b30–39)
And at Regimen. 1.27 (vi.500.10–28) the author claims that seed is required
from both male and female parent in order to master the ἐπιρρέον (the
menses), since the seed from each parent singly has too much moisture and
too little fire to concentrate and shape the menses.
It is clear, then, that Hippocratic and some pre-Socratic authors assume
the existence of both male and female seed, and see them as necessary for
the conception and formation of the embryo. Aristotle, as we will see in
chapter 2, thought the female produced only one contribution to generation,
the katamênia or menses, which he does call “seed” (sperma), although he
did not attribute to it the same capacities as the sperma produced by the
male. One question, then, that divided ancient authors was whether to posit
female as well as male seed, and more generally, what counted as the fertile
residue of the female and what role it played in generation.
A second point of disagreement among ancient authors was the process
through which seed was produced. Pangenesis is the view that seed is
drawn from every part of the parent’s body, rather than produced in and
drawn from a single organ or limited set of organs. If seed is informed in its
origin (before emission) by the shape and function of the body of the animal
that generated it, it is assumed that it must be drawn from every part of that
animal’s body in order to carry with it somehow the shape and function of
every part. There were variations in pangenetic theory. The Hippocratic
author of Generation advocated a pangenetic theory emphasizing that seed
was drawn from the entire body of both male and female (Genit. 1.1
[vii.470.1–5], 1.3 [vii.474.6–8], 1.8 [vii.480.7–10).93 On Aristotle’s
testimony, Empedocles believed that the seed was drawn not from every
part of the body in any given individual but from half (since each of the two
parents, on his view, contributes only half the tally of parts).94 Democritus,
by contrast, believed that each parent contributed seed from each part of the
body, and so that seed was drawn from every part of the body in both
parents.95 One of Aristotle’s objections to these theories was that they failed
to provide an explanation for the transmission of a unified soul: if the parts
are separate prior to conception, then they cannot have soul, but nor can
they acquire soul in utero. This, as we will see in chapter 2, motivated him
to provide an account of generation according to which the spermata are
potentially alive.
One manifestation of pangenetic theory was preformationism, the idea
that the parts of the offspring’s body are pre-formed, and present in a
homuncular form, in the seed of the parents. Aristotle seems to believe that
Empedocles and Democritus subscribed to a theory of pangenesis and
preformationism (GA 4.1 764a1–23). But pangenesis did not require
preformationism. As Dean-Jones notes, “The more sophisticated theory of
pangenesis claimed that semen provided the material from each part in an
unshaped state.”96 The link between pangenesis and preformationism is
thus loose; the link between pangenetic theory and a commitment to female
seed is much closer. If seed is drawn from every part of the body, and not
from an organ that belongs only to males, it would be consistent to suppose
that females as well as males produce seed. Certainly, Aristotle thought that
pangenetic theories implied female seed. He says that “it is reasonable to
hold that if it [sperma] is not drawn from the whole of the body it is not
drawn from both the parents either [εὔλογον γάρ, εἰ μὴ ἀπὸ παντός, μηδ᾿
ἀπ᾿ ἀμφοτέρων τῶν γεννώντων]” (GA 1.17 721b10–12). He adds:
“Moreover, if the female does not discharge any semen, then it is consistent
to say that the semen is not drawn from the whole body either; or again, if it
is not drawn from the whole body, there is nothing inconsistent in saying
that it is not drawn from the female either, but that the female is responsible
for generation in some way other than this” (GA 1.18 724a8–12).97 So we
can see that for Aristotle the question of female seed is intimately tied to the
question of pangenesis, and we will see in chapter 2 that he rejects
pangenetic theories and conceives of female seed as importantly different
from male seed.
The next question is what those who posited female seed thought female
seed could explain—what phenomenon were they trying to explain by
positing female seed?98 If we turn our attention to the contexts in which
female seed is invoked—if we consider what it was intended to explain—
we can gain some understanding both of those who accepted, and of those
who rejected, the claim that women contribute seed to reproduction.
In some cases, female seed is posited in order to explain the
phenomenon of sexual pleasure during intercourse as parallel experiences in
the male and the female. The author of the Hippocratic treatise Generation
links the experience of pleasure to the ejaculation of seed in both male and
female:
In the case of women, it is my contention that when during intercourse the vagina is rubbed and
the womb is disturbed, an irritation is set up in the womb which produces pleasure and heat in
the rest of the body. A woman also releases something from her body, sometimes into the uterus,
which then becomes moist, and sometimes externally as well, if the uterus is open wider than
normal. . . . The reason that the man feels more pleasure is that the secretion from the bodily
fluid in his case occurs suddenly, and as the result of a more violent disturbance than in the
woman’s case. (Genit. 1.4 [vii.474.16–476.10])99
In this passage we see that the author connects male pleasure to the
emission of seed in semen, observes that women experience a similar
pleasure associated also with the emission of fluid, and speculates that this
fluid must also contain seed.100 There are provisos: the woman might not
always experience pleasure, her pleasure will be less than the man’s
(although it will last longer: Ἧσσον δὲ πολλῷ ἥδεται ἡ γυνὴ τοῦ ἀνδρὸς ἐν
τῇ μίξει, πλείονα δὲ χρόνον ἢ ὁ ἀνήρ), and the fluid she emits will not
always be ejaculated outside the body. But female seed is invoked here as a
way of explaining what occurs in a female body by analogy with the male
body.
A second, more prevalent, reason to posit female seed was the need to
explain the possibility of the resemblance of offspring to their mothers. In
many accounts, an attempt is made to explain resemblance through the
contribution of seed from both male and female parents. With Empedocles
and Democritus, pangenetic accounts seem to underpin accounts of
resemblance. On Empedocles’ account, for example, if the seed for the
eyebrows was contributed by the father, the offspring will resemble its
father with respect to eyebrows; if the seed for the nose was contributed by
the mother, the offspring will have a nose that resembles its mother. Since
on his view each parent contributes seed that accounts for only half of the
body parts, resemblance is established simply in virtue of which parent
contributed the seed for a particular part. In the case of Democritus,
however, since each parent contributes seed from all parts of the body, some
mechanism is needed to explain which seed determines the formation of a
given part. That mechanism, on his account, is mastery: the notion that the
seed from each parent competes with the seed from the other, and one or the
other prevails, determining resemblance to the parent from which that seed
originated with respect to the part in question. By contrast, several
Hippocratic treatises—Generation 6–8 (vii.478.1–482.3), Nature of the
Child 17 (vii.496.19–21), and Diseases of Women, 1.24 (viii.64.1)—suggest
that both male and female contribute seed, and that resemblance is
determined according to which parent supplied the largest quantity of seed
for that part.101 So to explain resemblance requires not only that one posit a
contribution of seed from both parents, but also that one specify whether
resemblance is determined simply by the presence of seed from a specific
part of the parent’s body (and the absence of seed from that part from the
other parent), or alternatively by some other mechanism: the strength or
quantity of the seed contributed for that part by one parent or the other.
Given the need to explain the fact of female offspring and the
resemblance of offspring (male and female) to their mothers in other
respects, we might ask why anyone rejected the idea that the female
produced seed. The answer, which becomes fully apparent only when
Aristotle takes up the question, is that positing female seed makes it more
difficult to explain why a male parent is necessary, and what role he plays
in generation. If the female provides the material (or the source of
nourishment in the case of preformationist theories) for offspring in the
menses, provides seed that is capable of shaping that material (or is capable
of constituting itself into a whole animal embryo in the case of
preformationist accounts), and provides a space in which the embryo can
grow, then it is difficult to understand why the female cannot generate
viable offspring independently. So despite its explanatory power, there is a
limit to what positing female seed can explain.102
1.4.3 The determination of sex in the embryo

The issue of resemblance is central in discussions of the determination of
sex in the offspring. If sex is viewed as a heritable feature, the desire to
explain the production of female animals in particular (even more than
other respects in which offspring might resemble their female parent) might
motivate one to posit female seed. On a view of sex determination as a case
of resemblance and a pangenetic theory of seed, the sex of the embryo is
determined in just the same way that the shape of the nose or the ear is
determined: when the seed drawn from sexual organs either (1) comes from
one parent rather than the other (when each parent contributes half the seed)
or (2) is stronger or greater in quantity from one parent than the other (so
that, although seed is drawn from the sex organs of both parents, if that
drawn from the sex organs of the mother is stronger or more plentiful, then
it will determine the sex of the child as female). An example of (1) is
Empedocles, as reported by Aristotle (although, as we will see later,
Aristotle also reports that Empedocles offered a second explanation of sex
determination). Examples of (2) are the author of Generation and Nature of
the Child and Democritus, again as reported by Aristotle, who says that
Democritus “holds that the difference of male and female is produced in the
uterus . . . this is determined, he asserts, according to which of the two
parents’ sperma prevails, the sperma, that is to say, which has come from
the part wherein male and female differ from one another (τὸ σπέρμα τὸ
ἀπὸ τοῦ μορίου ἐλθὸν ᾧ διαφέρουσιν ἀλλήλων τὸ θῆλυ καὶ τὸ ἄρρεν)” (GA
4.1 764a7–12). Aristotle also characterizes the view this way: sex is
determined when a complete set of parts “is secreted off from each of the
parents and . . . a male or female embryo is formed according as one part
prevails over another part” (GA 4.1 764b19–21).
On these pangenetic accounts seed itself carries a sex, which is
transmitted to offspring and thereby determines their sex. Aristotle also
reports that “Anaxagoras and certain other physiologers say that this
opposition [between male and female] exists right back in the spermata
[i.e., the semen and the menses] (φασὶ γὰρ οἱ μὲν ἐν τοῖς σπέρμασιν εἶναι
ταύτην τὴν ἐναντίωσιν εὐθύς)” (GA 4.1 763b30–33). But even those who
embraced pangenesis often hypothesized some mechanism in the uterus that
determined definitively the sex of the offspring. If we consider the various
mechanisms most often postulated prior to Aristotle, we see that in every
case the production of females is the result of some defect of the generative
process.
Since, as we have seen, sexual difference was often supposed to be
characterized by a difference in the temperature of the body, it is not
surprising that temperature is often invoked as an explanatory mechanism
for the determination of sex in the embryo. The range of such views
incorporates both pangenetic and non-pangenetic theories, including
accounts in which seed is sexed as well as accounts in which sex is
determined in utero. In these theories it might be the temperature of the
parent’s body as a whole, or of the uterus or the testes, that determines sex.
But none of the temperature-based theories of sex determination treats the
sex of offspring as a heritable feature.
Empedocles is an example of someone who thought that it was the
temperature of the uterus that determined sex (although his view is
complicated in that he also seems to have thought that it was determined
according to whether the seed for sex organs was drawn from the mother or
the father). Aristotle reports that he thought that “the seed which enters a
hot uterus become male, that which enters a cold one, female; and that the
cause of this heat and cold is the menstrual flow, according as it is hotter or
colder (ἢ ψυχροτέραν οὖσαν ἢ θερμοτέραν), older or more recent (ἢ
παλαιοτέραν ἢ προσφατωτέραν)” (GA 4.1 764a2–7).103 Peck and Lloyd
understand this to mean that a more recent menstrual flow will be hotter,
hence that a uterus with a recent menstrual flow will be hotter, and one with
a less recent menstrual flow colder, while Dean-Jones takes it to mean that a
larger quantity of menses will create a colder uterus. Since menses is, on
Aristotle’s account, a form of concocted blood, it should be hot so long as it
is in the body, but perhaps once it is stored in the uterus it cools over time;
this suggests that Peck and Lloyd’s interpretation is to be preferred.104
Galen, referring to a different fragment of Empedocles (DK B67, Hippocr.
Epid. VI. 48, CMG V 10.2.2 119 16ff.), seems to have understood that there
are hotter and colder parts of the uterus, and that males are formed in the
hotter ones and females in the colder.105 At any rate, we might suppose that
if the temperature of the uterus (whether the variations are spatial or
temporal) determines the sex of offspring, then the seed itself need not be
sexed. Aristotle objects to Empedocles’ theory precisely because it suggests
both (1) that the seed contributed by the parents is sexed, which would
account for the sex of the offspring as a matter of resemblance to one parent
or the other, and (2) that the temperature of the uterus determines the sex,
which would mean that sex was not a question of resemblance (GA 4.1
764a12–20); and if (1) is true, then (2) is not.
Certain Hippocratic theories also appeal to cold and hot to explain the
determination of sex. Superfetation 31 (viii.500.5–10) seems to agree with
Empedocles that a quantity of menstrual fluid will make the uterus colder,
advising a man who wishes to have a male child to engage in intercourse
when the menstrual flow is diminishing or completed, and one who wishes
a female child to engage in intercourse while the menstrual flow is heavy.
Regimen at 1.26–28 [vi.498.13–502.23]offers a rather different account of
the influence of temperature on sex determination. In this treatise seed itself
is composed of fiery elements and wet elements; when the fiery element is
preponderant, the seed is male, and when the wet element is preponderant,
it is female. Both men and women produce both male and female seed,
since both have fiery and wet elements. Males are produced when either (1)
both parents contribute male seed or (2) one parent contributes male and the
other female seed, but the male seed is stronger. Females are produced in a
parallel way. So on this view sex in the seed is determined by temperature,
but sex in the offspring is determined by the relative strength of the seeds
contributed by the two parents. This again is a theory of sex determination
that takes sex not to be a heritable characteristic, or is only indirectly so
(through the resemblance to temperature). Finally, the Hippocratic text
Regimen holds that females are produced by a diet “inclining to water” (τῇ
πρὸς ὕδατος) (Vict. 1.27). Because the female is associated with water (τὰ
δὲ θήλεα πρὸς ὕδατος μᾶλλον), female embryos grow in utero through the
ingestion of cold, moist, and soft food (ἀπὸ τῶν ψυχρῶν καὶ ὑγρῶν καὶ
μαλθακῶν αὔξεται). Males, by contrast, are produced by means of a diet
“inclining to fire” (τῇ πρὸς πυρὸς).
The most prevalent theme of ancient theories of sex determination was
an association of the left side of the body with the female, and the right side
of the body with the male. These theories clearly have as their antecedent
the identification of the left side with the female in the Pythagorean and
other tables of opposites, as we saw earlier in section 1.3. Aristotle tells us
that Anaxagoras and certain other natural philosophers believed that seed
itself—produced only, on this account, by the male—had a determinate sex,
male seed coming from the right side of the male body and female seed
from the left side (GA 4.1 763b30–764a1). At the end of this passage, in a
line that some commentators take to be spurious because it seems
inconsistent with what comes before, Aristotle suggests that Anaxagoras
and these other natural philosophers also thought that males develop on the
right side of the uterus and females on the left. If the seed already has a sex,
this difference in embryonic placement is not necessary to explain sex
determination, but Aristotle may intend to say that Anaxagoras and others
believed that once sex was determined the embryo developed on one side or
the other according to its sex. Galen attributes to Parmenides the view that
the sex of the offspring is determined according to whether it develops on
the left or right side of the uterus—with the left producing females and the
right males.106 And several Hippocratic treatises explain sex determination
in terms of the right and left, although in different ways. In some, seed from
the left testicle produces female offspring, whereas seed from the right
testicle produces males (Epid. 6.4.21 [v.312.9–10]). Superfetations 31
(viii.500.6–12)—a passage from another Hippocratic work mentioned
earlier in the context of heat and cold—suggests tying up the right testicle
to produce a girl and the left for a boy, and Aristotle mentions a Leophanes
who held such a view (GA 4.1 765a25). These accounts are similar to that
attributed by Aristotle to Anaxagoras. But other Hippocratic accounts agree
more with Parmenides’ suggestion that it is the left or right side of the
uterus that determines sex, and hence that sex is determined not in seed but
in utero.107
We have already seen that some theories of sex determination appeal to a
notion of strength or prevalence as the mechanism that ultimately
determines sex. In Democritus’s account, as reported by Aristotle, since
both parents produce seed, and the seed is sexed accordingly (so females
produce female seed, male parents male seed), the sex of the offspring is
determined when the two seeds responsible for the sex of the embryo
compete and one prevails over or masters the other (GA 4.1 764a8–12). It is
not clear just what it means for one seed to prevail over the other. The
Hippocratic treatise Generation appeals, as we have seen, to a similar
mechanism, in which both parents produce seed, which might be strong or
weak, where strong seed produces male offspring and weak seed produces
female offspring, according to which “prevails”:
If stronger semen comes from both parents, a male is engendered, if weaker, a female.
Whichever sex exceeds in amount is engendered (ὁκότερον δ᾽ ἂν κρατήσῃ κατὰ πλῆθος ἐκεῖνο
γίνεται): for if weaker semen is much greater in amount than stronger semen, the stronger is
overcome, and being mixed with the weaker is brought around to become a female. But if
stronger semen is much greater in amount than weaker, the weaker is overcome and brought
around to become a male. (Genit. 1.6 [vii.478.7–11])
On this account, then, prevalence is a question of quantity. Since both

parents produce both kinds of seed, the weakness or strength of the seed is
not a matter of resemblance, and so the sex of the offspring is not a matter
of resemblance. Rather, it is the relative quantity of strong and weak seed in
the mixture of seeds from the two parents that determines sex. In this it
seems quite unlike other functions and organs of the body, since in general
the physical characteristics of the offspring are determined according to
resemblance transmitted through the seed (Genit. 1. 6).108 Moreover, the
seed that determines sex cannot be drawn from the sexual organs (if it were,
each parent could only produce seed of the same kind as itself), although
we are told that weak seed is drawn from weak body parts and strong seed
from strong parts (Genit. 1.8 [vii.480.7–9]). Seed is drawn rather from the
humors of the body, which are the same in the two sexes.109 Another
Hippocratic treatise speaks of mastery in a rather different way: at Regimen
1.27 (vi.500.10–22) the seed from both the male and the female parent is
required to master the menses (ἐπιρρέον).
If we bear in mind the associations from tables of opposites, we can see
that almost every theory of sex determination prior to Aristotle implies that
the production of female offspring is somehow worse than the production of
male offspring. If the cold, the left side of the body, and weakness are
routinely associated not only with the female but with what is worse, then
to explain the determination of the sex of an embryo by appealing to one (or
more) of these attributes is to posit the inferiority of the female to the male.
We will see in chapter 2 that Aristotle preserves many features from these
pre-Socratic and Hippocratic accounts in his own theory of sex
determination, combining them in novel ways.
1.5 Sexual difference in the political context

When Aristotle discusses the nature of women and their role in the polis in
his Politics, it is the proposals of Socrates in Plato’s Republic 5 that he
seems to have in mind. Although in this section I am concerned largely with
those proposals and their context—ideal and philosophical—Aristotle was
of course also writing in the non-ideal context of contemporary Greece.
Since both Plato and Aristotle took Athens as the primary focus of their
political interest (although both had some interest in comparative politics),
and since there is more evidence concerned with women in Athens than
elsewhere, I focus here on the status of women in Athens, with two
provisos. There is some limited evidence that women in other Greek city-
states (Sparta, in particular) may have enjoyed more freedom, and we
should bear in mind that Athenian norms in this period may not have been
representative of Greek norms more generally. We should remember also
that the legal status of women probably did not determine every aspect of
their lives, and that individual women and men may have organized their
lives together on a more egalitarian basis. But the law tells us something of
what was expected of women in Athens at the time, and what might have
been possible for women in public terms.
1.5.1 The legal status of women in Athens

Some women in Athens had the status of a citizen (ἀστή), while many did
not. Citizenship was especially important after 451/450 BCE, when
Pericles’ provision established that both parents had to be Athenian citizens
if their children were to be citizens (Ath. Pol. 26.3). This meant that an
Athenian man had to marry an Athenian woman citizen if he wished to
guarantee citizenship for his sons and daughters. As well as conferring
citizenship on her children, citizenship for women was necessary so that
they might enjoy certain civil and economic rights and so that they could
participate in the religious functions of women in the city. But citizenship
for women did not carry the same privileges that it did for men; most
important, it did not allow women to participate in judicial functions or to
take up public office, so that all women were excluded from political life. A
woman might be an ἀστή but could not be a πολίτης.
Women citizens were subject in many aspects of their lives to the legal
control of a man. They lived under the authority of a kurios (guardian),
usually their father, husband, or some other male relative. This authority
was exercised over a woman’s person, and over her property. She could
neither choose nor refuse a husband. Her guardian would determine whom
she should marry, and her consent was not required for marriage. She could
be forced to divorce a husband so that she might marry a relative in order to
preserve property within a family (Demosthenes, 57.41). Marriage,
moreover, involved sexual obligation (although it is true that the law is
expressed in a way that suggests the primary obligation belonged to the
husband). Couples were to have intercourse at least three times a month; if
not, an heiress (ἐπίκληρος) was permitted to request to marry her husband’s
next nearest relative.110 And a husband was obliged to divorce his wife if he
discovered that she was adulterous, to ensure the legitimacy of offspring.
These obligations (to have intercourse, and to divorce in the case of the
wife’s adultery) were intended to subject women, and in particular the
reproductive capacity of women, to the control of men in order to ensure
the birth of legitimate offspring, even when they imposed an obligation on
men.
Again, with respect to property, a woman citizen was not independent of
her guardian. Upon her engagement she received a dowry from her father,
but it was subject to the control of her husband. Although he would be
required to return it in the event of a divorce, it would be returned to her
family, not to her personally. Women could not own land in Athens,
although land and other property could pass through a woman citizen to
male heirs (the sons of a man’s daughter might inherit his property if he had
no immediate male heirs). Severe restrictions were imposed on a woman’s
financial agency. She was not allowed to control any sum larger than the
worth of a medimnus of barley, about sufficient to provide for a household
for a week (Isaeus, Aristarchus 10.10).111
A woman citizen took no role in public life, except in religion, and in
any legal transaction (usually marriage) she had to be represented by her
guardian. So even women of the highest status did not control their persons
or their property. For non-citizen women conditions were simultaneously
both more and less restrictive. A citizen woman could not leave her
household except for occasional, usually religious, functions; a non-citizen
woman had more freedom of movement.112 Such non-citizen women might
hold a number of different social statuses, often focused on their sexual
availability; a non-citizen woman might perform other forms of labor, but
the ideal was to have a guardian and be confined to the household.113 An
Athenian man was forbidden by law to have sex with any woman who had
a guardian, and men sought out prostitutes (pornai) or courtesans (hetaerai)
so as to avoid legal sanctions (Demosthenes, 23.53).114 Pornai were held in
brothels, which were regulated by officials; therefore, they too were under
the control of men, although the constraints and obligations imposed on
them were quite different from those imposed on citizen women.
1.5.2 Aristophanes
The legal restrictions on women’s autonomy and their exclusion from all
political participation in classical Athens might suggest that it was
unthinkable to suppose women should hold political power or participate in
public life as citizens. Although commentators sometimes say as much, it
clearly was thinkable, since it was not only thought, but also publicly
proposed on at least two occasions, in the comedy Ekklesiazousae
(Assemblywomen), by Aristophanes, performed in 393 or 392,115 and in
Book 5 of Plato’s Republic (the date of which is contested, but most
probably lies somewhere between 385 and 365).116 Those who assume that
the idea of women with political power was simply preposterous believe
that Plato intended his proposals for equality as a kind of joke, and often
that Aristophanes was writing satirically about the Socratic proposals in the
Assemblywomen, extending the Socratic joke.117
The assumption that the Assemblywomen is a satire on the Republic is
one reason that some have dated the Republic as early as the 390s. Since,
however, the Republic was more probably written after the
Assemblywomen, it is unlikely that the latter was a satire on the former.118
Plato may have had the Assemblywomen in mind when he wrote the
Republic, but Halliwell points out that many of the ideas that characterize
the ideal state of Republic 5 (including holding women in common) were
already available in other works. So it is also possible that both Republic 5
and the Assemblywomen were influenced by contemporary debates, rather
than responding directly to one another.119
In the Assemblywomen, a woman, Praxagora, disguised as a man,
addresses the Assembly and convinces them to turn over the governance of
the city to women. This would be wise, she argues, because men have made
a mess of governing the city:
For while drawing your civic pay from public funds, each of you angles for a personal profit.
Meanwhile the public interest flounders like Aesimus. But listen to my advice and you shall
escape from your muddle. I propose that we turn over governance of the city to the women;
after all, we employ them as stewards and treasurers in our own households [ταῖς γὰρ γυναιξὶ
φημὶ χρῆναι τὴν πόλιν ἡμᾶς παραδοῦναι. καὶ γὰρ ἐν ταῖς οἰκίαις ταύταις ἐπιτρόποις καὶ ταμίαισι
χρώμεθα]. (Ekkl. 206–12; italics added)120
The suggestion is that women will have certain moral advantages over men
in political office: most important, women will be more disposed to act for
the common good because, as mothers, they wish to protect the health and
safety of the citizens more than they wish to further their own interests as
individuals (clearly implied is that this is what men have been doing) (Ekkl.
206–40). Moreover, women are generous, which again suggests that they
will govern in the interests of those over whom they rule (Ekkl. 441–59)
(and in the political philosophy of both Plato and Aristotle, that means they
will govern correctly or legitimately). Even their failings prove to be
advantages, and their innocence of the vices of men will be convenient for
the men over whom they rule: they are better able to catch fraud because
they are so adept at it themselves, or, alternatively, they are less likely to
prosecute fraud because they do not have the habits of cheating that men
do. These lines clearly include jokes about women—their sexual
rapaciousness, their cunning ways—but the larger joke is about men, who
govern with such a narrow, venal, and selfish focus on their own interests
that we would be better off collectively if we put women in power, because
they, at least, would take care of us. Although women have certain moral
and intellectual failings, these failings are no worse than those of men—and
generally less destructive of the public good.
Praxagora indicates two concrete ways in which the concern with the
common benefit that she takes to be characteristic of women as a sex will
manifest itself when they have political power. The first concerns the
common ownership of property and wealth. She says that her “first act will
be to communize all the land, money, and other property that’s now
individually owned. We women will manage this common fund with thrift
and good judgment, and take good care of you” (Ekkl. 597–600).121 This
represents a conception of the common good according to which, by
pooling the resources of the political community, we might ensure a good
life for every citizen (slaves and other non-citizens are another question).
Praxagora suggests that women by nature are more likely to pursue the
common good, even at the expense of their private interests, and that the
experience women acquire in managing a household will make them more
adept at managing the city.
The second way in which women’s concern with the common benefit
will manifest itself is in the regulation of sexual contact. Praxagora
proposes that under women’s governance prostitutes will offer sex without
charge to men (and the implication is that they will want to have sex with
men who are citizens). The aim of this measure is also to ensure the
common good in the sense of a minimum of goods for everyone (Ekkl. 611–
18). It is important that the good promoted by this regulation of sexuality is
(at least minimal) sexual satisfaction for everyone, rather than the optimal
reproduction of citizens, which is the practical goal of the Socratic
proposals for sexual regulation, as we will see. Praxagora does, however,
say that all children born to women held in common will view all men as
their fathers (Ekkl. 635–37), which is similar to a claim Socrates makes in
arguing that sexual regulation will promote unity (Rep. 5 464a1–b5).
1.5.3 Socrates
In Republic 5, Socrates returns to two contentious assertions and proposals
that he had made earlier (objections which he refers to as “waves”) in
formulating the plan for an ideal city. The first is that women and men
should perform the same work and therefore have the same education,
because they are the same by nature in all important respects (Rep. 5
454d3–e6). There is a mention in the Critias, in the story of ancient Athens,
of common military training for men and women, which is described as an
“ancient custom”: “All the female and male creatures that live together in a
flock can very well pursue in common, as much as is possible, the special
talents that are suited to each species” (Criti. 110c1–3).122 In the Critias this
is presented as historical fact, rather than as part of a proposal for an ideal
city, and so requires no argument. In the Republic, the principal argument
that Socrates offers in support of the proposal depends again on an analogy
with animals: just as we do not give different tasks to male and female dogs
in our households, so too we should not give different tasks to the male and
female guardians (5 451d4–e5).123
The second proposal is that women, and children, should be held in
common—that is, that they should not live privately with, and under the
control of, an individual man.
[Socrates] I suppose that the following law goes along with the last one and
the others that preceded it.
[Glaucon] Which one?
[Socrates] That all these women are to belong in common to all the men,
that none are to live privately with any man, and that the children, too,
are to be possessed in common, so that no parent will know his own
offspring or any child his parent. (Rep. 5 457c8–d4)
This second proposal has as a corollary that there will be no households or
private property among the guardians.124
In the Laws Socrates repeats most of the proposals for equality: that
women should be educated along with men (6 764c5–d3), trained in the
military arts along with men (7 813e4–814c6, 7 804d1–e4) and engage in
the political life of the polis to some extent (for example, by holding office
as directors of the education of children, at 7 794a7–b5) (see also Laws 6
780d5–781d5; 7 805a3–d4). So the proposals of Republic 5 do not
constitute an isolated instance of Socrates’ commitment to something like
sexual equality.125 Although there is disagreement about the extent of the
political participation that Socrates advocates for women in the Laws, there
is no doubt that the fundamental claim for equality is reiterated:
Let me stress that this law of mine will apply just as much to girls as to boys. The girls must be
trained in precisely the same way. . . . I now know for sure that there are pretty well countless
numbers of women, generally called Sarmatians, round the Black Sea, who not only ride horses
but use the bow and other weapons. There, men and women have an equal duty to cultivate
these skills, so cultivate them equally they do. . . . I maintain that if these results can be
achieved, the state of affairs in our corner of Greece, where men and women do not have a
common purpose and do not throw all their energies into the same activities, is absolutely
stupid. Almost every state, under present conditions, is only half a state, and develops only half
its potentialities, whereas with the same cost and effort, it could double its achievement. (Laws 7
804d7–805b1)126
The Athenian Stranger concludes that “there might have been something to
be said against our proposal, if it had not been proved by the facts to be
workable. . . . We are not going to withdraw our recommendation that so far
as possible, in education and everything else, the female sex should be on
the same footing as the male [μάλιστα κοινωνεῖν τὸ θῆλυ γένος ἡμῖν τῷ τῶν
ἀῤῥένων γένει]” (Laws 7 805c2–d1). This is both very clear and makes
evident that Plato thought “the facts,” and not only utopian aspirations,
warranted the proposal of equality.
There is one important difference in the treatment of women in Republic
5 and the Laws: in the latter, private households are to be maintained, but
we should note that this is something the Athenian Stranger proposes with
regret (Laws 7 807b3–c2). Moreover, we ought not to overemphasize the
difference this might make to the equality claim: Aristotle certainly
believed that the political institutions of the Laws and the Republic were
largely identical, and that the treatment of women in the two dialogues did
not differ in any significant way (see Pol. 2.6 1265a1–6).127
1.5.4 Comparison of Aristophanes and Socrates

The Socratic proposals of Republic 5 are patently similar to those of
Praxagora in the Assemblywomen.128 Socrates argues that women should
hold political power (perform the same work), that women—at least those
of the guardian class—should no longer live under the authority of an
individual man but should be held in common, that property too should be
held in common and households dissolved, and that all of these
arrangements would contribute to the organization of an ideal political
community, something better than what was customary at the time. But
there are important differences between Republic 5 and the
Assemblywomen. Most significantly, Praxagora based her proposals on an
argument for the moral superiority of women over men, and urged that as
the reason men should cede political governance to women. Socrates, by
contrast, argues in Republic 5 for the equality of the sexes with respect to
those features that are relevant to political rule (and not for the superiority
of women), and so he does not propose to exclude men from rule but rather
to include women with men in governance. So Socrates and Praxagora
make different claims for the relative worth of the sexes, and different
proposals for who should rule.
There is also a contrast in the constitutional forms that are supposed to
support these proposals: Praxagora advocates preserving democracy,
whereas Socrates’ proposals are part of an aristocratic constitution. What is
interesting is that although Praxagora claims that women are superior to
men, she does not aim to exclude men altogether from political
participation, as we might expect; her vision is democratic rather than
aristocratic. By contrast, Socrates, although arguing for the equality of the
sexes in fundamental respects, is advocating an aristocratic constitution,
where the best people rule in virtue of their superior moral and intellectual
abilities. So arguments for superiority and for equality of the sexes do not
track support for aristocratic and democratic politics, as we might
suppose.129 This difference is reflected in the aims of the proposals for the
regulation of sexual activity. As we have seen, Praxagora plans to regulate
sexual activity in order to ensure sexual pleasure for everyone in the
community; Socrates, by contrast, proposes to regulate sexual activity in
order to produce offspring best suited to meet the needs of the state. And
there are differences in details: Praxagora does not propose sending women
into battle, says nothing of gymnastic training for women, and implies that
women would continue to perform the domestic tasks traditionally assigned
to them (Ekkl. 599, 654). In these ways, Praxagora’s proposals are more
reliant on traditional gender norms, with political rule construed as an
extension of traditional domestic tasks, and less disruptive to contemporary
gender norms than those of Socrates.
What the proposals in Assemblywomen do have in common with those in
Republic 5 is an understanding of political participation by women as a
necessary condition for some ideal of a shared life. In Assemblywomen,
allowing women to assume political authority is a mechanism for ensuring
the common good, because women by nature will be more likely to be
concerned that certain benefits should be available to each citizen. In
Republic 5, allowing women to share in political rule (on the grounds that
they are no different from men in their aptitude for politics) is a strategy for
ensuring that the city is ruled by those who are best. The ideal of koinônia,
of sharing as a way of ensuring the good of the whole, is central to the
Republic’s utopian vision, and the proposal to allow women to share in
political authority, and to free at least some of them from the control of
individual men so that they might contribute to the defense of the political
community and to its rule, thereby serving the greater good, is an instance
of the ideal of koinônia at work.130 Another instance of this ideal can be
found in the suggestion of the Assemblywomen that the reason women
should be put in charge is precisely to allow the city as a whole to benefit
from their special propensity to promote the good of the koinônia.
Therefore, since proposals to allow women to participate in the political life
of the polis are put forward as ways in which to promote the interests of the
polis as a whole, when Aristotle comes to dispute the Socratic proposals he
has to make the case that excluding women from political authority will
promote rather than inhibit the good of the koinônia. We will see how he
does this in chapter 3.
1.5.5 Interpreting the Socratic proposals

I mentioned earlier that some commentators interpret the Socratic proposals
of Republic 5 as humorous, intended lightly and not to be taken seriously.
The most compelling evidence against this view is Aristotle’s extended
discussion of the proposals in Book 2 of the Politics. It is possible, of
course, that he missed the joke, but as a contemporary reader he is more
likely than we are to have understood Plato’s intentions. Moreover, some of
the same proposals are taken up again in Plato’s Laws, where they have
never struck anyone as especially funny. There is no question but that
Aristophanes did intend the Assemblywomen to be humorous, but there is
some question about what exactly would have seemed funny to a
contemporary audience. The joke, I suggest, is not about how bad women
would be at political governance if they were to be put in charge, but rather
about how bad men actually are at political governance (see Ekkl. 137–43,
where the decrees of men are compared to the “ravings of drunkards,” and
Ekkl. 438–53, where men are characterized as criminals, informers, and
cheats—by contrast with women, who are praised in moral and political
terms as unlikely to inform on or sue their fellow citizens, or to “overthrow
the democracy”). Suggesting that women might rule in a context where they
never do might of course count as preposterous, but the joke seems to be
that if we consider the qualifications of men and women for political
authority, men are clearly ill equipped to rule, so we might as well allow
women to govern. Men are so bad that women could hardly be worse, and
there is a need for a radical change in self-governance, a change that will
put the interests of the whole before individual interests. Aristophanes is not
representing women as moral and intellectual paragons, but he is
representing them as better able than men to serve the common interest.
Returning to the Socratic proposals, even (especially) if we accept that
they are intended seriously, we might ask whether they can properly be
called feminist.131 Two points are often made in arguing that they are not.
The first is that their aims are not feminist; the second is that there are
passages elsewhere in the Republic and other dialogues that are
misogynistic. The first point concerns the motives offered for educating and
employing women of the guardian class in the same ways as men. These
proposals are clearly a radical departure from the norms of contemporary
Athenian political structures, and, perhaps even more important, they
clearly contest that there is a metaphysical distinction in the abilities and
moral capacities of men and women. But this (so the argument goes) is not
sufficient to characterize them as feminist. Socrates’ concern in introducing
these proposals, as several commentators have pointed out, is not that
women have been treated unjustly and should be provided with the
opportunity to exercise their talents in a political life.132 His concern is
rather the common benefit, the good that the city as a whole and the citizens
as a group will reap from an aristocratic arrangement where whoever is best
at ruling is allowed to rule. Aristophanes also suggests (however
mockingly) that women might rule over men as a means of benefiting the
city as a whole, but the way he envisions that benefit—sexual pleasure for
all, enough to eat for everyone—although quite different from the Socratic
utopia, is again not one that on this view should be called feminist.
So the argument is that, although they would give some forms of
political power to women, neither the Aristophanic nor the Socratic
proposals are feminist, because their goals are not to achieve political
justice for women.133 It is certainly true that Socrates does not aim to
ensure the just treatment of any particular group or class in the Kallipolis.
He is not interested in whether it would be just or unjust to allow any given
group to rule, but only in whether a city ruled by that group would be a just
city. So it is not so much that he does not aim to ensure justice for women
as that he does not aim to ensure justice except as a characteristic of the
whole polis. This does not mean that the proposals are feminist, but it might
mean that asking whether they are feminist is wrongheaded because that is
a question about intentions (rather than, say, a question about whether
women would in fact be better off should the proposals be realized, or a
question of the underlying metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the
sexes).
Turning now to the second argument against the interpretation of the
Socratic proposals as feminist, it is true, as many commentators have
pointed out, that there are remarks in the Assemblywomen and in the
Republic and other works by Plato that argue against any attribution of a
feminist (or proto-feminist) position to Aristophanes or Socrates. As we
have seen, in the Assemblywomen women are both praised for their superior
virtue and mocked for their vices. And women are represented as cowardly,
emotional, or undisciplined in the Republic at 3 395d5–e4, 4 431b4–c4, 5
469d5–e1, and 10 605c10–e8, and in the Laws at 6 781a2–b3. Lovibond
points out that while Plato in the Timaeus suggests that the indeterminate
receptacle is a necessary condition for all becoming, in the Republic he
“connects the female with the indeterminate or limitless in a way that shows
these principles to be located, for him as for his Pythagorean predecessors
in the ‘bad’ column of the Table of Opposites.”134 That is, despite the
egalitarian proposals of Book 5, in the rest of the Republic and elsewhere
Plato attributes to Socrates views that continue the tradition of representing
women as morally inferior to men. In particular, women are said to be
especially susceptible to desire, pleasure, and pain, in a way that is
characteristic of slaves and “those of the inferior majority who are called
free” (Rep. 4 431c1–4); furthermore, men are able to withstand emotion,
while women are inclined to indulge it (Rep. 10 605c10–e8). Lovibond
reconstructs the argument this way: “Masculinity . . . expresses itself in
coherence. . . . Femininity by contrast expresses itself in incoherence – that
is, in plurality and indeterminacy, which are understood not as positive
characteristics but as the negation (or absence of) their opposites. To be
feminine is to lack the formative power which, on its inward side,
constructs a definite identity for itself; and on its outward side, continually
seeks to imprint this definite identity on its surroundings.”135
We have seen that there is a history of associating moisture, emotion,
and a lack of control that correlates to the unbounded, and results in the lack
of sōphrosynē attributed to women (although the evidence for this is not
altogether convincing). In his negative remarks about women in the
Republic, Socrates seems to be drawing on some such tradition, which is
inconsistent with the proposals for equality in Book 5 and their justification
by means of an argument for the essential sameness of men and women.
The pejorative remarks about women in the other books of the Republic
suggest, incompatibly with Book 5, not just that women are worse than
men, but that women are a separate genos from men, with their own
distinctive nature.136 These remarks align with the account of
metempsychosis in the Timaeus, where the souls of cowardly or unjust men
return in the bodies of women in the second generation (90e6–91a5). Since
the whole passage treats of the different “races” of animals (celestial,
terrestrial, and aquatic), the implication is clearly that men and women are
different in kind (“that is how women and females in general came to be.
As for birds, as a kind they are the products of a transformation (γυναῖκες
μὲν οὗν καὶ τὸ θῆλυ πᾶν οὕτω γέγονεν. τὸ δὲ τῶν ὀρνέων φῦλον
μετερρυθμίζετο)” [Ti. 91d6–7]).
Moreover, the Laws does not much alter the picture of Socratic
ambivalence. Some commentators argue that the proposals of the Laws
continue to subordinate women, in much the same way that they were in
fact subordinated in the Athens of the time.137 Others argue that the Laws
allows for women to participate in most areas of political life.138
What, then, are we to make of the tension between the proposals for
equality and the insults to the character of women? One way to interpret,
and resolve, the tension is to suppose that the pejorative remarks are aimed
at actual women, while the proposals for equality are intended
imaginatively for an elite group of women under ideal political
circumstances. On this interpretation, the proposals for equality are to be
evaluated as utopian fantasies—imagine a world in which philosophers rule
and justice prevails: in that world, elite men and women might be educated,
trained, and used in the same way, even to the extent of being given equal
political power. And in that world, these elite women would not suffer from
the variability and the emotional unboundedness that actual women in this
actual world exhibit. So the insults are directed at women as we know them;
the proposals of equality for the best women under a system of perfectly
just, aristocratic rule. As Schofield puts it, “A sharp distinction is made
between how humans are by nature (summed up in the claim that for the
Plato of the Republic the soul is ‘fundamentally sexless’)”—a remark made
by Vlastos139—“and how he conceives the way people are in existing
circumstances, where dismissive sociocultural stereotypes inform many of
his references to women.”140
A second interpretive strategy is to suppose that in putting forward the
proposals for equality Socrates is not so much saying that men and women
are equal as that, in a political community in which an intellectual elite held
political power, it would be possible to reduce the femininity of women (or
at least of a certain class of women) to the extent that they resembled men
in every important way—and especially with respect to reason.141 On this
reading of Republic 5, the proposals for equality for women are not in
tension with the insults aimed at women elsewhere. The proposals are
rather a manifestation of the same hostility to women that inspires the
insults in that they aim to reduce women to men, to eliminate the feminine
altogether from the ruling elite of the ideal city. This interpretation
understands Plato to follow in a tradition of identifying women with the
unbounded and the emotional, and men with the bounded and the rational,
so that to say that Plato wishes to reduce women to men is to say that he
wishes to cultivate their rational capacity. One might object that the
ultimate aim is to make both men and women more divine, so that the goal
is not to reduce women to men so much as it is to elevate both sexes to an
intellectual ideal that is gender-neutral. But the features associated with
men (boundedness and stability) are also associated with the divine, so to
make women more divine would be in the first instance to make them more
like men. The ideal is not so much gender-neutral as it is masculine.
If we cannot be certain that Plato endorsed conclusively the Socratic
arguments of Republic 5, we do know that Aristotle took them seriously
enough that he devoted an extended discussion in Book 2 of the Politics to
refuting them. In that discussion he sets out to demonstrate that the
proposals for holding women in common would not lead to the sort of unity
that Socrates asserts they will promote, and that at any rate Socrates’
conception of unity is problematic. Aristotle did not think the proposals
were a joke; rather, he thought they were a mistake. In chapter 3 I argue that
Aristotle understood the Socratic proposals in the manner of the second
interpretive strategy for resolving the tension between the egalitarian
proposals and the misogyny expressed elsewhere in the Republic. That is,
Aristotle understood the point of the proposals to be to eliminate or at least
diminish sexual difference in the ideal city; and he responds that what we
should do instead is acknowledge and institutionalize sexual difference. To
make that argument, as we will see, Aristotle has to argue that it is in some
way good that there should be women in the political community.
1.5.6 The question of women as a genos

What is most important about the Socratic proposals of Republic 5 is that
they challenge the tradition according to which men and women constitute
different kinds. The Assemblywomen, in suggesting that women are superior
to men, maintains the notion that the sexes are separate kinds with distinct
natures; if that were not true, then giving women rather than men political
power would change nothing. But Socrates, in suggesting that women of the
guardian class should join with men in assuming political governance, is
disputing that the sexes are different kinds of being, or at least suggesting
that some women, given the correct education, might become just like
men.142 And while, as noted earlier, there are passages elsewhere in the
Republic and the Timaeus that stand in tension with the egalitarian claims of
Book 5, there are also passages that support an understanding of human
capacity as undifferentiated by sex. In particular, the opening section of the
Meno, in which Socrates argues that the virtue of women is identical with
the virtue of men, supports the view that the moral and intellectual
capacities of the sexes are the same. At Meno 72d4–73c5 Socrates disagrees
with Meno when he suggests that the virtue of a man and that of a woman
will be different, although the health or the strength of one would be the
same as that of the other. Socrates concludes: “So, both the man and the
woman, if they are to be good, need the same things, justice and
moderation” (Meno 73b5–7).143
The question whether women and men have the same virtue is closely
tied to the question of whether rule is the same in different contexts: “Did
you not say that the virtue of a man consists of managing the city well
(πόλιν εὖ διοικεῖν), and that of a woman of managing the household?—I
did. . . . Is it possible to manage a city well, or a household, or anything
else, while not managing it moderately and justly?—Certainly not” (Meno
73a5–b1). Socrates in this exchange seems to be suggesting that since a
woman can manage a household, she is equally capable of managing a city
well—and that is also the view of the character Praxagora in the
Assemblywomen (Ekkl. 210–12). Sameness of virtue and sameness of rule
are linked: virtue is virtue, whether practiced by a man or a woman, and
good rule is good rule, whether exercised in the context of a city or in that
of a household.144
Xenophon also attributes to Socrates the view that rule is the same
whether it is over the members of a household or over the citizens of a city.
In the Memorabilia Socrates says, “Whatever someone presides over (ὅτου
ἄν τις προστατεύῃ), if he knows what is needed and is able to procure it, he
will be a good presiding officer (ἀγαθὸς ἂν εἴη προστάτης) whether it is a
chorus or a household or a city or an army that he presides over” (3.4.6; see
also 3.4.12 and 3.6.14). The point is that if one possesses the knowledge
requisite for rule, one will be able to rule in any context. If women rule,
even under some constraints, in the household, then they must have the
requisite knowledge, and so they should also be able to rule in the city or
the army. Moreover, Xenophon seems to assume that the virtue of women
and men (and slaves) is the same. In his Oeconomicus there are passages
that indicate that the virtue of self-control (sôphrosunê), in particular, will
be identical in free men, women, and slaves. At 7.15, Ischomachus reports
to Socrates that he has told his wife that “self-control for both man and
woman means behaving so that their property will be in the very best
condition and that the greatest possible increase will be made to it by just
and honourable means.”145 Plato’s and Xenophon’s accounts are thus
consistent in attributing to Socrates the view that rule is the same in
household and city. Moreover, they also attribute to Socrates (Plato
explicitly, Xenophon implicitly) the view that women and men have the
same virtues. This is at any rate implied in the first claim, since women
exercise rule in the household, and no one would believe that they could or
should exercise rule in the city unless exercising it in the household was
sufficient to indicate that they had the virtues required for rule in any
context.
There is, then, a close relation between the claim that the virtue of
women and men is the same, the idea that a capacity for rule is a question of
knowledge, and the claim that the nature of rule is the same in any context
(whether household, chorus, or city). Aristotle, as we will see in chapter 3,
rejects each of these claims. If there is no difference in kind in the people
over whom one rules, then there will be no difference in the kind of rule
that should be exercised over them; and if everyone shares the same virtues,
then anyone (including any woman) who has the virtues required for rule
might legitimately be a ruler. Aristotle argues that there are differences in
the virtues of women and men (and that they are not merely differences in
degree), that women should not rule, and that the kind of rule that should be
exercised over natural subjects in the household is not that which should be
used in governing a city.
1.6 Conclusion
Aristotle, as we will see in chapters 2 and 3, shares with his predecessors an
interest in the question of the origin and purpose of the sexes. Earlier
writers for the most part approach that question by speculating about the
origins of the distinction between men and women; Aristotle, however,
attempts to address it through the framework of his causal theory. Since he
holds the view that one must establish a fact before one can ask about its
cause, he provides an analytical account of the sexes, particularly as
biological phenomena. That is, together with asking about the final causes
governing the generation of sexually differentiated animals, he sets out the
facts of sexual difference as he understands it, thereby giving us the first
systematic account of sexual difference as a natural phenomenon.
As we have seen, Aristotle’s predecessors do not generally treat sex as a
neutral distinction; on the contrary, they understand it to both differentiate
and rank individual animals as more and less valuable. For many of them,
the female is simply inferior to the male and women are unqualifiedly bad,
not only in the sense that being a woman is worse than being a man, but
also in the sense that women are somehow bad for men. Plato seems to be
an exception (although the evidence is mixed) in that he treats women and
men as equals, or different only in philosophically insignificant ways, in
Republic 5. Aristotle rejects both the view that women are without positive
value and the view that sexual difference is without value. That is, he thinks
(1) that although women are inferior to men, they are valuable—valuable to
men and more generally to the species to which they belong, and (2) that
sexual difference is a feature which enhances a species in biological terms
and promotes full human flourishing in the polis.
As we will see in subsequent chapters, Aristotle makes this argument for
the value of females and women while drawing on certain elements of his
predecessors’ views in describing the features of the sexes, the process of
sex determination in the embryo, and the character of men and women, but
also contesting many of their assumptions, claims, and explanations. We
find Aristotle recognizing, accepting, and conceptualizing the ambivalence
that pervaded most accounts of sexual difference and discussions of the role
of women in generation and in political life. But he does so in order to
argue that while females are inferior to males and women to men, they
nonetheless have value and are necessary both for generation and for a
flourishing political community. If the Socratic proposals of Republic 5
imply an attempt to dispute the view of the sexes as separate kinds,
Aristotle tries to make philosophical sense of the idea that there is a single
human kind while maintaining that the distinction between the sexes, both
biologically and politically, is natural, necessary and good. The claim of the
Meno is that virtue is identical in women and men, and that rule in the
household and in the city is the same activity, requiring the same
excellences; but Aristotle disputes both the idea that virtue is identical
across different kinds of people and the identity of all forms of rule. He
wishes to maintain the coherence of a human kind and the distinction of the
sexes, the notion of human excellence and the variety of forms of rule
required by what he sees as important differences in the human virtue of the
sexes.
2
Sex Is a Difference in the Matter
2.1 Introduction
We saw in chapter 1 that Aristotle’s predecessors represented the female,
and women in particular, in largely negative terms, in both biological and
political contexts, and that these negative assessments can be traced back to
accounts of the origin of women as a kind distinct from men. This chapter
argues that Aristotle maintains the value of the role of the female animal in
generation, by seeing the contribution of the female as necessary in the
framework of a teleological process that aims at the good. It will determine
the fundamental biological features of sexual difference, which will allow
us to consider in chapter 4 whether those features can account for social and
political sexual differences as Aristotle describes them.
In the Generation of Animals Aristotle asks what characterizes male and
female both as causal principles of generation and as individual animals,
and how the sex of an individual is determined. His answers to those
questions constitute an account of sexual difference in the biological realm.
The questions are complex, and although Aristotle answers them in
empirical terms, defining male and female, describing how the sexes differ
in a variety of species, and offering an account of the determination of sex
in the embryo, his discussion of sex includes a normative component. He
argues that it is good that there should be sexual difference in animals. The
empirical account of sexual difference must then cohere with the claim that
there is some value in sexual difference.
In this chapter I demonstrate that sexual difference as a biological
phenomenon is a question of a certain capacity or incapacity of the
reproductive faculty, shared by all living things—plants and animals as well
as people. It is the nutritive and reproductive faculty of soul that determines
an individual as male or female in sexually differentiated species, and in the
first instance it is the ends of that faculty that are served by sexual
difference. To achieve the concoction of the fertile residue produced by
either male or female is then a good for an individual animal. At the same
time, Aristotle considered sexual difference as a biological phenomenon to
be good in a larger sense: it is good that there are female as well as male
animals. It follows that it is good that there should be some individuals with
a certain incapacity. That is a point that will require elaboration, since
Aristotle does not as a rule treat an incapacity as an end and a good.
A number of philosophical problems emerge from the account of sexual
difference in the Generation of Animals. Two in particular are the focus of
this chapter. One concerns the emergence of soul in the embryo in the
process of conception, and in particular the roles of the male and the female
parent in the transmission of soul. Since the father produces form in the
matter supplied by the mother through the motions in his semen, it might
seem that soul is transmitted by the father, and that the material cause
provided by the mother is passive. But, as we will see, Aristotle did not
understand the menses in the mother’s uterus as an entirely passive
substratum, nor did he believe that the semen has the capacity to impose
form on any matter; his account of the transmission of soul is more
complex.1 I develop here an account of the interaction of the male and
female principles of generation that emphasizes the nuances of Aristotle’s
account of soul faculties and the difficulties of understanding the forms of
potentiality and actuality in the process of conception.
The second problem concerns Aristotle’s description of the female as a
kind of deformity at Generation of Animals 4.6 775a15–16. Some
commentators have argued that this does not imply that the male is the ideal
embodiment of the species form, or that the production of a male is the telos
of the process of generation.2 The evidence for that view centers on
Aristotle’s insistence that the female is natural, and the claim at
Metaphysics 10.9 1058a37–b3 that sex does not divide the form of the
genus animal, and hence that in any given species male and female must
have the same essential form. But Aristotle does say the female is a kind of
deformity (ὥσπερ ἀναπηρίαν), and many other commentators understand
him to mean that, although the sexes in any species have the same essential
form, the male is the ideal form of a sexually differentiated animal species,
while the female is a defective realization of that form and a product of the
failure of the process to reach its telos.3 If we accept that interpretation, we
have to explain why Aristotle describes the production of a female as
according to nature rather than opposed to nature.
The view I develop here is intended to reconcile the claim that the
female is defective with the claim that the production of the female is
natural, and for the best. Although I agree that Aristotle treats the male as
the ideal realization of the form of any species, that interpretation has to
meet the challenge presented by the identity of species form in male and
female: if the female has the species form, how can she be a defective
example of the kind? I argue that Aristotle addresses this problem by
positing that the generation of an animal involves material necessity as well
as final causation, so that the production of a female can be both an
accidental occurrence caused by defects in the matter and also an
occurrence with a natural telos. The telos in question is the capacity to
generate a fertile residue, and since both the female and the male have such
a capacity, both achieve the telos of the generative faculty in an individual
animal, and the fertile residues of both are necessary for generation (neither
can achieve individually the ultimate telos of the generative faculty of
generating another animal like themselves). Nonetheless, the female’s
generative capacity is inferior, on Aristotle’s account, to the male’s, and that
renders her defective relative to the male. Although most commentators
deny either that the female is a deficiency or deviation from a male ideal
(Henry, Connell), or that the female is natural and good (Nielsen,
implicitly), my account reconciles these seemingly irreconcilable claims.4
I begin, in section 2.2, with an analysis of the discussion of sexual
difference in the Metaphysics as a distinction that does not divide species,
because that account underpins the extended discussion of biological sexual
difference in the Generation of Animals as well as the discussion of the
capacities and status of men and women in the Politics. Turning then to the
account of biological sexual difference, in section 2.3 I consider the
definitions of male and female as principles of generation. Section 2.4
examines sexual difference as manifested in the organs of animal bodies;
sections 2.5 and 2.6 analyze the differences in the fertile residues produced
by male and female animals, particularly with respect to their causal
capacities; section 2.7 describes the interaction of male and female
contributions to the process of conception; and section 2.8 then asks how
sexual difference is determined in the course of embryological
development. These sections together constitute an investigation into male
and female as principles of physical change, and as distinct forms of
embodiment for any given animal species. They address the first of the
problems mentioned earlier. In section 2.9 I turn to a set of questions that
emerge from Aristotle’s empirical account of sexual difference, and address
the second of the problems mentioned earlier: what is the relation between
necessity and teleology in the production of males and females? How can
the female be natural, necessary, and also defective? I demonstrate that
Aristotle can coherently claim both that the individual female is defective
relative to the male of her species, and that it is good for the species that
there should be females. Finally, in section 2.10 I consider whether the
account of the roles of male and female in generation, and of the way in
which animal soul is transmitted to the offspring, is consistent with
Aristotle’s conception of the unity of soul, and I introduce the special case
of rational soul.
This chapter offers an analysis of Aristotle’s account of sexual difference
in the Generation of Animals. I proceed thematically, in order to make clear
the conceptual framework of that account and the philosophical problems it
is intended to address. At the same time, my analysis draws on an
understanding of the Generation of Animals as a work in which Aristotle
proceeds from the general to the specific, and from standard cases to
anomalies.5 He begins the work by first establishing a general account of
generation in Book 1 and the first chapters of Book 2, connecting that
account to a metaphysical framework (calling, for example, on notions of
causation and on a distinction between potentiality and actuality), before
considering in the later part of Book 2 and in Book 3 how generation occurs
in different kinds of animals (e.g., those that bear their young live, or those
that lay eggs). In all of these discussions Aristotle begins with what is
generally true and moves on to consider more specific aspects of a
phenomenon and the problems or anomalies associated with it. Books 4 and
5 are then devoted to unresolved questions and problems emerging from the
first three books. Since issues of sexual difference are treated in different
ways in Books 1, 2, and 4, much of the evidence in what follows is drawn
from them; the differences among them are to be acknowledged but do not,
in my view, produce an inconsistent account of sexual difference.6
2.2 Sexual difference in the Metaphysics

Those interested in the history of sexual difference generally focus on the
Generation of Animals and the Politics. Much of the rest of this book is
concerned with those two discussions, which elaborate Aristotle’s views on
how to understand male and female as biological entities and how to
structure the relation between the sexes in political life, and on what
grounds. But there is a foundational account of sexual difference in the
Metaphysics, which is the groundwork for these longer and more concrete
discussions. That is, in the Metaphysics Aristotle takes as obvious two
points: that male and female are contraries (and so different), and also that
this is not a difference in the form of the sort that subdivides a species;
rather, as we will see, it is a difference in the matter, necessary but non-
essential. Those claims, and the resolution he offers to the problem they
give rise to (i.e., how a set of contraries can belong as such to a species
without dividing its form), are fundamental to Aristotle’s discussions of
sexual difference in both his biological works and in his practical
philosophy. Male and female, men and women, are significantly different
on these accounts, but they are not different natural kinds, and they are both
necessary. Considering the Metaphysics passage in question, before moving
on to the discussion of sexual difference in the Generation of Animals,
reveals the thread that unites them: in both, Aristotle represents the
distinction between male and female as a difference in the matter, whether
the matter in question is that of the genus or of an individual animal.
At Categories 10 11b15–20 Aristotle distinguishes a number of kinds of
opposition, two of which have some bearing on sexual difference. Some
things are opposed as positive and privative, and we will see that Aristotle
in his biology sometimes treats sexual difference as an opposition of this
kind, the male as positive and the female as privative.7 But it is another kind
of opposition, contrariety, that Aristotle uses to characterize the difference
between the sexes, at Metaphysics 10.9 1058a29ff. where he poses this
question: why are the male and female of a species not different in form
(εἴδει)?8 That is, why do they not constitute species of the genus animal, or
subspecies within animal species? Aristotle presents the argument that
might lead one to believe that male and female are separate species: male
and female are contrary (ἐναντίου), and their difference is a contrariety
(ἐναντιώσεως). It is not the case that every contrariety within a genus is
such as to constitute a species of that genus, since there are accidental
contrarieties. Pallor and darkness, for example, constitute a contrariety that
belongs to the genus animal but does not divide the genus into species (dark
and pale animals) because it does not belong to animals as such (καθ’
αὑτό). That is, while animals may be dark or pale, so may many other
things; pallor and darkness are not peculiar to the genus animal. So,
accidental contrarieties (i.e., contrarieties that do not belong to the genus as
such) do not divide a genus into species. The difference that is a contrariety
and distinguishes male and female, however, belongs to animal in virtue of
animal itself (ᾗ ζῷον). Following this reasoning, male and female ought to
constitute species of the genus animal, since the difference that
distinguishes them is a contrariety and belongs peculiarly to the genus—but
Aristotle rejects that reasoning. He accepts both that male and female are
contraries, and that they belong to animal as such. He needs, then, to show
that it is possible for contrary attributes that belong to a genus as such not to
divide that genus into species. More precisely, he needs to show why some
such attributes will divide a genus into species while others will not.
Consider what Aristotle means in saying both that male and female are
contraries and that they belong as such to the genus animal. Notice first that
he does not argue that male and female are contraries; he takes this to be as
obvious as that hot and cold are contraries. What is the character of
contraries? At Metaphysics 10.3 1054a23–26 and Categories 10 11b18–19
Aristotle identifies contraries as one kind of opposites.9 He defines
opposites generally as those things that cannot be present together in that
which is capable of receiving both (Met. 5.10 1018a22–24). So the
members of pairs of contraries exclude one another. Moreover, contraries
are often characterized as what are “most different” (τὰ πλεῖστον
διαφέροντα), although these may be items of various kinds: (1) of things
that differ in genus, those that cannot be present in the same thing together;
(2) the most different of things in the same genus; (3) the most different of
things in the same receptive (material) (ἐν ταὐτῷ δεκτικῷ); (4) the most
different of the things that fall under the same capacity (ὑπὸ τὴν αὐτὴν
δύναμιν); and (5) those things the difference between which is greatest
either absolutely or in genus or in species (Met. 5.10 1018a25–32).
Now, Aristotle is clear that male and female are qualities of substances,
not themselves substances. That is, there is nothing male or female except
male and female animals; there is no male-in-itself or female-in-itself (Met.
13.3 1078a7–8). So male and female are contrary qualities in the same
genus, namely, the genus animal. It follows that male and female are not
contraries of the first sort, because they are in the same genus. Nor are they
contraries of the fifth sort, since, as we have seen, Aristotle maintains that
male and female fall within the same species as well as the same genus.
Each of the other options fits the contrariety of male and female. If we
think of animal as a single genus, then male and female animals may be the
most different things in the same genus (or at least the most opposed;
wombats and giraffes may be more different from one another than male
and female wombats are from one another, but they are not opposed to one
another in the way that male and female within a single species or within
the genus animal are). Moreover, since Aristotle says that male and female
belong to the matter rather than the form of the genus, we can conclude that
male and female are “the most different of the attributes in the same
receptive material” (Met. 5.10 1018a29–30). Finally, because Aristotle
conceives of reproduction as a single capacity shared between male and
female, it is true to say that male and female are “the most different of the
things that fall under the same capacity” (Met. 5.10 1018a30–31).
It is important that in all these characterizations of contrarieties, the
contrarieties belong to some subject that is the same: the same genus, the
same receptive material, the same capacity. It is, Aristotle says, “the nature
of contraries to belong to the same thing (the same either in species or in
genus)—sickness and health in an animal’s body, whiteness and blackness
in a body simply, and justice and injustice in a soul” (Cat. 11 14a15–18).
That is, it is of the nature of pairs of contraries to belong to the same thing.
It is the genus animal that is “the same thing” to which male and female
belong (or it is the receptive material of the genus animal, or it is the
capacity to reproduce of the genus animal), just as it is the genus number
that is “the same thing” to which odd and even belong. The two contraries
that constitute a pair belong at the same time to the same genus. Only one
of the pair will belong at any given time to any given individual of that
genus. Any particular number will be odd or even, any particular animal (or
material for an animal, or reproductive function of an animal) male or
female.
While some contraries have intermediates, others do not. That is, some
contraries are such that it is not necessary for one or the other to belong to
the things to which they naturally belong, while others are such that it is
necessary for one or the other to belong (Cat. 10 11b38–12a4). Odd and
even, sickness and health, are offered as examples of contraries that do not
have intermediates and one of which must belong in each case to that to
which the pair of contraries naturally belongs—animal bodies in the case of
sickness and health, numbers in the case of odd and even (Cat. 10 12a5–
10). Male and female seem to be contraries that do not have an
intermediate, since Aristotle classes them with odd and even.10
With this general understanding of the claim that male and female are
contraries, we can now ask: what does it mean to say that male and female
belong as such to the genus animal? The passage that explains the as such
relation is at Posterior Analytics 1.4 73a34–b24. Aristotle enumerates four
senses of καθ’αὑτό (as such); for our purposes it is the first two that are of
interest. In one sense, X belongs to Y καθ’αὑτό if X is in the essence (τί
ἐστι) of Y (A.Po. 1.4 73a34–37). So if it were part of the essence of animal
to be male or female, then male and female would belong καθ’αὑτό to
animal. As we know, however, Aristotle denies that male and female are
essential attributes of animal. The second sense in which an attribute might
belong to a subject is detailed at Posterior Analytics 1.4 73a37–b5. Aristotle
says that when the subject must be mentioned in the account of the
attribute, that attribute belongs καθ’αὑτό to the subject. In this sense X
belongs to Y καθ’αὑτό if Y is in the essence of X.
Aristotle does not use male and female as examples—his examples are
straight and curved as attributes of line, odd and even, prime and composite,
and equilateral and oblong as attributes of number. But male and female
satisfy the definition of such attributes, because to give an account of male
and female one must mention animal (moreover, we have seen that Aristotle
often compares the male/female set of contraries to the odd/even pair). This
amounts to saying that male and female are peculiar to animal, which is
what Aristotle claims in the Metaphysics when he says that we cannot
explain what a female is without appeal to animal (Met. 7.5 1030b25–27).
And this sort of as such attribute then seems to be what Aristotle calls in the
Topics an ἴδιον, a non-essential but necessary property of some substance.
An ἴδιον “does not indicate the essence of a thing, but yet belongs to that
thing alone, and is predicated convertibly of it” (Top. 1.5 102a18–19).
Moreover, later in the same chapter of the Posterior Analytics Aristotle
says:
Whatever, therefore . . . is said to belong to things as such in the sense of inhering in the
predicates or of being inhered in, holds both because of themselves and from necessity. For it is
not possible for them not to belong, either in absolute terms or as regards the opposites [τὰ
ἀντικείμενα]—e.g. straight or crooked to line, and odd or even to number. For the contrary [τὸ
ἐναντίον] is either a privation [στέρησις] or a contradiction [ἀντίφασις] in the same genus—e.g.
even is what is not odd among numbers, in so far as it follows. Hence if it is necessary to affirm
or deny, it is necessary too for what belongs as such to belong. (A.Po. 1.4 73b16–24)
This passage clearly mentions contraries as καθ’αὑτό attributes in the

second sense and reiterates a claim we have already considered: that in the
case of contraries without intermediates (including odd and even), the pair
of contraries belongs necessarily to that which can receive it. That is,
καθ’αὑτό attributes of the second sort are here linked to contraries without
intermediates by the claim that in both cases one or the other of a pair must
belong to every member of the genus to which the pair belongs as such.
Since Aristotle wants to maintain that male and female are contraries,
and also that they belong to the genus animal as such, while asserting that
male and female do not constitute independent animal species, he needs to
show how all three claims can be consistent with one another. The question
is why there are contraries that are non-accidental and yet do not divide the
form of a genus into species. To answer it, Aristotle distinguishes between
contraries in the formula of the genus (ἐν τῷ λόγῳ) that do divide the genus
into species, and contraries in the compound material thing (ἐν τῷ
συνειλημμένῳ) that do not divide the genus (Met. 10.9 1058a37–b3). To
illustrate the distinction, Aristotle appeals by analogy to differences among
individuals within a species. For example, although a pale animal is
different from a dark animal, they are not different in species. This suggests
that pallor and darkness as accidental contrarieties of the genus animal do
not divide that genus into species. Similarly, Callias is indeed different from
Socrates, but he is not different in species. It is accidents of the matter that
distinguish one member of a species from another without dividing the
species into subspecies. Aristotle wants to extend the point to male and
female. He wants, that is, to claim that male and female are differences in
the matter rather than the form, in just the same way as the accidents that
distinguish Callias from Socrates although they are members of the same
species, or as pallor and darkness might distinguish one animal from
another. In all these cases the individual that is qualified is the material
person (ὡς ὕλη γὰρ ὁ ἄνθρωπος at Met. 10.9 1058b5–6), that is, the
compound thing rather than the form or formula of the individual.
There is, however, a difficulty. Although we can accept that Callias and
Socrates differ in matter in the sense that they differ with respect to certain
accidental attributes (but do not differ with respect to specific form), it
cannot be the case that male and female are merely accidental attributes of
animal as a genus, because they are attributes of animal as such. So
Aristotle is proposing that male and female are differences in the matter that
are non-accidental. They are peculiar to the genus not because they are
peculiar to its form, but because they are peculiar to its matter. At the same
time, in saying, “That is why the same seed becomes female or male by
being acted on in a certain way (παθόν τι πάθος),” Aristotle seems to
suggest that the difference between male and female is like other accidental
features of the individual (Met. 10.9 1058b23–24). Male and female can be
both accidental and non-accidental features only because they belong in one
sense (as a pair of contraries) to the genus and in a different sense to the
individuals that fall under that genus. Insofar as male and female belong to
the genus, they belong as a pair of contraries, in which case they belong
non-accidentally. But in a different sense they belong (that is, one or the
other of them belongs) to each individual that is a member not only of the
genus but always also of some species of that genus, in which case they
belong accidentally.
The particular phrase Aristotle uses to describe the kind of attributes that
are male and female in Metaphysics 10.9 is οἰκεῖα πάθη (peculiar
modifications, or affections) (1058b22). That male and female are πάθη
suggests that they are not formal attributes, but material attributes, as we
should expect; that they are οἰκεῖα means that they belong in virtue of the
thing itself (or as such) and are ἴδια of that thing. By “material attribute” I
mean an attribute that belongs as such, but belongs to the matter rather than
to the form of the genus in question. Male and female are then material
attributes (and ἴδια) relative to the genus animal, because anything that is
male or female will have to be an animal, but neither maleness nor
femaleness individually is part of the form or essence of animal. So too
pallor and darkness will be material attributes (and ἴδια) of surfaces, since
anything that is pale or dark will have to be a surface, but neither pallor nor
darkness belongs to the essence of surface. And equal/unequal will be
material attributes (and ἴδια) of quantities, since anything that is equal or
unequal will have to be a quantity, but neither equal nor unequal is part of
the essence of quantity. At Metaphysics 13.3 1078a7 Aristotle refers to male
and female, in a similar manner, as ἴδια πάθη. In this latter passage he says,
“Many in-itself accidents (συμβέβηκε καθ᾿ αὑτὰ) belong to things qua each
such thing, since, for example, [with respect to] the animal, both qua female
and qua male, there are peculiar attributes (ἴδια πάθη) (and yet there is no
female or male thing separate from animals),” (translation mine). The point
is that certain attributes, among which are male/female and equal/unequal,
bring with them certain other attributes, or are constituted by those other
attributes, but remain attributes rather than substances. That is, an animal
that is male will have certain physiological and morphological traits (“the
peculiar attributes”) that distinguish it from the females of its species; but
those traits do not constitute a substance (“maleness”); maleness has to
belong to the animal to exist. This is significant because it emphasizes that
male and female causal principles can never be more than attributes of the
animals that are then called male and female.
By claiming that the sorts of attributes of which male and female are an
example are both καθ’αὑτό and accidental, Aristotle turns out to mean that
these attributes belong to the matter, rather than the form, but also that they
belong necessarily to the matter, in the sense that one or the other of them
will belong to the matter of each individual in the genus. So, while some of
the καθ’αὑτό attributes of the second sort will be differentiae of the genus
to which they belong, not all such attributes can be differentiae; some will
belong to the form of the genus, but some will belong to the matter. The
description of such attributes does not require that they be specific
differences (those that belong to the form of the genus will be differentiae,
but those that belong to the matter will not). It does require that they be
contraries without intermediates, but that does not entail that every
καθ’αὑτό attribute will be a differentia, since it is not the case that every set
of contraries divides the genus to which it belongs into species, even if it
belongs peculiarly to that genus.
The conclusion, then, of the Metaphysics discussion of καθ’αὑτό
contraries is that male and female are contraries that belong as such to the
genus animal (in the sense that male-or-female belongs to animal καθ’αὑτό
because animal is in the essence of male-or-female). That is, this is an
instance where “X belongs to Y καθ’αὑτό when Y is in the essence of X”
(as opposed to “X belongs to Y καθ’αὑτό when X is in the essence [τί ἐστι]
of Y”). But the “peculiar attributes” that distinguish a male from a female
animal belong to the individual animal as accidents, and not as part of their
form, since the form belongs to all the members of a species, while a given
accident in matter belongs only to some members. This is possible because
male and female are as such contraries that belong to the matter rather than
to the form of the genus animal.
The distinction between the sense in which male and female as a set of
contraries belong to the genus, and the sense in which male or female, each
as a set of peculiar attributes, belong to an individual animal, underlies a
distinction that we find in Aristotle’s biological works, between male and
female as causal principles, and male and female as individuals
characterized by the possession of one or the other of these principles,
accompanied by the peculiar attributes that are necessary for the realization
of the principle. The notion of the sexes as contraries, emerging from the
traditions that precede Aristotle and conceptualized in his Metaphysics,
finds concrete form in the Generation of Animals, where Aristotle tries for
the first time to analyze the physiology and morphology of the sexes as the
concrete manifestations of the contrary causal principles that are the sexes
and belong to the matter of the genus animal.
2.3 The definitions of male and female

The fundamental difference in reproductive functions between males and
females is a difference in the degree of vital heat that leads to a difference in
the kind of fertile residue each contributes to the generation of the
offspring.11 This emerges from Aristotle’s definitions of male and female in
Books 1, 2, and 4 of the Generation of Animals. In this section I consider
these definitions in the order in which they occur in the text, to show that,
despite differences in emphases and in detail, they offer us a consistent
account of male and female.
In Generation of Animals Aristotle hypothesizes that the role of the
female is to provide the material cause and that of the male is to provide the
efficient cause of generation:
As we mentioned, we may safely set down as the chief principles of generation the male
[principle] and the female [principle]; the male as possessing the source of movement and of
generation, the female as possessing that of matter [τὸ μὲν ἄρρεν ὡς τῆς κινήσεως καὶ τῆς
γενέσεως ἔχον τὴν ἀρχήν, τὸ δὲ θῆλυ ὡς ὕλης]. One is most likely to be convinced of this by
considering how the seed (sperma) is formed and whence it comes; for although the things that
are formed in the course of nature no doubt take their rise out of sperma, we must not fail to
notice how the sperma itself is formed from the male and the female, since it is because this part
is secreted from the male and the female, and because its secretion takes place in them and out
of them, that the male and the female are the principles of generation. By a “male” animal we
mean one which generates in another, by “female” one which generates in itself [ἄρρεν μὲν γὰρ
λέγομεν ζῷον τὸ εἰς ἄλλο γεννῶν, θῆλυ δὲ τὸ εἰς αὑτό]. That is why in cosmology too they
speak of the nature of the earth as something female and call it “mother,” while they give to the
heaven and the sun and anything else of that kind the title of “generator,” and “father.” (Italics
added) (GA 1.2 716a4–18)
In this passage Aristotle describes the female as a causal principle or origin

alongside the male: she possesses the source of matter, the material cause of
the change that is the generation of offspring; the male possesses the source
“of movement or generation.” The proximate efficient cause of animal
generation is the set of movements in the semen, but since the male
produces that semen, Aristotle will say that he is the efficient cause.
This passage emphasizes the role of sperma in marking the difference
between male and female (in the case of species where the male initiates
generation through motions in the semen).12 It is clear that both male and
female in these species concoct and emit sperma; the differences lie in (1)
its causal role in generation (which is in turn determined by how well
concocted the sperma is) and (2) where it is emitted (in order to realize its
causal role). (Female sperma I will refer to as ‘menses’ or ‘katamênia’ (as
Aristotle does); male sperma I will refer to as ‘semen’.13) Despite the
differences, Aristotle describes the reproductive functions of male and
female animals in parallel terms—it is not so much that the sexes do
different things as that they do the same thing (concoct) differently.
In Book 2 of the Generation of Animals, there are two further passages
that offer definitions of male and female. In the first of these, Aristotle
compares semen to the “tools” of the craftsman and the male himself to the
agent who is the craftsman. This implies a link between efficient and formal
causation in generation, since the craftsman (and by analogy the male) will
initiate the change in the materials and also impose form on them:
The female always provides the material, the male provides that which fashions the material into
shape (τὸ δημιουργοῦν). This, in our view, is the specific characteristic of each of the sexes: that
is what it means to be male or to be female. Hence, necessity requires (ἀναγκαῖον) that the
female should provide the physical part, i.e. a quantity of material (σῶμα καὶ ὄγκον), but not
that the male should do so, since necessity does not require that the tools should reside in the
product that is being made, nor that the agent which uses them should do so. Thus the physical
part (τὸ μὲν σῶμα), the body, comes from the female, and the soul from the male, since the soul
is the essence of a kind of body (οὐσία σώματός τινός). (GA 2.4 738b20–27)
Aristotle insists here on the separation of the material cause from the formal
and efficient cause. Although the passage states that the female provides the
material cause (which we would expect from the definition in Book 1), it
emphasizes that the male does not provide matter. The point of the analogy
between the male and the craftsman is that necessity does not require that
the male should be associated with the matter, just as necessity does not
require that either the craftsman (the male) or his tools (the motions in his
semen) should “reside in” the matter from which the artifact will be
produced.14 In the last line of the passage Aristotle identifies the material
cause with the body of the animal (provided by the female) and the formal
cause with the soul (provided by the male). But this distinction does not
fully represent the nuances of his considered view.15
The sense in which the male contributes soul to the generation of
offspring is clarified and restricted in the second of the passages in Book 2
that has the force of a definition. Aristotle says that “it is impossible for the
female all by itself and from itself to generate an animal; because the
faculty just mentioned [the capacity to produce sensitive soul: τὸ ποιητικὸν
αἰσθητικῆς ψυχῆς] is the essence of what is meant by ‘male’ ” (GA 2.5
741a15–17). In the hierarchy of soul faculties set out in the De anima (at
2.2 413a21–414a4 and 2.3 414b29–415a13), the lowest faculty is the
nutritive or reproductive faculty, which every animate being possesses. The
sensitive soul, the next in the list, is the faculty characteristic of animals,
setting them off from plants: “Something is an animal primarily because of
perception. For even those things which do not move or change place, but
which have perception, we call animals (ζῷα) and not merely alive (ζῆν)”
(DA 2.2 413b2–5).
To produce sensitive soul is thus to produce the form of animal in the
offspring. This is what males do; this is what it means to say (as Aristotle
has at GA 1.2 716a6–7) that the male possesses “the principle of movement
and of generation.” But one implication of this account is that the menses or
katamênia of the female is itself potentially alive, since the male can
produce sensitive soul only in the appropriate katamênia. That is, the fact
that the katamênia can be actualized by male sperma is sufficient evidence
that it is potentially alive, and potentially possesses both nutritive and
sensitive soul. But there seem to be degrees of potentiality, since there is
some evidence that the potentiality for nutritive soul in the katamênia is
more robust than the potentiality for sensitive soul. At Generation of
Animals 2.4 740b29–741a4 Aristotle says that the nutritive soul “at the very
outset . . . causes [the natural object] to be set and constituted” (ἐξ ἀρχῆς
συνίστησι τὸ φύσει γιγνόμενον), indicating that the nutritive soul is active
from the beginning in the generation of the embryo. And it is implied by
Aristotle’s discussion of “wind-eggs” (τὰ ὑπηνέμια, now called
“parthenotes”) at Generation of Animals 2.5 741a17–32.He asks whether a
female can generate all by herself from herself; he answers that the case of
wind-eggs shows that the female is able to generate “up to a point,” because
wind-eggs possess soul “of a sort”—namely, the nutritive soul. Since wind-
eggs are produced without interaction with the male, the source of this
nutritive soul must be the female.16 That shows that the katamênia does not
necessarily require a contribution from the male in order to become a being
that nourishes itself; it only requires some vital heat. But it does require a
contribution from the male in order to become an animal. This suggests that
the potentiality for nutritive soul in the katamênia is of a higher degree than
the potentiality for sensitive soul, since it requires less to be realized.17 The
katamênia cannot, then, be inert matter. But its potentialities for soul are
different from semen’s. Most importantly, it does not have the active
potentiality for sensitive soul.
Another definition of the sexes is found in Book 4 of the Generation of
Animals, at 4.1 765b9–15, where two features are said to differentiate male
and female: (1) the male is able to concoct and emit semen (σπέρμα), while
the female is incapable of doing so, and (2) the male has the “source of the
form (τὴν ἀρχὴν τοῦ εἴδους),” and, by implication, the female does not.18
This definition is abbreviated and simplified in ways that might lead one to
suppose that Aristotle conceives of the female simply as an animal that
lacks the powers possessed by the male. It should, however, be understood
in light of the definitions in Books 1 and 2 in which male and female are
defined in ways that highlight the capacity and causal role of the female as
well as the male. The “source of the form” here must be the same as the
principle described as the source “of movement or generation,” in the
passage at Generation of Animals 1.2 716a4–18 (discussed earlier). To have
the source of form is to have a causal power, the capacity to produce form,
which, in a living being, will be a soul, as we have seen emphasized in the
definition in Book 2 (GA 2.4 738b20–27). Aristotle does not say here in
Book 4 what kind of form has its origin with the male, but, as we have seen,
he has already specified that it is the sensitive soul of the animal.
Aristotle makes clear that the capacity and incapacity for concoction that
characterize the sexes are produced by differences in heat (GA 4.1 766a31–
37). In the production of sperma, whether semen or menses, what is
concocted is blood or the counterpart of blood (the “ultimate nutriment”—
τῆς ὑστάτης τροφῆς) up to the point where it becomes a fertile residue. This
process of concoction involves the transmission of natural heat (a process I
will explore in more detail in section 2.5).
Let us assume then that “the male” is a principle and is causal in its nature; that a male is male
in virtue of a particular ability (ᾗ δύναταί τι), and a female in virtue of a particular inability (ᾗ
ἀδυνατεῖ); that the line of determination between the ability and the inability is whether a thing
effects or does not effect concoction of the ultimate nourishment (τῆς ὑστάτης τροφῆς) (in
blooded animals this is known as blood, in the bloodless ones it is the counterpart of blood); that
the reason for this lies in the “principle,” i.e., in the part of the body which possesses the
principle of the natural heat (τὴν τῆς φυσικῆς θερμότητος ἀρχήν). (GA 4.1 766a31–37)
The “part of the body which possesses the principle of the natural heat” is
the heart (see GA 4.1 766a35–37), so the cause of the capacity or incapacity
for concoction lies in the heart. Since natural heat (also called “connate
natural” heat, “vital” heat, or “soul” heat) determines the capacity for
concoction, and the sexes have different capacities for concoction, the
principles of natural heat in male and female will have to be different in
some way.19
The female receives, but is incapable of producing, semen, which is the
origin of animal form. Nonetheless the female does produce a kind of
“seed” (also called sperma)—the katamênia—which Aristotle says is either
the same residue (περίττωμα) as that in the male, although incompletely
processed (GA 4.1 765b36–766a2), or a residue that is analogous to semen
(ἠ γονή) in males, although “greater in amount and less thoroughly
concocted” (GA 1.19 726b31–727a4). Although the products of concoction
are thus different in kind in the sense that they have different capacities, the
processes of concoction are not different in kind, but only in degree: in
males the process is more complete.20 And the incapacity of the female to
concoct as completely as the male constitutes the deficiency of the female:
“Females (τὰ θήλεα) are weaker and colder in their nature; and we should
look upon the female state (τὴν θηλύτητα φυσικήν) as being as it were a
deformity (ὥσπερ ἀναπηρίαν)” (GA 4.6 775a14–16).21 Although, then, both
males and females produce a fertile residue (both of which Aristotle will
call sperma), the sexes concoct it to different degrees, with the result that
the residues have different causal capacities. The fundamental biological
sexual differences in viviparous animals is thus a difference in the degree of
natural heat produced by the body, the correlative differences in the degree
of capacity for concoction, and the differences in the fertile residues that
ensue.22
The definition of male and female in Book 4 (at GA 4.1 765b9–15,
discussed earlier), centering as it does on the female’s incapacity to concoct
and her receptive role, seems to characterize her in negative terms relative
to the male. It should, however, be interpreted in light of the definitions of
male and female that Aristotle has offered earlier in the Generation of
Animals, in Books 1 and 2, where, as we have seen, he highlights the
contributions of each sex to the process of generation, and the capacities
that each must have in order to make these contributions. What it means to
be male or female is to contribute either the principle of movement and
form or the principle of matter to the production of the offspring. Returning
to the two features said to differentiate male and female in the definition at
Generation of Animals 4.1 765b9–15, and bearing in mind the definitions
Aristotle has offered in Books 1 and 2, it is clear that we should understand
these features in more precise terms: (1) when he says that the male is able
to concoct and ejaculate semen (σπέρμα), while the female is incapable of
doing so, he means that the male is able to concoct and emit sperma that is
fully concocted (and constitutes semen), whereas the female is able to
concoct and emit sperma that is imperfectly concocted (and constitutes
katamênia)—he does not mean that she is incapable of producing or
emitting any kind of sperma; and (2) when he says that the male has the
“source of the form (τὴν ἀρχὴν τοῦ εἴδους),” and, by implication, the
female does not, he means that the male has the principle of efficient and
formal causation, and the female has instead the principle of material
causation. This makes clear that the female is not characterized by Aristotle
simply as having an incapacity, nor as being causally inactive.
While clarifying Aristotle’s conceptions of male and female, these
definitions also raise two questions. Although Aristotle concludes that the
male does not provide matter, we have seen that he leaves open the question
of whether the female provides form.23 That is, while the katamênia must
have a potentiality both for sensitive soul and for nutritive soul just in virtue
of its capacity to become an animal, the potentiality for nutritive soul
appears to be an active power to some degree, since it can be realized by
vital heat internal to the female body in some cases (when wind-eggs
form).24 This gives rise to the first question: if Aristotle believes that the
nutritive soul does not come from the male in the same way that the
sensitive soul does, then has he not produced for himself the problem that
he identifies in the accounts of Democritus and Empedocles (see chap. 1,
sections 1.4.2–1.4.3)—namely, if male and female sperma each carry some
part of the form (some faculty of the soul), how will they unite in the
embryo? Crucial to Aristotle’s account is the claim that the fertile residues
have soul potentially, not actually (GA 1.18 722b4ff., 4.1 764b4ff.); I will
return to the question of the capacity of male and female to transmit soul
faculties, and the union of those soul faculties, in sections 2.6 and 2.10.
A second question raised by these definitions of male and female
concerns final causation in sexual differentiation: is the production of
females a final cause for animal nature? We know that the male has a
capacity and the female an incapacity for concoction; and we know that the
female provides the material cause and the male the formal and efficient
causes. But is it because the female has the incapacity to concoct that nature
gives her the task of providing the matter? Or does nature give her the
incapacity to concoct in order that she may provide the matter? These
questions emerge from a more basic question about the status of the female:
are females produced by nature for the sake of some end (i.e., so that they
can provide the matter for offspring), or through a failure of nature? In the
former case, the final cause is the concoction of appropriate material for the
generation of offspring, and the production of females is conditionally
necessary for that. In the latter case, the production of a female cannot be
understood as the achievement of an end, but rather as a failure to achieve
that end. The question is whether it is not possible for the female to serve an
end even as a failure (in some respect) of nature. I will consider these issues
in section 2.9.
2.4 The organs that differentiate the sexes
2.4.1 Organs and capacities

It is clear, then, that the definitions of male and female as principles are
functional definitions. The sexes are causal principles of change, and the
change in question is the production of offspring; the sexes are able to
generate through the concoction of nourishment into fertile residues. These
principles of male and female belong to individual animals, and allow them
to produce one of two kinds of fertile residue: semen or katamênia.
Individual animals are then distinguished as male or female according to
whether their capacity for concoction is sufficient to allow them to produce
semen, which provides the efficient and formal principle for generation, or
only sufficient to allow them to produce katamênia, which provides the
material principle.
The causal roles of male and female principles in generation must be
supported by organs, because the process of concoction, and the emission of
sperma (either into another animal or into the same animal), require certain
body parts. Since male and female concoct and emit differently, their organs
also differ. It is nonetheless the capacities for concoction that are the
fundamental sexual differences, because it is for the sake of these
differences that the morphological and physiological differences occur.
They [male and female] are distinguished in respect of their capacity (δυνάμει), and this entails
a certain function (ἔργῳ). Now for the exercise of every function instruments are needed, and
the instruments for physical faculties are the parts of the body. Hence it is necessary that, for the
purpose of copulation and procreation, certain parts should exist, parts that are different from
each other, in respect of which the male will differ from the female; for although male and
female are indeed used as epithets of the whole of the animal, it is not male or female in respect
of the whole of itself, but only in respect of a particular faculty and a particular part—just as it is
seeing and walking in respect of certain parts—and this part is one which is evident to the
senses. (GA 1.2 716a23–32)25
Later in the Generation of Animals Aristotle repeats the point that it is the
capacities rather than the organs that are the principles of male and female:
“Since there is a difference (ἐπεὶ δ’ἔχει διαφορὰν) in the capacity, there is
also a difference (διαφέρον) in the organ” (GA 4.1 766a23–24). That is, first
(not temporally, but causally) an animal is determined to be male or female,
and then its organs are formed so as to allow it to engage in concoction and
emission as it is performed by a male or female animal of its kind.26 And
when those organs are formed, the animal becomes male or female in
actuality:
As far, then, as the principle and the cause of male and female is concerned, this is what it is and
where it is situated; a creature, however, really is male or female only from the time when it has
got the parts by which female differs from male, because it is not in virtue of some random part
(καθ’ ὁτιοῦν μέρος) that it is male or female, any more than it is in virtue of some random part
that it can see or hear. (GA 4.1 766b3–8)
We recognize in the case of sensation that possessing the organ is a

necessary condition for the exercise of the capacity for sensation. So, too, in
the case of sexual function, the possession of the organs is necessary if the
animal is actually to produce semen or katamênia.
2.4.2 Sexual organs

Aristotle identifies the sexual parts of an animal as those that contribute in
some way to sexual generation. Since the process of concoction is the origin
of the different residues (semen and katamênia) necessary for sexual
generation, the parts associated with that process are also the parts
associated with sexual difference. Aristotle identifies the “particular parts”
that make a blooded animal appear to the senses to be male or female as the
uterus (αἱ καλούμεναι ὑστέραι) in the female, and, in the male, “the regions
about the testes and the penis” (τὰ περὶ τοὺς ὄρχεις καὶ τοὺς περινέους) (GA
1.2 716a32–34).27 In other words, he identifies as sexual organs just those
body parts that concoct the nutriment into sperma and that transport the
sperma: the “spermatic ducts” or “seminal passages” (οἱ πόροι
σπερμάτικοι), the penis, the vagina, and the uterus.28 In the case of the male
parts, the spermatic ducts serve as the place in which the semen collects,
and is further concocted, before being emitted through the penis.29 In the
case of female parts, the uterus acts both as the place into which the female
ejaculates sperma and as the location of the developing embryo and fetus.30
Aristotle understands the fallopian tubes as part of the uterus but likens
them to the testes: “The uterus is always double without exception, just as
in males there are always two testes without exception” (GA 1.3 716b33–
34).31
2.4.3 The heart as a sexual organ

In Aristotle’s account of sexual difference in bodies, the single most
important organ is one that we do not now associate with sex: the heart. It is
made from blood and is the receptacle of blood. This is why the concoction
of blood into sperma occurs, initially, in the heart (and only later in the
“particular parts” of each sex). The heart is the principle and source of life
in the animal: “A third part [other than the part for the ingestion of food and
the part for the discharge of its residue] present in all animals lies midway
between the two most necessary parts, within which is their origin of life
(ἐν ᾧ ἡ ἀρχή ἐστιν ἡ τῆς ζωῆς)” (PA 2.10 655b36–656a1). This “third part”
is the heart. The origin or principle of life is the “vital” or “natural” heat
that we have seen is responsible for the concoction of the blood. Its degree
determines the sex of an animal, by determining the animal’s capacity to
concoct sperma into either semen or katamênia. Even more fundamentally,
the presence of this heat coincides with life, and its absence with death:
Now all parts and indeed the whole body of living creatures contain within them some connate
natural heat (τινὰ σύμφυτον θερμότητα φυσικήν); so when alive they are perceptibly warm, but
when dead and deprived of life the opposite of this (τοὐναντίον). Now the source of this warmth
must lie in the heart in animals with blood, and in the bloodless in some corresponding part; for
while every part reduces and digests the food by means of its natural heat, this is most true of
the part with most control (τὸ κυριώτατον). (Juv. 4 469b8–14)
The Generation of Animals confirms that the vital heat, in this passage
referred to as “connate natural heat” (Juv. 4 469b8–9), has its source in the
heart, but also suggests, in a passage at Generation of Animals 4.1 766a31–
37 cited earlier, that the quantity or quality of heat in the heart is different in
male and female.32 Because the fundamental biological sexual difference is
a functional difference in the capacity to concoct and the heart is the first
organ to concoct the blood or blood-analogue into a fertile residue, the
distinction between male and female animals resides not only in the genitals
but also in the hearts of animals, which provide vital heat adequate for the
concoction of blood into semen or into menses. The capacity of the heart to
produce heat is then one manifestation of the sex of the animal.
This might suggest that Aristotle believes that the hearts of males and
females are different in morphology or physiology, but the evidence for that
is slight. He does say, at Generation of Animals 4.1 766a32–37, that the
reason that “the line of determination between the capacity and the
incapacity is whether a thing effects or does not effect concoction of the
ultimate nourishment” lies in “the principle, i.e. in the part of the body
which possesses the principle of the natural heat,” which is the heart. And
later, at Generation of Animals 4.8 776b11–15, he says that “both the
residue in males and the menses in females are of a bloodlike nature; now
the source of the blood and of the blood-vessels is the heart, which is
situated in these [upper] parts; therefore of necessity it is here that the
change which this sort of residue undergoes must be first of all apparent.” If
the change in the residues appears first “here,” that is, in the heart, this
suggests that the transmission of vital heat occurs in the heart; but the
passage certainly does not indicate that the change in the residue that occurs
in the heart will be different in males and females. Moreover, immediately
after the passage at Generation of Animals 4.1 766a32–37 just cited,
Aristotle adds that no animal is male or female until it has “the parts by
which female differs from male,” suggesting that the heart is not such a part
(GA 4.1 766b5–6). And earlier (at GA 4.1 766a4–5) he indicates that the
parts by which female differs from male are the uterus and the perineos,
which must be the male genitals. Finally, in species that ejaculate semen,
the final concoction of the semen occurs in males in the seminal ducts and
in the penis, as a result of friction during intercourse; and the final
concoction of the katamênia probably occurs in the uterus (GA 4.1 764a12–
20). So, while male and female differ in their capacity to concoct the fertile
residue, since that concoction takes place in a number of organs, it may be
that male and female hearts do not differ either structurally or functionally.
There is, however, some evidence that the hearts of male animals
produce more heat. In a passage at Parts of Animals 3.1 661b33–37,
Aristotle explores the notion of “the more and the less” (μᾶλλον and ἧττον),
saying that “since the male is stronger and more spirited, in some cases he
alone has such parts [e.g., sting, spur, horns, tusks, etc.], in other cases he
more than the female. For those parts which it is necessary for females to
have as well, e.g., parts related to nourishment, they have, but they have
less [ἧττον δ᾿ ἔχουσιν]; while those related to none of the necessities, they
do not have.” That the “parts related to nourishment,” such as the digestive
organs, are present “in a lesser degree” in the female probably means just
that they are smaller (in the Problemata, for example, we are told that a
large size “is characteristic of the male, for females are smaller than males”
[Prob. 10.36 894b26]). There is, then, no evidence that Aristotle believes
that the vital heat found in females is different in kind from the vital heat in
males; probably there is simply more of it in males. We should then
attribute the differences in the capacity to concoct in male and female to (1)
the quantity of vital heat transmitted by the heart to the ultimate
nourishment and (2) the differences in the particular sexual organs, since
Aristotle thinks that the final stage of the concoction of male sperma occurs
through friction in intercourse. There is no reason to suppose that the heat
of a female heart is different in kind from the heat of a male heart, and
hence no reason to suppose that the female heart is structurally or
functionally different from that of the male.33 They differ only in size.
In addition to producing blood and transmitting vital heat to the blood,
Aristotle attributes at least two other functions to the heart. Because these
may prove to have a bearing on the relation between biological sexual
differences and the political roles that Aristotle assigns to men and women,
it is worth exploring them here. First, the heart holds the principle of
sensation or perception. In the Parts of Animals Aristotle explains that
sensation has its origin in the heart because it operates through the blood
vessels: “For ‘animal’ is defined by sensation, and the primary sensory
organ is the primary blooded part, and such is the heart; for it is indeed an
origin of the blood and a primary blooded part” (PA 3.4 666a34–37); and
“the movements of pleasures, pains, and all sensation generally evidently
originate there [in the heart] and proceed to it” (PA 3.4 666a10–11). The
heart is the “primary blooded part” because it is connected to the entire
vascular system and thus to all the sensory organs. As Aristotle says:
Moreover, in all sanguineous animals the supreme organ (τό γε κύριον) of the sense-faculties
lies in the heart; for in this part must lie the common sensorium of all the sense-organs (τὸ
πάντων τῶν αἰσθητηρίων κοινὸν αἰσθητήριον). We can clearly see that two, taste and touch,
centre in the heart, so that all the others must do so too; for in this part it is possible for the other
sense organs to effect an impulse, but taste and touch do not extend to the upper region. Apart
from this, if in all creatures life resides in this part, clearly so too must the origin of sensation;
for we say that a creature is alive in so far as it is an animal, and an animal in so far as it is
sensitive. (Juv. 3 469a10–21)34
So the heart is the seat of sensation because it is the primary blooded part—
it lies at the center of the sensory network—and sensation operates through
the blood vessels.
Second, in the hierarchy of ends that an animal’s body aims to
accomplish, the ends of the heart establish the ends for other organs.
Because both sensation and life itself have their origins in the heart,
Aristotle claims that it is the “most authoritative” organ in an animal. In two
passages in On Youth and Old Age Aristotle tells us that the ends of the
heart determine the ends for the organism as a whole, and he connects this
activity with the function of the heart as the origin of sensation:
We have stated already in our treatise On the Parts of Animals that the heart is the source of the
veins; and that, in sanguineous animals, the blood is the ultimate nutriment from which the parts
are developed. Now it is clear that one function in respect of food is served by the mouth and
another by the stomach; but the heart is the most authoritative (κυριωτάτη) [organ], and it
determines the end (τὸ τέλος ἐπιτίθησιν).35 So in sanguineous animals the source of both
sensitive and nutritive soul must lie in the heart; for the functions of the other parts in respect of
food are for the sake of the heart’s function; for the dominant force must be directed towards the
final aim, as is the physician’s relation to health, and not reside in subordinate processes. . . .
Thus in the light of observed facts it is clear from what we have said that the source of the
sensitive and of the growth-producing and nutritive parts of the soul lies here; that is, in the
middle of the three parts of the body [i.e., in the heart]. (Juv. 3–4 468b32–469a27)36
The conception of the heart as the most authoritative organ, the one that sets
the ends for other organs in the animal body, emerges from the account of
its other functions. The heart transmits the vital heat that is both the
mechanism of nutrition (in the concoction of food into blood) and the
mechanism of reproduction (in the concoction of blood into sperma), and so
it is the first of the organs that supports the functions of the reproductive
faculty of soul. Aristotle’s point (in the passage at Juv. 3–4 468b32–469a27)
is that while we might think that the seat of the nutritive soul lies in the
stomach or other organs of digestion (“the other parts in respect of food”),
that is because the process of digestion is accomplished in order to allow
the heart to carry out its function—to change digested food into nutritious
blood, which is the ultimate function of nutrition. The heart is the first
organ to be formed in the embryo precisely because it is the seat of nutrition
(PA 3.4 666a20–22).37 This nutritive or reproductive faculty is common to
all living things; but the heart is also the seat of the sensitive faculty, and it
is sensation that characterizes animals, and distinguishes them from plants.
Moreover, because the soul of an animal includes just these faculties
(nutritive/reproductive and sensitive), the life of an animal is the exercise of
those faculties, and thus the heart has the principle of animal life. That these
are the activities that constitute the life of an animal implies that these are
also the ends of an animal—sensation, nutrition, and reproduction.38 In
saying that the heart sets the ends of the animal, Aristotle is explaining the
authority of the heart in terms of the telos of the animal: authority rests with
the part that is carrying out the tasks that constitute the life of the animal.
All the other parts of the animal (for example, the digestive organs) perform
their respective tasks for the sake of nutrition, reproduction, and sensation.
So the relation between the heart and the other organs is like the relation
between the doctor and those who practice the arts subordinate to medicine
(e.g., nutritionists, pharmacists); in other words, it is like the relation
between what Aristotle will call “architectonic” arts and the arts
subordinate to them.39
In subsequent chapters we will return to two features of this account of
the heart and its role in sexual reproduction and sensation. First, in chapter
3 I will draw on the conception of authority as Aristotle employs it to
clarify the relation between the heart and other organs of the body, in order
to understand the claim that the deliberative faculty of men has authority
over that of women. And in chapter 4 I will ask whether the differences in
the degree of heat that characterize the sexes might also affect sensation and
ultimately explain the particular deficit that Aristotle attributes to women.
To summarize the way in which the causal principles of sex are manifest
in individual animals: the bodies of animals are distinguished as male or
female according to the degree of capacity for concoction that the body
possesses, and the organs that distinguish male from female are those
associated with the different stages of concoction, beginning with the heart.
The product of that concoction, sperma, is also sexually differentiated, and
Aristotle sometimes treats it as a part of the body. Both male and female
blooded animals produce a kind of sperma, as we have seen; in the case of
the male it is semen, and in the case of the female it is katamênia.40 In the
next section I examine the differences Aristotle attributes to male and
female sperma, particularly the different contributions each makes to the
offspring.
2.5 The concoction of sperma in male and female

Understanding Aristotle’s conception of semen and of katamênia, the fertile
residues produced by the two sexes, is fundamental to an understanding of
sexual difference in biology. These are the fluids that both mark off
individual animals as male or female, and also determine the sex of animal
offspring. That is, the nature of the sperma produced by an animal—
whether it is semen or katamênia—is determined by the sex of that animal,
and in turn, the quality of the semen and katamênia contributed by male and
female parent jointly determine the sex of the animal offspring.
The terms Aristotle uses to name the generative residues (σπέρμα,
καταμηνία, and γονή) require some clarification. As we have seen, he says
that both male and female contribute σπέρμα (usually translated as “seed”)
to generation, and that is why they are both principles of generation (GA 1.2
716a11–14). In that case, σπέρμα has a broad sense: a fertile residue,
produced by either male or female, from which (ἐκ) natural things come
into being. There are passages throughout the Generation of Animals that
refer to the female residue (as well as the male) as σπέρμα: GA 2.1 734a1,
2.3 736b34, 2.6 741b37, 3.1 750b1, 4.3 768a11–14. At the same time,
Aristotle often uses the term σπέρμα in a more restricted sense, particularly
in the later books of the Generation of Animals, to refer exclusively to the
fertile residue produced by males, that is, semen (see, e.g., GA 4.1 765b9–
15—discussed earlier in section 2.3).41 But he sometimes uses a different
term, γονή, to pick out male semen, and seems to use that term exclusively
of the male fertile residue.42 Prior to Aristotle, both γονή and σπέρμα were
used interchangeably to refer to both the male and the female fertile
residues (in, for example, the Hippocratic texts Generation and Nature of
the Child), so it would not have been surprising that he should use σπέρμα
to refer to both. Aristotle’s terminological innovation is in reserving the
term γονή for the male residue. The term καταμηνία is used always to mean
menstrual fluid, which is the sperma or fertile residue of the female; on at
least one occasion Aristotle, combining the two terms, calls it τὰ καταμήνια
σπέρμα (“menstrual seed”) (GA 1.20 728a26). Thus, Aristotle’s terms often
require some interpretation; σπέρμα in particular has to be construed either
in the broader sense of “fertile residue” or the narrower sense of “semen.” I
will usually use katamênia and “menses” to refer to the fertile residue of the
female, and gone and “semen” to refer to the fertile residue of the male. I
will use sperma (plural spermata), “fertile residue,” “generative residue,” or
“seminal residue” to refer to both, or either, as Aristotle does.
The two kinds of sperma acquire, through a process of concoction in the
animal body, their capacities to produce species form as well as other
characteristics of the individual. We should then consider Aristotle’s
account of concoction as a physical process in the Meteorology before
turning to his application of that account in the Generation of Animals,
where he attempts to offer a physical explanation of the capacity for semen
to produce animal form in katamênia, and the capacity of katamênia to have
animal form produced in it.
2.5.1 Concoction in the Meteorology

Aristotle describes sperma in physical terms as “a compound of pneuma
and water (pneuma being hot air [θερμὸς ἀήρ]), and that is why it is fluid in
its nature; it is made of water” (GA 2.2 736a1–3). In the definition here of
pneuma as “hot air,” the heat in question is the vital heat internal to the
animal (the “connate natural heat” mentioned at Juv. 4 469b8–9), also
called “soul heat” (θερμότητα ψυχικήν).43 It is present in all forms of
pneuma (GA 3.11 762a21), including the pneuma found in water, which is
responsible, on Aristotle’s account, for spontaneous generation (GA 3.11
762b12–18). Soul heat causes the spermata of male and female to be fertile
(γόνιμα) (GA 2.3 736b34), and it is analogous to “the element that belongs
to the stars” (GA 2.3 736b38–737a1) (which Aristotle also calls “the first of
the elements” [DC 3.1 298b6]) because both are capable of generating life,
whereas the heat of fire is not. The pneuma in spermata generates life by
forming the parts of the animal (GA 2.6 741b37); pneuma is both the source
of the movements that produce form and shape the organs, and a tool that
those movements use to generate the homeomerous parts by means of both
cooling and heating (GA 2.6 743a4–6) (for more on the relation of pneuma
and movements, see section 2.7). So although pneuma includes “soul heat”
and is described as “hot air,” it is capable of both heating and cooling, and
this turns out to be essential to its functions in producing movement and
forming the embryo.44
Pneuma is thus a component of sperma; it also plays an important role in
the concoction of sperma. Before considering that role, I wish to emphasize
two points about the general account of concoction in the Meteorology.
First, concoction is both natural and teleological. Second, it is a process of
generation so that, when a given material is concocted, it becomes
something new.
The evidence for the first of these claims is to be found in the definition
of concoction in Meteorology 4, which makes clear that through concoction
the end of the object is achieved:
Concoction is a process of perfection (τελείωσις) produced from the opposite, passive
characteristics by a thing’s own natural and proper heat, these passive characteristics being the
matter proper to the particular thing. For when a thing has been concocted it has been perfected
and generated (τετελειωταί τε καὶ γέγονεν). And the perfecting process is initiated by the proper
heat of a thing, even though external aids may contribute to it. (Meteor. 4.2 379b17–25)45
Concoction is natural both in the sense that it is a process initiated by the

heat that is innate to that which performs the concoction, and in the sense
that it has as its goal the completed or mature state, the natural end, of that
which undergoes the process.46 Both the efficient cause (the heat) and the
final cause (the perfect or completed state of the object of concoction) are
natural causes—that is, are internal principles of change. In animal bodies,
then, concoction is achieved through innate natural heat, and something is
generated when the matter that is concocted arrives at the end state intended
for it by nature. So, just as green fruit becomes ripe through concoction, so
too digested food becomes blood, excess blood becomes sperma, and
female sperma ultimately becomes the embryo, which, when further
concocted, becomes an animal. Each of these products of concoction is
more perfect than the matter from which it was concocted.
The second point about concoction is that it is essentially a process of
change, and specifically of generation—one natural substance is generated
from another. Concoction is a process of generation, and inconcoction is a
process of decay. Aristotle explains concoction as generation by appeal to
“passive” and “active” qualities. The passive qualities are the moist and the
dry, while heat (including the natural heat of concoction) and cold are the
active qualities.47 The passive qualities undergo change, while the active
initiate change (Meteor. 4.1 378b10–14), although in different ways: heat
concocts, while cold produces inconcoction (ἀπεψία) (Meteor. 4.2 379b13–
14). The active qualities determine, conjoin, initiate change, and produce
form; they differ in that heat “is that which aggregates things that are of the
same kind (for the segregating which they say fire does is the aggregating
of things of the same type, for this results in foreign bodies’ being
expelled)” whereas “cold is that which gathers and aggregates
indiscriminately things that are related and things that are not of the same
type” (GC 2.2 329b26–30). This suggests that heat acts to concoct, perfect,
and generate by eliminating “foreign bodies,” whereas cold consolidates
both homogeneous and heterogeneous parts into something determinate. As
passive qualities, the moist and the dry, by contrast, are determined and
undergo change; if they somehow resist being determined or perfected, they
cause the object of concoction or inconcoction to decay (where decay is
opposed to generation). The mechanism that heat and cold use to act on the
passive qualities is called mastery: “The hot and the cold produce change
by mastering (κρατοῦντα) the matter. When they fail to master it the result
is half-cooked and undigested. But the most general contrary to simple
generation is decay (σῆψις)” (Meteor. 4.1 379a1–4).48 Concoction, Aristotle
says, “is what happens to everything when its constituent moisture is
mastered; for this is the material that is determined by a thing’s natural
heat” (Meteor. 4.2 379b32–34). So both the moist and the dry are passive
qualities, and both the hot and the cold are active qualities, but in
concoction it is the hot that acts and the moist that is acted upon in a way
that generates something new.
These two points—that concoction is a process (1) of perfecting and (2)
of generation—are connected. The perfection of the concocted object is
achieved when heat masters the moisture in the matter, and this is a process
of purification and perfection in that it involves the elimination of foreign
elements. The matter of what is generated is identified with a passive
quality (“its constituent moisture . . . this is the material”), so it is the matter
that is mastered (Meteor. 4.2 379b33) in the process of concoction by the
vital heat. Since the moist is defined as “that which is not bounded by any
boundary of its own, but is easily bounded,” it is easily determined by the
hot (GC 2.2 329b31–33). This, together with the particular way in which
the hot acts, by drawing together what is the same in kind and eliminating
what is “foreign,” suggests that the concoction of digested food into blood
and of excess blood into sperma is the process of (1) the evaporation and so
elimination of any excess of moisture, (2) the elimination of any “foreign”
dry matter (as in the production of useless residues in digestion), and (3) the
organization of what remains into something coherent.49 Concoction is also
the perfection or completion of the concocted object because the form
imposed through the process of mastery is the form natural to that object, its
natural end.50 For example, it is natural that, through concoction, excess
blood should become sperma, natural that female sperma should become a
fetation (κύημα), and natural that the fetation should become an animal.51
Concoction is, then, a teleological process of natural generation, in which
the efficient cause of the generation is vital heat and the final cause is the
perfected form of the concocted matter. In that process, the matter (what is
concocted) gains formal features and takes on a morphe or shape.
2.5.2 Concoction of sperma in the Generation of Animals

This is the general account of concoction as a process in the Meteorology,
where “concoction” applies to a wide range of phenomena, from the
maturation of fruits to the processing of nourishment in the animal body.52
Consider now the particular account of the concoction, in an animal body,
of digested food into blood (“the ultimate nutriment”) and eventually into
sperma in both sexes. Sperma (semen and katamênia) has to be understood
both in physical terms and in terms of its capacities to transmit or receive
form. Physically, as we have seen, it is constituted from pneuma and water.
Aristotle describes the origins of the process of the production of semen and
katamênia thus: “Sperma is a residue derived from useful nourishment, and
not only that, but from useful nourishment in its final form” (GA 1.18
726a26–28).53 Sperma is derived through a process of concoction, and so
the production of sperma is a process in which the matter that underlies that
process and undergoes concoction (i.e., the surplus of blood) is perfected
and something new (the sperma) is generated in both sexes.
As a process the concoction of sperma involves several stages and many
organs, beginning in the stomach and moving on to the liver, the spleen, the
heart, and the genitals (see PA 2.1 647b5, 3.6 669b25, 3.7 670a20, 3.12
674a9, 4.10 689a4–6; GA 1.5 717b23–26, 1.6 718a5–10, 1.12 719b2, 2.4
737b28–31, 738a10–b4, 4.1 766b7–12; for genitals, see GA 1.6 718a6–8).54
Nourishment is concocted into blood, but more blood is produced than the
animal needs, and so a variety of “residues” are produced (semen,
katamênia, phlegma, ichor, milk, excrement) at various stages of the
process of concoction. These residues are distinguished as “useful” and
“useless” according to whether they emerge from “useful” or “useless”
nourishment; the former has something more to contribute to the organism,
the latter does not. Sperma is the last of the useful residues to emerge. There
are two kinds of evidence that it is the final product of the process: (1) that
it is small in bulk (GA 1.18 725a18) and (2) that the emission of sperma
produces fatigue: “Though only a very small quantity of sperma be emitted,
the exhaustion which follows is quite conspicuous, which suggests that the
body is being deprived of the final product formed out of the nourishment”
(GA 1.18 725b7–9). The exhaustion, in other words, is a symptom that the
body has lost the last of the useful nourishment.55
That both male and female sperma are useful residues suggests that both
are produced by nature for some end. This is confirmed by Aristotle’s
claims (1) that there is a proper place for all the natural residues, and (2)
that there is a proper place for both male and female sperma. He mentions
this as part of his argument that sperma is a natural residue of nourishment
and not a “colliquescence” (σύντηγμα). In the case of the seminal residues
(τοῖς σπερματικοῖς), the natural places are the uterus, the pudenda
(including the spermatic ducts), and the breasts (Aristotle treats milk as a
seminal residue, although he does not name the breasts among the sexual
organs) (GA 1.18 725b4).56
The ability to concoct blood into semen depends, as we have seen, on
the ability to produce a certain degree of natural heat (also called “vital” or
“soul” heat) in certain organs, in particular the heart and the genitals.57
Blood is generated from the residue of the nutriment ingested by the animal
through the addition of pneuma, which has the “natural and proper” heat
(i.e., vital heat) required by any process of concoction. The surplus of blood
is then further concocted with the addition of pneuma to form sperma, in a
process of purification that involves the evaporation of moisture but also the
exclusion of any matter that is foreign to the ultimate product.58 That is, the
heat in the pneuma acts on the passive qualities in the matter (the blood) to
generate a new substance, the sperma. At every stage except the last the
female concocts the nutriment in the same way as the male, although the
vital heat in her body is lower in degree.
Now the weaker creature too must of necessity produce a residue, greater in amount and less
thoroughly concocted; and this, if such is its character, must of necessity be a volume of
bloodlike fluid. That which by nature has a smaller share of heat is weaker; and the female
answers to this description, as we have said already. From which we conclude that the bloodlike
secretion which occurs in the female must of necessity be a residue just as much [as the
secretion in the male]. Of such a character is the discharge of what is called the menstrual fluid
(ἡ τῶν καλουμένων καταμηνίων ἔκκρισις). This much then is evident: the menstrual fluid is a
residue, and it is the analogous thing in females to the semen in males. (GA 1.19 726b31–727a4)
The “bloodlike secretion which occurs in the female” is clearly menstrual

fluid. Because all sperma is produced through the concoction of blood,
sperma that is less well concocted will resemble blood more nearly than
does sperma that is more concocted; this is how Aristotle explains the
difference in the appearance of semen and menses. But the difference in
appearance should not mislead us into thinking that the female contributes a
residue devoid of potentiality. Aristotle is emphatic that the menses is a
fertile residue; it is not simply brute matter.59 Although he repeats in this
passage that the female has less vital heat and is therefore weaker than the
male, the point of the passage is that she does have vital heat, and does
produce a residue analogous to the semen produced by the male in that it is
fertile.
The different degrees of concoction that the excess blood undergoes in
male and female animals lead to differences in the purity of male and
female sperma, where purity correlates to perfection. The sperma of the
male, fully concocted, is described as “more pure,” and the semen produced
by the female as less pure because less concocted: “For, as we see, the
menstrual seed [τὰ καταμήνια σπέρμα] is sperma, not indeed sperma in a
pure condition [οὐ καθαρὸν], but needing still to be acted upon” (GA 1.20
728a26–27). “Needing still to be acted upon” must mean “needing to be
further concocted if it were to be male semen,” given the analysis of
concoction as a process in which active heat masters the passive qualities in
the matter. From the account of concoction in the Meteorology, it is clear
that to be purer will be to include less “foreign” matter. Since, as we have
seen, Aristotle says that sperma is constituted by water and pneuma (which
is hot air), we can conclude that in its purest form it will include nothing
else. The purity of sperma is a function of how well concocted the excess
blood is; and how well concocted the blood is will be a function of the soul
heat present in the pneuma in the process of concoction. So the female
sperma—the καταμήνια σπέρμα—is less “pure” because it has less pneuma,
is colder, less concocted, and less perfected in the sense that it retains more
“earthy” matter, as we will see later on.
There may seem to be some tension in reconciling Aristotle’s claim that
the female sperma is fertile and useful with his claim that it is impure and
imperfect. But a passage in Meteorology suggests a way to interpret these
claims as harmonious:
In some cases the end of the process is a thing’s nature, in the sense of its form and essence (ὡς
εἶδος καὶ οὐσίαν). In others the end of concoction is the realization of some [latent] form
(ὑποκειμένην τινὰ μορφὴν), as when moisture takes on a certain quality and quantity when
cooked or boiled or rotted or otherwise heated; for then it is useful for something (χρήσιμόν)
and we say that it has been concocted. Examples are must, the pus that gathers in boils, and tears
when they become rheum; and so on. (Meteor. 4.2 379b25–32)
The distinction here between concoction that ends by transmitting the
nature as form and essence of something and concoction that ends by
transmitting a “shape” is significant in that it captures the idea that in some
cases concoction is incomplete, so that the nature—which will include the
function—that is the telos of the process has not been fully actualized. The
process that produces male sperma would seem to be of the first kind, and
the process that produces female sperma of the second kind. Although
Aristotle uses εἶδος and μορφή as near-synonyms to refer to the form of
something, μορφή seems to place more emphasis on the physical
composition or shape.60 One of the examples Aristotle offers of a process of
concoction that ends in the realization of a latent form (ὑποκειμένην τινὰ
μορφὴν), rather than in a nature in the sense of form and essence (ὡς εἶδος
καὶ οὐσίαν), is that which produces γλεῦκος, usually translated as “must”
(the juice of crushed grapes that still contains the skins and seeds) or
“young wine.” This example suggests that must is to wine as katamênia is
to semen: the same matter at an early and incomplete stage, containing
impurities that with further concoction will be eliminated. This would fit
with the claim that the female sperma is concocted but not fully concocted,
impure, and therefore incapable of initiating the production of sensitive
soul, and would explain why Aristotle nonetheless says it is fertile; the
moisture in the matter (the excess blood) has not been fully mastered, but
has been mastered to some extent. The process of concoction of excess
blood into sperma aims to generate sperma that can initiate the production
of sensitive soul, but when concoction occurs but is incomplete, the process
of concoction generates a product from the matter being concocted that
Aristotle describes as “useful”—the katamênia.
This passage also then suggests that the εἶδος of spermata is identical
whether it is fully realized in semen or imperfectly realized in katamênia;
we do not need to posit a distinct εἶδος for the katamênia. That εἶδος is not
fully realized in the katamênia, but the difference between male and female
sperma is a difference in μορφή, which is to say a difference in physical
composition; we have seen already that Aristotle accounts for the
differences in physical composition of semen and katamênia. What is
important is that the incomplete concoction that has as a telos the
transmission of a latent form is also natural; it is not caused by an external
application of heat, or engineered to serve an external purpose. And so, as
we will see, this is not a case of secondary teleology, but rather one of
primary teleology, in which the telos has been achieved, but in an inferior
mode.
2.6 Potentialities and capacities of spermata

2.6.1 Introduction
Aristotle’s account of the concoction of the spermata of male and female
animals adds precision to his characterization of the fundamental biological
difference between the sexes: it is a difference in the capacity to introduce
soul heat into the blood, which in turn is responsible for a difference in the
kind of sperma produced—semen or katamênia.61 The contributions are
different in kind physically, since the katamênia sperma is less concocted
because the active power of soul heat has not fully mastered the moisture in
the matter and as a result it is more bulky and cold, more like blood, more
earthy and less pure. Semen and katamênia are also different in kind in the
sense that they have different capacities to convey soul faculties in
potentiality. Aristotle in the Generation of Animals is concerned to
demonstrate that the biological processes he describes can explain the
generation of animate beings, and so he begins with questions about the
status of the two spermata and of the fetation as living and goes on to
consider embryonic development as a process of the actualization of the
capacities of soul. The focus of this section is on his account of the
transmission of nutritive and sensitive soul, which is identical for non-
human animals and human beings. The transmission of the rational faculty
to human offspring represents a particular problem, which I will take up in
section 2.10.
In his discussion of embryogenesis Aristotle uses a number of technical
terms, and other terms are required to make sense of his account of
generation. The spermata, as we have seen, are the fertile residues of male
and female. The fetation (κύημα) is defined by Aristotle as “the primary
mixture of male and female” at GA 1.20 728b34–35—so it is the entity
created when semen first actualizes the species form in menses, when
“setting” begins to occur and some differentiation is introduced (which may
be preliminary, e.g., when the yolk and the white of an egg are
distinguished, or more advanced, e.g., when the organs of the embryo are
formed). The embryo displays some organic differentiation. Peck coined the
term “fetation” as a translation of κύημα, but points out that Aristotle in fact
uses the term to refer not only to the first moment at which the matter is
informed, but also to later stages of development.62 So it is not always
possible to distinguish the fetation from the embryo, but it is useful to have
a term to indicate the stage at which the active potentiality for soul in the
semen has begun to actualize the passive potentiality for soul in the female
katamênia, prior to the full development of organs. I will refer to the entity
as an “embryo” or “fetus” depending on the stage of development.
The physical substance that conveys different soul faculties is identified
with the “hot” that is the soul heat in the pneuma. At GA 2.3 736b30–737a8
Aristotle points out, as we have seen, that while the heat of the sun and the
vital heat of the body can generate animals, fire cannot.63 His point is that
vital heat, which he also calls “soul heat,” has the power to effect the
generation of ensouled beings. The transmission of soul heat through
pneuma and the transmission of the dunameis (capacities or potentialities)
of soul are effectively the same operation. That is, the soul heat in pneuma
is the vehicle for the dunameis of soul. Aristotle says that “sperma is . . .
endowed with the same movement as that in virtue of which the body grows
through the distribution of the ultimate nourishment [i.e., the blood]” (GA
2.3 737a18–20). So the movement present in the pneuma of the sperma is
the same as the movement with which the blood travels around the body
and causes it to grow (see Juv. 26(20) 480a3–11); the processes of
conception, embryological development and development after birth have a
continuity of movement. In all cases the process is not simply one of
physical growth, but one also of the actualization of dunameis; these are
capacities, which may be active or passive. To refer to a dunamis I will use
the terms “capacity,” “power,” or “potentiality,” depending on the context.
2.6.2 Capacities of male semen

A male animal will have more soul heat in his body than a female, but she
too will have some degree of soul heat since it is necessary for the
concoction of a fertile residue, whether katamênia or semen. If the “hot” is
what transmits soul, and if there are different degrees of heat in male and
female sperma (as we have seen), then we would expect that katamênia and
semen should have different capacities for the production of soul. The male
has an active dunamis for sensitive soul (which will include nutritive soul),
and the female has passive dunameis for nutritive and sensitive soul (these
dunameis are more and less proximate to actualization, as we will see). That
is, Aristotle suggests that the potentiality for sensitive soul is a distinctive
feature of semen, and he associates a potentiality for nutritive soul primarily
with the katamênia sperma. At the same time, however, it is clear that the
potentiality for sensitive soul in the semen must include a potentiality for
nutritive soul, since higher-level soul faculties require lower faculties, and
that the katamênia must have potentialities both for nutritive and for
sensitive soul, since it is capable of becoming actualized as an animal.
Aristotle’s emphasis in describing the differences in the powers of the
fertile residues is first and foremost on the distinction between active
powers (in the semen) and passive powers (in the katamênia), and
secondarily on the difference between nutritive soul (associated more
closely with the female) and sensitive soul (associated with the male).64
We saw in section 2.5.1 that according to the account of concoction in
Meteorology 4.1, “the hot” is an active power and “the moist” a passive
one. The distinction between active and passive powers or potentialities is
one that Aristotle draws in On Generation and Corruption at 2.2 329b19–
30. He reduces all tangible properties to two primary contrarieties,
moist/dry and hot/cold, then identifies hot and cold as active potentialities,
and moist and dry as passive potentialities. The four sublunary simple
bodies each have an active and a passive potentiality: fire has hot/dry, air
has hot/moist, water has cold/moist, and earth has cold/dry (GC 2.3
330a30–b5). In the Metaphysics Aristotle emphasizes that passive
potentialities are indeed potentialities:
Obviously, then, in a sense the power of acting and of being acted on is one (for a thing may be
capable either because it can be acted on or because something else can be acted on by it), but in
a sense the powers are different. For the one is in the thing acted on; it is because it contains a
certain principle [of change], and because even the matter is a principle [of change], that the
thing acted on is acted on, one thing by one, another by another; for that which is oily is
inflammable, and that which yields in a particular way can be crushed; and similarly in all other
cases. But the other power is in the agent, e.g. heat and the art of building are present, one in
that which can produce heat and the other in the man who can build. (Met. 9.1 1046a19–28)
“Even the matter is a principle”—that is, even the matter has a dunamis or
capacity for change, but it is a passive dunamis because it is a capacity to be
changed, and not to initiate change. Although Aristotle routinely associates
the male with the hot and the female with the cold, and both are active
qualities, he also says often that the katamênia is wetter and more bulky
(i.e., contains more moisture) than the semen and has less of the hot. That is
some reason to think that he is associating the active power of the hot with
an active power to produce soul, and the passive power of the moist with
the passive power to have soul produced in it. My suggestion is that the
higher degree of vital heat in the semen is identified with the active power
to produce soul and in particular with the sensitive (animal) soul faculty,
and that the lower degree of vital heat in the katamênia, which causes it to
be more moist than the semen, is identified with the passive power to have
soul produced in it and in particular with the nutritive (plant) soul faculty.
Consider first the claim that male sperma has an active potentiality for
soul. Aristotle poses the question: how is an animal formed out of (ἐκ) the
spermata (GA 2.1 733b23–24)? He believes the spermata must have soul,
in a qualified sense, because no other explanation for the transmission of
soul to the embryo is plausible. That the animal is formed out of the female
sperma is clear, he says.
The problem now before us, however, is not out of what, but, by what are they [the parts of an
animal] formed? Either something external fashions them, or else something present in the
semen (ἐν τῇ γονῇ) and the seminal fluids (σπέρματι); and this is either some part of soul, or
soul, or something which possesses soul. (GA 2.1 733b32–34a2)
The question is about the efficient cause (“by what”), not the material cause
(“out of what”), of generation, and Aristotle goes on to say that the efficient
cause cannot be external because it must be in contact with the materials.65
The efficient cause is in the male semen, which has sensitive soul
potentially; this must then be an active potentiality since it can initiate
change. We saw in section 2.3 that Aristotle defines the male in terms of
this capacity: “The faculty just mentioned [the capacity to transmit sensitive
soul: τὸ ποιητικὸν αἰσθητικῆς ψυχῆς] is the essence of what is meant by
‘male’ ” (GA 2.5 741a15–17). Male semen does not actually have this soul;
if it did, it would be an animal. But it has the capacity to produce or
actualize the sensitive faculty of soul in the appropriate matter (and hence
an active potentiality for sensitive soul), which is the efficient cause of
generation. The katamênia, by contrast, does not have an active potentiality
for sensitive soul (although it must have a passive potentiality).66 The
argument Aristotle offers for this claim is: if the female were to contribute
sperma that contained the principle of movement (i.e., the efficient cause),
then she would be able to generate offspring by herself; but she cannot
generate by herself; so she does not produce a sperma that produces
(ἐμποιεῖ) sensitive soul (τὴν αἰσθητικὴν ψυχήν) in the offspring, as does the
male (GA 2.5 741b2–7).67
2.6.3 Capacities of katamênia

Consider now the claim that the female sperma has a passive potentiality
for soul. The animal is formed “from” sperma and “by” sperma—from a
material cause and by an efficient cause—and Aristotle concludes that these
causes are both potentialities or capacities for soul. So the katamênia has
potentialities. Since it is capable of becoming an animal with both nutritive
and sensitive soul faculties, it must have passive potentialities for both
faculties, but there is some evidence that these potentialities are different in
degree.68 Aristotle says:
As for the question whether the fertile residue (σπέρμα) possesses soul or not . . . it is clear both
that it possesses soul, and that it is soul potentially. And there are varying degrees in which it
may be potentially that which it is capable of being—it may be nearer to it or further removed
from it (just as a sleeping geometer is at a further remove than one who is awake, and a waking
one than one who is busy at his studies). (GA 2.1 735a5–12)
There is no reason to suppose that the sperma in this passage refers

exclusively to the semen, since both semen and katamênia have soul in the
sense that both have sensitive and nutritive soul potentially, although they
have them in different degrees. The katamênia sperma must have two
passive powers: a higher degree of potentiality for the nutritive soul, and a
lower (or further removed) degree of potentiality for the sensitive soul of
the animal. And the male will have a higher degree of sensitive soul and a
lower degree of nutritive soul.
The evidence that the female katamênia has nutritive soul potentially in
a higher degree than she has sensitive soul potentially can be found in
Aristotle’s discussion of wind-eggs.69 At GA 2.5 741a5–9 Aristotle raises
the question explicitly: why does the female not generate by herself in
species that are sexually differentiated? If the katamênia has soul
potentially, just as does the semen, why is the female unable to generate an
animal independently of the male? Aristotle introduces the phenomenon of
wind-eggs to suggest that in a way the female can generate by herself, but
she cannot generate an animal. Wind-eggs (τὰ ὑπηνέμια) resemble eggs, but
no bird develops in them. Some species of birds are able to form wind-eggs
because they meet two conditions: (1) they produce plenty of the residue
required for the formation of offspring, and (2) this residue is produced
close to the diaphragm, the heat of which is sometimes responsible for the
“setting” of wind-eggs in the absence of male sperma (see GA 3.1 750b3–
751a13). This means that when the residue is stored close to the diaphragm,
so that vital heat may be transmitted to it from within the female bird’s
body, an egg may be formed in which white and yolk are separated; but
such an egg will be infertile. A wind-egg grows but it does not acquire the
form of the species. Consider this passage:
Granted that the female possesses the same soul (τὴν αὐτὴν ψυχὴν)[as the male] and that the
residue provided by the female is the material [for the fetation], why has the female any need of
the male in addition? . . . The reason is that there is a difference between animal and plant: the
animal possesses sense-perception. It is impossible for any part of the body whatever (face,
hand, flesh, etc.) to exist unless sensitive soul is present in it, whether in actuality or potentially.
. . . Thus, if the male is the factor which produces the sensitive soul in cases where male and
female are separate, it is impossible for the female all by itself and from itself to generate an
animal; because the faculty just mentioned [the production of sensitive soul] is the essence of
what is meant by “male.” Still, it is not at all unreasonable to raise the puzzle we have stated, as
is shown by the instances of those birds which lay wind-eggs (τὰ ὑπηνέμια): this proves that up
to a point the female is able to generate (φανερὸν . . . ὅτι δύναται μέχρι γέ τινος τὸ θῆλυ
γεννᾶν). But there is a puzzle here too: In what sense are we to say that these eggs are alive? We
cannot say that they are alive in the same sense as fertile eggs, for in that case an actual living
creature would hatch out from them; nor are they on a par with wood and stone, because these
eggs go bad just as fertile ones do, and this seems to indicate that to start with they were in some
way alive. Hence it is clear that potentially they possess soul of a sort. What sort, then? The
lowest, it must be obviously; and this is nutritive soul (ἡ θρεπτική), because this it is which is
present alike in all animals and plants. Why then does this soul fail to bring the parts to their
completion and so produce an animal? Because the parts of an animal are bound to possess
sensitive soul, since they are not on a par with those of a plant; and that is why the male is
required to take its share in the business (διὸ δεῖται τῆς τοῦ ἄρρενος κοινωνίας)(the male being
separate from the female in such animals). (GA 2.5 741a6–30)
When Aristotle says that “up to a point the female is able to generate,”
he indicates that, like the male sperma, the katamênia has some soul faculty
in potentiality. This implication is not limited to those species that produce
wind-eggs; the katamênia produced by the female in any species must have
soul potentially.70 This is because what distinguishes wind-egg-producing
species is not the nature of the katamênia the female produces, but the
proximity of the uterus to the diaphragm in those species, and the excess
katamênia that they produce (GA 3.1 750b17–27). The potentiality for
nutritive soul in the katamênia is one that is usually, and optimally,
actualized by male sperma; but on the evidence of the discussion of wind-
eggs, this potentiality is one that could in principle be actualized by any
form of vital heat, including the heat found within the female body. Should,
however, the nutritive soul in the katamênia be actualized by some degree
of vital heat other than that introduced by the male, it will fail to “bring the
parts to completion and so produce an animal” precisely because, as in this
example, the vital heat transmitted from the diaphragm does not have that
“principle of soul”—the moving cause of the offspring—which here is
identified, as we should expect, with the active potentiality for sensitive
soul of the male sperma. That the katamênia can be set by heat from the
diaphragm indicates that it must already have nutritive soul in it potentially.
That the heat of the diaphragm is not sufficient to complete the
development of an animal shows that the potentiality for nutritive soul is
closer to actuality than the potentiality for sensitive soul that is
characteristic of animals. The potentiality for sensitive soul in the
katamênia can only be actualized by the higher degree of soul heat found in
semen. So the potentialities for nutritive and for sensitive soul in the
katamênia are different, and the former is closer to actualization.
2.6.4 Capacities of the fetation

We can see the sense in which semen and katamênia have soul potentially
more clearly by contrasting those potentialities with that of the kuêma
(fetation). Aristotle takes for granted that the fetation, like the fertile
residues, must be ensouled in some sense:
No one, of course, would maintain that the fetation is quite without soul, completely devoid of
life in every sense, for the spermata and the fetations of animals are just as much alive as plants
are, and up to a point they are fertile (γόνιμα). Thus it is clear that they possess nutritive soul
(vide my remarks on soul in another treatise for an explanation of why nutritive soul must of
necessity be acquired first). It is while they develop that they acquire sentient soul as well, in
virtue of which an animal is an animal—I say “while they develop,” for it is not the fact that
when an animal is formed at the same moment a human being, or a horse, or any other particular
sort of animal is formed, because the end or completion (τὸ τέλος) is formed last of all, and that
which is peculiar to each thing (τὸ ἴδιόν) is the end (τὸ τέλος) of its process of formation. (GA
2.3 736a32–b5)
The fetation has soul potentially as soon as it is formed (see also GA 2.3
737a17–19), but it must have soul potentially in a different sense than do
the katamênia and semen. Aristotle describes katamênia, semen, and
fetation as “just as much alive as plants are” (GA 2.3 736a33–35) in the
sense that they all possess nutritive soul potentially. But they possess it in
different degrees.
The katamênia has the passive potentialities for nutritive and sensitive
soul. The semen has the active potentiality identified with a potential for
initiating the production of sensitive soul (which includes a potentiality for
nutritive soul, since higher soul faculties contain lower faculties, on the
model of geometric figures). The potentiality for sensitive soul possessed
by the semen will be a higher degree of potentiality, that is, closer to
actuality, in virtue of being active. The fetation has a potential nutritive soul
in a higher degree of actuality than either katamênia or semen because it is
capable of growth and hence actualized to some extent. There will not be a
fully actual nutritive soul until all the organs of digestion and reproduction
have been completely formed in the fetus (and ultimately, in the case of the
organs of reproduction, in the animal). This ascription of potential nutritive
soul to semen, katamênia, and fetation illustrates the distinctions within
potentiality that Aristotle mentions at GA 2.1 735a9–12, cited earlier, while
reminding us that there are various degrees of potentiality, further from or
nearer to the telos for which they are potentialities: “there are varying
degrees in which it [the fertile residue] may be potentially that which it is
capable of being—it may be nearer to it or further removed from it (just as a
sleeping geometer is at a further remove than one who is awake, and a
waking one than one who is busy at his studies).”71 In this passage there are
three levels of potentiality: sleeping geometer, geometer awake, geometer
engaged in geometry. The katamênia and semen must have nutritive soul
potentially in the first degree (although different degrees of the first,
because one is passive and the other active), analogous to the sleeping
geometer. The fetation and embryo must have the potentiality for nutritive
soul in a manner analogous to the geometer who is awake—or rather,
awakening, since embryonic development is a process over time, in which
the potentiality is gradually realized. It is only when all the organs of
nutrition and reproduction have been formed and the animal exercises its
nutritive and generative capacities fully that it is analogous to the geometer
engaged in geometry.
We have seen that Aristotle says of wind-eggs too that they possess
nutritive soul potentially (GA 2.5 741a23–25). How then does the potential
for nutritive soul of the wind-egg differ from that of the fetation or the
embryo in its early stages? A more precise way to pose the question is to
ask what differentiates the activity of nutritive soul in the growth exhibited
by both the wind-egg and the fetation. In the De anima 2.4 Aristotle
suggests a way to understand the different operations of the nutritive faculty
in the unfertilized wind-egg and the fertilized fetation: by distinguishing
between the activity of nourishing and the activity of growing:
Since nothing which does not partake of life is nourished (τρέφεται), what is nourished would
be the ensouled body, insofar as it is ensouled, with the result that nourishment is relative—and
not coincidentally—to what is ensouled. There is a difference, however, between being
nourishment (τροφῇ) and being able to produce growth (αὐξητικῷ) in something. For insofar as
an ensouled thing is a particular quantity (ποσόν τι), something is capable of producing growth
in it, while insofar as it is some this and a substance (τόδε τι καὶ οὐσία), something is
nourishment for it. For what is ensouled preserves its substance and exists as long as it is
nourished; and it is capable of generating not the very thing which is nourished, but rather
something like what is nourished, since its substance already exists and nothing generates itself,
but rather preserves itself. Consequently, this principle of the soul is a capacity of the sort which
preserves the thing which has it, as the sort of thing it is, while nutrition equips it to be active.
(DA 2.4 416b9–20)
The wind-egg grows because it has nutritive soul at a level of potentiality

(actualized in a preliminary way and set by the heat of the diaphragm), and
as “a particular quantity” its growth is promoted by food (through the
production of further residue from the nourishment that adds to its bulk),
but because the nutritive capacity has not been actualized by a sensitive
soul the growth of the wind-egg is not directed toward an animal form. The
fertilized fetation, by contrast, not only grows in quantity, but also
nourishes itself in the sense that it acquires form as an individual; it is
actualized and perfected and over time acquires the organs and capacities
characteristic of it as a member of a natural kind. In other words, the heat
from the male parent allows the fetation not only to increase in size (a
change which the heat of the female parent can sometimes effect), but also
to grow toward a determinate end, to acquire the essential form of an
animal kind, with that kind’s capacities and as well as its organs. The wind-
egg, although it grows, acquires no shape, no organs, and no function. The
nutritive soul of the wind-egg is a qualified nutritive soul because it does
not have that capacity for development toward a determinate end, but only
the capacity to increase in quantity. The difference between wind-egg and
fetation is captured by Aristotle in the notion that the wind-egg is like a
plant (i.e., restricted to the nutritive soul faculty), whereas the fetation is
potentially an animal (because it possesses the sensitive soul in
potentiality). The wind-egg is thus “complete” as a plant, since it has all the
soul faculties of a plant, and yet “incomplete” as an animal (GA 1.21
730a30–33). This suggests with more precision what the female
contribution to generation lacks: not the capacity to initiate growth, but
rather the capacity to initiate growth that aims to shape and to confer
function on body parts.
2.6.5 The value and the inferiority of the katamênia

Although he attributes a potentiality for soul to the fertile residues of both
male and female, it is clear that Aristotle believes the capacities of the
katamênia to be inferior to the capacities of the semen. The physical
explanation for the inferiority of the menses, as we have seen, is that it is
less concocted, and therefore impure. One of the implications of this
impurity is that the menses lacks “the principle of soul,” where that means
the principle of sensitive soul (GA 3.2 737a28–30). Aristotle says this in the
context of saying that the female is like the male, but deformed or defective.
This is not to say that the menses lacks a potentiality for sensitive soul (if
that were true, no animal could be generated from the menses), but only that
it lacks the active potentiality. So, in functional terms, the imperfection of
the katamênia manifests itself as an incapacity to initiate the development
of an animal: it lacks the capacity to actualize the potentiality for sensitive
soul, or to initiate the formation of the offspring from the matter. If the
katamênia did have the principle required to initiate conception, the female
would not need male semen in order to produce an animal. To say that the
katamênia is defective in this way is not, however, to say that it is wholly
deficient in potential soul—on the contrary, as we have seen, it has both
nutritive and sensitive soul potentiality, the former in a higher degree. If it
did not have soul in potentiality, it would not be a fertile residue, because it
would not be the kind of material that could be transformed into animal
offspring.
The capacities of the katamênia are inferior for two reasons. First,
because they are passive, rather than active, powers, and Aristotle thinks
that a capacity for action is better than a capacity to be acted upon. We have
seen that he identifies the “principle of soul” in the male sperma as the
efficient cause, and we know that he associates the efficient cause with
agency. Since he identifies the katamênia as the material cause of
generation, and we know that he associates the material cause with
passivity, it is clear that the potentiality of the katamênia is a passive
potentiality. As Alan Code puts it: “Male semen has the active
power/capacity to make something an animal (of a definite sort). The
female is passive (i.e. ‘acted upon’) in virtue of the fact that the female
menstrual residue is the (completed) animal in power/capacity (δυνάμει).
The menstrual fluid cannot be an animal δυνάμει in the way that the semen
is an animal δυνάμει. The female residue has a passive δυνάμις that
corresponds to the active δυνάμις in the semen.”72 In the analogies that
Aristotle uses to describe conception (the setting of milk by rennet at GA
2.4 739b21–31, and a variety of craft productions at GA 1.22 730b7–23),
the notion that the semen has an active power is emphasized. The motions
in the semen are acting on the matter, and acting as an efficient cause of the
generation of the offspring.
Second, the katamênia, although it has both nutritive and sensitive soul
potentially, is more closely associated by Aristotle with the nutritive soul,
and that is a lower form of soul than the sensitive. There is some evidence
for that in this passage:
Now so far as we can see, the faculty of soul of every kind (πάσης ψυχῆς δύναμις) is associated
with some physical substance which is different from the so-called elements and more divine
than they are; and as the souls (αἱ ψυχαί) differ from one another in worthiness and
unworthiness, so differs also the nature of the corresponding matter (οὕτω καὶ ἡ τοιαύτη
διαφέρει φύσις). In all cases the sperma contains within itself that which causes it to be fertile—
what is known as “hot” (τὸ καλούμενον θερμόν), which is not fire nor any similar capacity, but
the pneuma which is enclosed within the sperma or foam-like stuff (τῷ ἀφρώδει), and the nature
which is in the pneuma; and this is analogous to the element which belongs to the stars. (GA 2.3
736b30–737a1)73
We see here that Aristotle identifies the pneuma in sperma as the vehicle for
the transmission of soul; this is what causes sperma to be fertile, which is to
say, capable of generation. The phrase “the faculty of soul of every kind”
refers to the different kinds of soul faculties, nutritive and sensitive.74 The
“corresponding matter” that is said to differ in worth as do the faculties of
soul must be the katamênia sperma and the semen of the male. And the
claim that the substances that are associated with these soul faculties differ
in value according to the value of the faculties with which they are
associated means that the substances are the katamênia and the semen,
which differ from one another in value because the katamênia carries
(primarily) the less worthy nutritive faculty whereas the semen carries
(primarily) the more worthy sensitive faculty, both in potentiality.75 So
Aristotle is claiming that the nutritive/reproductive faculty of soul is
associated with or shares in (κοινωνέω) some physical substance, as does
the sensitive faculty of soul, but since these capacities of soul differ in
value, so too do the physical substances that convey them, the semen and
katamênia, differ in value.
Both male and female sperma have then a dunamis—a capacity and a
potentiality—that is what it is for them to be fertile residues. But those
capacities differ in value. There is no question but that on Aristotle’s
account the female sperma is inferior in value to the male. At the same
time, it is important to be precise in characterizing that inferiority, which is
not absolute, but relative to the value of semen. The katamênia is a fertile
residue, with nutritive and sensitive soul potentially, that is not only
valuable to the process of generation but necessary to it.
2.7 Conception and generation of an animal

2.7.1 Introduction
In sections 2.5 and 2.6 the focus was on semen and menses—the two kinds
of sperma Aristotle recognizes—and on the powers or potentialities that he
attributes to them, in order to understand the role of male and female in the
generation of animals. The focus now is on Aristotle’s account of the
phenomena that ensue when those fertile residues combine—conception
and embryogenesis—in order to understand how the sex of an individual
animal is determined in the process of generation. This section considers
the interaction of male and female contributions to the process of
conception, as described in Generation of Animals 1 and 2, and its
implications for Aristotle’s account of sexual difference. The next, section
2.8, considers the organic development of the embryo in a viviparous
animal, as described in Generation of Animals Book 2, and in particular
how sex is determined in individual animals in the course of that
development, which Aristotle describes in Book 4.
The capacities of the semen and the katamênia are the foundation of
Aristotle’s account of the roles of the male and the female in generation.
The guiding question of this section is just what those roles are. The
conception and generation of an animal are, on Aristotle’s account,
extended processes involving both the transmission of soul and the
development of organs. In his account we find the concrete manifestations
of the capacities that he attributes to male and female spermata in the
interaction of efficient and material cause.
The actualization of the sensitive soul is initiated when the male sperma
begins to act on the katamênia. But this actualization is possible only
because the parts of the animal are present potentially in the katamênia, and
it occurs only in the course of their progressive development (GA 2.5
741b6–9). The process begins, as we have seen, when the katamênia is
“set” and the fetation is formed from the interaction of male semen and
katamênia. It is clear that it is the male’s semen that “sets,” that what is set
is the residue in the female or the purest part of that residue (GA 2.3
737a21–22; 2.4 739a7–8), and that the product of setting is the “fetation”
(GA 1.23 731a16) or the animal (GA 2.1 733b21) or some part of the animal
(GA 2.6 744a20–25, 4.4 772b15–16). To understand what Aristotle means
by “setting” consider this passage:
The male emits semen into the female and upon the entry of the semen the young animals are set
(συνίσταται) and assume their proper shape (λαμβάνει τὴν οἰκείαν μορφήν); with the viviparous
animals this stage takes place within the parent. (GA 2.1 733b20–23)
There are two ways in which we might interpret the claim in this passage
that “upon the entry of the semen the young animals are set and assume
their proper shape.” According to the first, “assume their proper shape” is a
gloss on “are set”; that is, an animal is not set until it has acquired its organs
and its shape. According to the second, the phrase refers to two events: in
the first, the animal is “set” when some primitive differentiation occurs in
the katamênia, prior to organ formation; and in a second, subsequent, phase
it acquires its proper shape over time as movements in the semen act on it.76
In some cases Aristotle employs the notion of “setting” to mean nothing
more complex than the differentiation of solids and liquids in the fetation,
or the separation of yolk and white in an egg, which is why the second
interpretation might seem correct.77 But in other cases, particularly in
discussions of viviparous animals, the first of these interpretations,
according to which animals are “set” only when their organs are formed, is
more likely. The reasons for this emerge from the claims Aristotle makes
about the actualization of soul in the fetation and the embryo.
It is clear that setting is associated with the actualization of the nutritive
soul. For example, Aristotle says that the power of the nutritive soul (ἡ τῆς
θρεπτικῆς ψυχῆς δύναμις) sets the natural object from the beginning while
it is being formed (ἐξ ἀρχῆς συνίστησι τὸ φύσει γιγνόμενον), just as, at a
later stage of the animal’s life, the power of the nutritive soul produces
growth out of nourishment (GA 2.4 740b29–741a4). Moreover, as we have
seen, Aristotle says that wind-eggs are set by the heat of the diaphragm in
some species (GA 3.1 750b3–751a13), and being set causes them to grow,
suggesting that their nutritive soul has been actualized to some degree
(although not completely, as Aristotle emphasizes). Setting always, then,
involves the actualization of the nutritive soul, and in some cases—the case
of the wind-egg—involves nothing more than the actualization of nutritive
soul.78
It cannot, however, be the case that in the setting of an animal fetation,
the nutritive soul is actualized without the sensitive soul, for several
reasons. First, since the soul is a unity, and sensation is the higher faculty,
the nutritive faculty is contained in the sensitive faculty (in the analogy of
soul faculties with geometrical figures) and cannot be actualized or
transmitted without the sensitive faculty (DA 2.3 414b28–32; see section
2.6.10). Second, the semen of the male is what sets the fetation, and it is
closely associated with the sensitive soul (GA 2.5 741a15–17; see section
2.3). Third, Aristotle says that no part of the animal body exists unless it has
sensitive soul:
It is impossible for any part of the body whatever (face, hand, flesh, etc.) to exist unless
sensitive soul is present in it, whether in actuality or potentiality, whether in some qualified
sense or without qualification. Otherwise what we have will be on a par with a dead body or a
dead limb. (GA 2.5 741a10–14)
The point of this passage is that an animal organ is such only when it
belongs to an animate body, but the phrasing makes clear that sensitive
soul, in some degree—potential or actual—is necessary for the formation
and operation of the parts of an animal’s body. This reminds us that in the
generation of an animal the actualization of soul must be the actualization
of sensitive soul in particular, if the animal offspring is to develop in a
directed way toward its specific telos. Even though the actualization of
nutritive soul is essential because it makes possible the nourishment of the
embryo, it is the actualization of sensitive soul that enables growth in the
sense that the embryo gains not only in size but also in formal features. So
when setting is brought about by male semen (rather than by the heat of the
female’s diaphragm, as in the case of wind-eggs) sensitive soul must be
produced in the embryo together with nutritive soul, and setting will
involve not the primitive differentiation and undirected growth of the
nutritive soul as in the case of wind-eggs, but the formation of organs. The
functional and teleological development of the embryo thus depends
crucially on the actualization of sensitive soul initiated by the male parent.
The actualization of both nutritive and sensitive soul in the katamênia,
the setting of the fetation, and the formation of the organs are then a single
event, as Aristotle describes it, although, as becomes clear, a single event
that in most animal species takes place over a protracted period of time. In
the generation of an animal “setting” is the prolonged process in which the
male semen (1) actualizes the potentialities for nutritive and sensitive soul
present in the katamênia, initiating directed growth and development, and
(2) forms the organs that are also potentially in the katamênia, and does so
sequentially, beginning with the heart.79 There is reason to think that the
transmission of sensitive soul and the formation of organs are not only
simultaneous, but coincident (see GA 4.3 767b16–21): as we saw earlier in
the discussion of wind-eggs (sections 2.6.4 and 2.6.5), should the katamênia
somehow (and exceptionally) be activated by the heat of the mother’s body
rather than by the movements in the vital heat of the father’s semen, it will
grow as an undifferentiated mass rather than develop as an animal embryo,
with differentiated organs. So vital or soul heat both initiates the production
of soul in the appropriate material, and at the same time separates solids
from fluids and forms the organs; the soul heat concocts the material and
purifies it, which means, as we have seen, that it excludes any “foreign”
matter not constitutive of the final product. Heat transforms matter at the
same time that it actualizes soul.
The association of the female with the passive potentiality for nutritive
soul and the material cause of generation, and of the male with sensitive
soul and the active potentiality to initiate the actualization of both nutritive
and sensitive soul, makes clear that Aristotle views the male principle as
active and superior with respect to the female principle. At the same time, it
is important to stress that he does not treat the female principle as soulless;
on the contrary, it has passive potentialities for soul that are essential for the
production of soul in the animal embryo, although incapable of initiating
the production of soul.
2.7.2 Two analogies with conception and embryonic development

The importance of the role of semen in “setting” and shaping the embryo is
emphasized by the two analogies, with cheese making and with certain
crafts, that Aristotle employs to illustrate the process of conception. The
first is one in which “setting” is likened to the formation of curds in milk
with the introduction of rennet or fig juice; in the same way, semen, when
introduced to katamênia, causes it to take shape. In the analogy with
sculptural crafts, the formation of organs in the embryo is compared to
certain crafts ( metalworking, carpentry, or pottery): as a craftsman, using
tools along with heat and cold, shapes the metal into a sword, the wood into
a bench, or the clay into a pot, so the male parent, using semen or (in the
case of some animals) acting directly, conveys motions to the katamênia
and thereby shapes it into an animal that resembles him both specifically
and individually. Each of these analogies illuminates Aristotle’s
understanding of the interaction of semen and katamênia in the process of
conception.
Consider first the analogy between curdling milk and setting, which
emphasizes the role of vital heat and explains the notion of setting:
The action of the semen of the male in setting the female’s secretion in the uterus is similar to
that of rennet upon milk. Rennet is milk which contains vital heat, as semen does, and this
integrates the homogeneous substance and makes it set. As the nature of milk and the menstrual
fluid is one and the same, the action of the semen (ἡ γονὴ) upon the substance of the menstrual
fluid (τὴν τῶν καταμηνίων φύσιν) is the same as that of rennet upon milk. Thus when the setting
is effected, i.e., when the bulky portion sets, the fluid portion comes off; and as the earthy
portion solidifies membranes form all round its outer surface. This is the result of necessity; but
also it is to serve a purpose (καὶ ἐξ ἀνάγκης καὶ ἕνεκά τινος): (a) necessity ordains that the
extreme surface of a thing should solidify when heated as well as when cooled; (b) it is requisite
that the young animal should not be situated in fluid but well away from it. (GA 2.4 739b21–
31)80
The analogy clearly describes one aspect of embryological development:

rennet, like semen, contains vital heat, and the effect of that heat is in the
one instance the formation of curds and in the other the solidifying of the
“earthy portion” of the katamênia and its enclosure in a membrane. This
analogy reminds us of the account of concoction as a process of
purification, in which matter that is extraneous to the ultimate product of
concoction is separated from that which will constitute the product, even as
shape is bestowed on that matter. As surfaces are formed, the embryo
begins to take shape. Notice that the rennet does not become part of the
whey; nor does the semen become part of the “earthy portion” that is
solidified and enclosed.
Aristotle’s use of the analogy with crafts also emphasizes that the male
sperma (by analogy with the craftsman) does not become part of the
offspring (by analogy with the product of craft), but the crafts analogy
speaks more to the role of movements in the semen in the formation of the
embryo. The role of the male is to transmit shape and form to the material
through movements. These may be directly transmitted, as a craftsman
might shape clay with his hands (in the case of certain animals that do not
produce male sperma) or indirectly transmitted, as a craftsman might
impose shape on metal by working with tools (in the case of animals that do
produce male sperma). In either case, the crafts analogy emphasizes that it
is shape and form, and not matter, that the male contributes to the offspring.
After all, the builder (ὁ τέκτων) is close by his timber, and the potter close by his clay; and to
put it in general terms, the working or treatment of any material, and the ultimate movement
which acts upon it, is in all cases close by the material, e.g., the location of the activity of house-
building (ἡ οἰκοδόμησις) is in the houses which are being built. These instances may help us to
understand how the male makes its contribution to generation; for not every male emits semen
(σπέρμα), and in the case of those which do, this semen is not a part of the fetation as it
develops. In the same way, nothing passes from the builder into the pieces of timber, which are
his material, and there is no part of the art of building (τῆς τεκτονικῆς) present in the object
which is being fashioned: it is the shape and the form which pass from the builder (ἡ μορφὴ καὶ
τὸ εἶδος ἀπ’ ἐκείνου), and they come into being (ἐγγίνεται) by means of the movement in the
material. It is his soul, wherein is the ‘form’ (τὸ εἶδος), and his knowledge, which cause his
hands . . . to move in a particular way . . . ; his hands move his tools and his tools move the
material. In a similar way to this, nature acting in the male of semen-emitting animals uses the
semen as a tool, as something that has movement in actuality; just as when objects are being
produced by any art the tools are in movement, because the movement which belongs to the art
is, in a way, situated in them. (GA 1.22 730b7–23)
The process of setting and the process of organ formation are not distinct in
time: the separation of solids from the surrounding liquid, the actualization
of soul in the various organs, and the formation of those organs must all
occur at the same time. And the similarity in emphases of the two analogies
used to describe the processes of conception suggests that these processes
are contemporaneous: as the male “sets” the katamênia into the fetation, he
also actualizes soul and shapes the organs.81
2.7.3 The role of movements in conception and embryonic

development
The movements in the semen drawn from the male’s body are the origin of
conception. Aristotle says:
If the seminal residue in the menstrual fluid is well concocted, the movement derived from the
male (ἡ τοῦ ἄρρενος κίνησις) will make the shape (τὴν μορφὴν) after its own pattern. (It comes
to the same thing whether we say “the semen” or “the movement which makes each of the parts
grow”; or whether we say “makes them grow” or “constitutes and ‘sets’ them from the
beginning”—because the logos of the movement is the same either way.) (GA 4.3 767b16–21).82
The movement in question is that described as “the same movement as that

in virtue of which the body grows through the distribution of the ultimate
nourishment [i.e., the blood]” (GA 2.3 737a18–20), as we saw in section
2.6.1. That is, the movements that make a body grow after birth are the
same as the movements that bring into being the parts of the embryo and
make them grow. It is “the logos of the movement” that determines the
shape and form of the offspring. Aristotle uses logos to refer to the form or
nature of something. Sometimes this is a reference to the proportion of
elements in a substance (e.g., at GA 2.1 734b34, where he says that while
heat and cold produce hardness, softness, and other physical attributes of
matter, they do not produce the logos in consequence of which one thing is
flesh and another bone). But the logos of a movement will not be a
proportion of elements, but rather a capacity to produce form in the sense of
shape and function. References to “the semen” or even “the male” are
abbreviated ways of speaking of this logos of the movement as the agent or
efficient cause of conception.83 The movements cause the menses to set and
shape it into the appropriate animal form:
Some males do not emit semen, but, just as the ones which emit semen fashion (δημιουργεῖ) the
creature that is taking shape out of the material supplied by the female by the agency of the
movement (τῇ κινήσει) resident in the semen, so these fashion it into shape by the agency of the
movement which resides in that part of themselves whence the semen is secreted [later specified
as “the region around the diaphragm”/where warmth is]; they produce this same effect of
causing the material to set. (GA 2.4 738b11–15)
Again at Generation of Animals 4.3 768a16 Aristotle refers to the
movements as αἱ δημιουργοῦσαι, which makes clear that they fashion or
shape the offspring and also give it life, which is to say, give it soul.84 In a
passage at 4.3 767b36–38 Aristotle indicates that the movements are drawn
from or derived from (ἀπὸ) the dunameis in the semen, where these are
identified as the potentialities for resemblance at different levels of
characterization (individual parent, species, genus). This is how the
movements can be responsible for setting and forming the offspring such
that it resembles its parents—the movements come from the potentialities,
and the potentialities are ways in which the offspring will resemble its
parents with respect first to soul faculties, and then also, and as a result,
with respect to the organs of its body:85 “If, however, it [the movement]
fails to gain the mastery, whatever be the dunamis in respect of which it has
not gained the mastery, in that dunamis it makes the offspring deficient”
(GA 4.3 767b23–24). So the movement in the sperma comes from the
potentialities of soul (which, we have seen, are drawn from the vital heat of
the pneuma in the sperma) and also produces (or fails to produce) those
potentialities in the offspring. We will see that the katamênia too has
movements, which must either be mastered, and so suppressed, by the male
movement, or, when that fails, actualized through a failure of mastery.
Aristotle says that what causes the spermata to be generative is “the hot”
in them (GA 2.3 736b34–35), which is the soul heat, and hence the source
of the dunameis or potentialities from which the movements are drawn.
This soul heat is in the pneuma that constitutes in part the spermata. But the
movements also use heat and cold as instruments, drawing on pneuma that
is produced when the hot (in the soul heat of the semen), which is an active
power, meets the moist (in the katamênia), which is a passive power (GA
2.6 742a15–16). As we have seen, while pneuma is always described as hot,
the movements that form the embryo use pneuma both to heat and to chill,
because both hot and cold are capable of setting and solidifying the
homeomerous parts (GA 2.6 743a5–6). There is then reason to believe that
pneuma must be capable both of cooling and of heating in order to explain
its role in the formation of the embryo.86 In the Movement of Animals 10
703a10 Aristotle mentions the “innate pneuma” (πνεῦμα σύμφυτον)—
something that animals have and that allows them to move themselves
through processes of contraction and expansion (MA 10 703a20–21), which
Aristotle here and at De anima 3.10 433b18 associates with movements of
pushing and pulling.87 This suggests that heating and cooling are used to
produce contractions and expansions, pulling and pushing the matter in
order to shape the embryo.
At Generation of Animals 2.6 741b37 Aristotle says that the parts of the
embryo are differentiated or defined (διορίζεται), by pneuma that results
from necessity (742a15–16). He reiterates the point in a more general way
in Book 5, saying that many things are made by means of pneuma as an
instrument, although they also have a final cause (GA 5.8 789b8–9). That is,
final causation is consistent with the use of other causes as instruments. We
know that the pneuma in the semen contains the vital heat that gives rise to
the movements that act on the katamênia. At the same time, when the hot
meets the moist, that action produces further pneuma which is then used by
the movements, to cool and heat, expand and contract, push and pull the
matter in order to shape the organs of the embryonic body. There is a
parallel between the process by which the body moves itself, when the
faculty of desire (ὀρεκτικὴ ψυχή) sets in motion the pneuma and pneuma
sets in motion the limbs, and the process by which the embryo is formed,
when the nutritive faculty (θρεπτικὴ ψυχή) sets in motion the pneuma, and
pneuma sets in motion the katamênia. In both cases no material part passes
from the pneuma to the material on which it acts, just as the carpenter at
Generation of Animals 1.22 730b12–15 transmits no material to the matter
on which he acts.88
The dunamis of the nutritive soul behaves in the same way [as the dunamis of the arts]. Just as,
in the independently existing animal or plant, this soul, which uses heat and cold as its
instruments (for it is in these that its movement subsists [ἐν γὰρ τούτοις ἡ κίνησις ἐκείνης]),
each several thing being formed according to some definite logos), at a later stage produces
growth out of the nourishment supplied, so in precisely the same way at the very outset, this
soul, while the natural object is being formed, causes it to be set and constituted; since, as the
matter from which the object derives its growth is identical with that out of which it was
originally set and constituted (ἐξ ἧς συνίσταται τὸ πρῶτον), so too the dunamis which fashions
the object is identical. If, then, this is the nutritive soul, this it is which also generates the object.
And this part of soul it is which is the nature of each several object, being present alike in plants
and in animals one and all, whereas the other parts of soul, while present in some living things,
are absent from others. (GA 2.4 740b29–741a4)
The movements in the semen are active potentialities for soul; when the
fetation is formed the active potential for sensitive soul actualizes the
passive potential for nutritive and sensitive soul in the katamênia. “This
soul,” or “this part of soul,” that is, the nutritive soul, generates the embryo
and then causes it to grow; it generates it from the katamênia, and the
katamênia then also serves as “the matter from which” the embryo derives
its growth. The nutritive soul “is the nature of each several object” just
because it is fundamental to any living thing, whether plant, non-human
animal, or human. The dunamis of the nutritive soul in the fetation, which is
to say the potentiality or capacity of the nutritive faculty, is not identical
with the dunamis that is found in the katamênia; it is rather that dunamis
actualized by the movements in the semen to the point that it is now a
capacity for growth directed at a determinate end—that end determined by
the nature of the species (and so a higher-level potentiality because it is
closer to the telos of the process).
The idea that conception and embryonic development unfold through the
use of tools is a recurrent theme in Aristotle’s account, and one that is
prominent in the analogy with craftsmanship. In the passage at GA 1.22
730b7–23, we saw Aristotle say that “nature acting in the male of semen-
emitting animals uses the semen as a tool, as something that has movement
in actuality; just as when objects are being produced by any art the tools are
in movement, because the movement which belongs to the art is, in a way,
situated in them” (GA 1.22 730b19–23). Although in this passage it is the
semen that is described as a tool of nature, it is more properly the
movements in the semen that are the tool, and the movements are then a tool
that uses tools—heat and cold—to produce their effects. In calling heat and
cold the tools of the movements, Aristotle is signaling that they are
subordinate to the determinations of the movements, which aim to shape a
being of a particular form, with certain functions.89
2.7.4 Conception and final causation

The emphasis on the importance of movements adds an important
corrective to some passages in which Aristotle suggests that material
necessity alone, without final causation, might be responsible for the
process of “setting.” So, for example, in the analogy with rennet and milk,
Aristotle says that rennet is milk that contains vital heat (θερμότητα
ζωτικὴν), just as semen does, and that it is this vital heat that “integrates the
homogeneous substance and makes it set” (GA 2.4 739b23–25). But the
heat in question is identified with “soul heat” in a passage where Aristotle
discusses the growth of eggs, and compares it with the action of yeast: in
the case of animals “the nature of the soul-heat” shapes this growth
(δημιουργεῖ δὲ τοῦτο ἡ τοῦ ψυχικοῦ θερμοῦ φύσις) (GA 3.4 755a19–20).
He adds, “Eggs thus grow of necessity (ἐξ ἀνάγκης) on account of this
cause (i.e., they contain a yeast-like residue), but also they grow for the
sake of what is better (χάριν δὲ τοῦ βελτίονος), since it is impossible for
them to obtain all their growth in the uterus owing to the prolific habit of
these animals” (GA 3.4 755a22–26). Conception in viviparous animals thus
occurs both for the better and out of necessity, in just the same way that the
growth of eggs does. The movements aim at a telos and so have a final
cause, but they use heat and cold as instruments precisely because of the
necessary effects of those instruments (we saw earlier that Aristotle makes
clear at GA 5.8 789b8–9 that it is quite possible to have final causation
operate by using tools that arise from material necessity, as when pneuma is
produced when the hot meets the moist, and pneuma provides the heat and
cold necessary to allow the movements to fashion the embryo).
So the process of setting and shaping the embryo occurs by means of
movements, heat, and cold, but it is a process with a final cause, the
production of a living being of a given type. The crafts analogy again serves
to illustrate how this might work:
Exactly the same happens with things formed by the processes of the arts. Heat and cold soften
and harden the iron, but they do not produce the sword; this is done by the movement of the
instruments employed, which contains the logos of the art; since the art is both the principle and
form of the thing which is produced; but it is located elsewhere than in that thing, whereas
nature’s movement is located in the thing itself which is produced, and it is derived from another
natural organism which possesses the form in actuality. (GA 2.1 734b36–735a5)
Just as heat and cold act on the iron but do not produce the sword, so too
they act on the katamênia but do not generate the animal. It is the
movements in the sperma of the male, which shape and form the katamênia
into the organs of the body, using heat and cold to soften and harden the
material as necessary, that generate the animal. The crafts analogy confirms,
then, that the movements are the efficient cause of generation, although
they make use of heat and cold to arrive at the telos of generation, the
individual living being. I will return to questions of necessity and final
causation in the determination of sex in the next section.
To summarize the process of conception on Aristotle’s account: Both
parents have a fertile residue in which pneuma is present, and that pneuma
contains “soul heat,” which has dunameis (potentialities or powers). The
male parent is the efficient cause of generation because he contributes the
sperma that has the “principle of soul,” which is the active potentiality for
sensitive soul. This principle is present in the soul heat from which the
movements that actualize the potential for nutritive soul in the katamênia
are drawn, and those movements confer on the fetation and the embryo a
higher potential for sensitive soul. These movements, using heat and cold as
tools, set and shape the embryo, simultaneously actualizing the various
nutritive, reproductive, and sensitive capacities that characterize the animal
species in question and causing it to grow toward its mature form. This
account deflates somewhat the notion of a peculiarly male agency: heat and
cold are tools of the movements, which are in turn tools of the semen,
which is itself a tool of nature. The male animal, as much as the female
animal, is used by nature for its own purposes. In the next section I take up
the question of the determination of sex as an aspect of this process of
embryonic development.
2.8 The determination of sex in the embryo

2.8.1 Introduction
This section considers the organic development of the embryo in a
viviparous animal, as described in Generation of Animals Book 2, and in
particular how sex is determined in individual animals in the course of that
development, which Aristotle discusses later, in Book 4.1–2. We might
wonder why he does not deal with the question of the determination of sex
in Book 1 when he first raises the issue, or in Book 2, as part of the account
of embryological development. At Generation of Animals 1.2 716a20–b15,
there is a brief discussion of sexual differentiation, in which Aristotle
indicates that because male and female have different powers they must
also have different organs, and that the constitution of those organs will be
part of embryological development; at 4.1–2 there is an extended discussion
of the reasons an individual animal becomes male or female, and the way in
which sex is developed in the embryo. This is an instance of Aristotle
sketching a general account of a phenomenon, in this case sexual
differentiation, early in a work, before going on to consider that
phenomenon in more detail and specificity later.90 But another
consideration helps to explain why Aristotle delays the more detailed
discussion of the determination of sex to Book 4. The sketch in Book 1
offers no explanation of the determination of sex in the individual; it
emphasizes that once sex has been determined, the organs will develop in
somewhat different ways in male and female animals because they possess
different causal principles of generation. This emphasis is the result of
Aristotle’s interest, in Books 1 and 2, in the different roles that male and
female animals play in generation. By contrast, in Generation of Animals
4.1–2 he is interested in why, and how, an individual animal becomes male
or female, and so he needs to explain why one animal is formed with the
capacities and organs of a male, and another with the capacities and organs
of a female. That is, in Books 1 and 2 Aristotle offers us a theory of sex as a
difference in causal principles, in organs, and in capacities, as we have seen
in sections 2.3–2.6; in Book 4 he offers us an explanation of the origin of
these differences, in the determination of an individual animal as male or
female. That this discussion occurs in Book 4 signals that Aristotle believes
that the question of the determination of sex is problematic in some way
(see section 2.1 for a discussion of the structure of the Generation of
Animals). But to understand the explanation of the determination of sex, we
must first consider his general account of embryogenesis in Generation of
Animals 1–2.
As we have seen, in the passage at Generation of Animals 2.3 737a18–
30 Aristotle says that the female residue, the katamênia, contains
potentially all the organs of the body, including the sexual organs (“those
parts which distinguish the two sexes”). Since the katamênia is capable of
developing into an animal of either sex (GA 2.3 737a23–25), it follows that
it contains potentially both male and female sexual organs. In the same
passage Aristotle says that the semen has those movements “in virtue of
which the body grows” through the distribution of concocted food, which it
imparts to the katamênia; this is what it means to say that the semen
actualizes the nutritive soul that is potentially in the katamênia. In sections
2.3 and 2.4 we saw that the capacity or incapacity of the nutritive soul to
concoct blood into semen is the factor that distinguishes the sexes in many
animal species. So in the first instance it will be the movements of the male
semen in interaction with the katamênia that cause the embryo to acquire a
nutritive soul with, or without, that capacity—and hence to determine the
sex of the embryo. That is, sex is determined as the nutritive soul is
actualized in the embryo. That actualization, as we have seen, is a process
through which the embryo acquires certain capacities at the same time that
the organs necessary for the nutritive and reproductive capacities are
formed.
2.8.2 The formation of organs in the embryo

Before offering his account of embryological development, Aristotle
considers different possible causal mechanisms: (1) that the parts of the
body are formed successively (a) because the movements in the semen
produce one organ, and then that organ produces others in a sequence, or
(b) because the movements in the semen form all the organs successively;
or (2) that all the organs are produced simultaneously by the movements in
the semen (GA 2.1 734a16–19). He dismisses (2) because “our senses tell
us plainly that this does not happen: some of the parts are clearly to be seen
present in the embryo while others are not” (GA 2.1 734a21–23). He also
dismisses (1)(a) because the form of an organ must be brought about by
something that actually has that form, and if one organ produced the others,
then that first organ would have to have the forms of the others, which, says
Aristotle, is absurd (GA 2.1 734a30–33). So (1)(b) must be the causal
mechanism of embryonic development: as the movements in the semen that
determine each organ cease successively, each part is formed and acquires
soul (GA 2.1 734b24–25). That is, the movements form each part
successively and invest it with soul:
The cause of this process of formation is not any part of the body, but the external agent which
first set the movement going (τὸ πρῶτον κινῆσαν ἔξωθεν)—for of course nothing generates
itself, though as soon as it has been formed a thing makes itself grow. That is why one part is
formed first, not all the parts simultaneously. And the part which must of necessity be formed
first is the one which possesses the principle of growth (ὅ αὐξήσεως ἀρχὴν ἔχει): be they plants
or animals, this, the nutritive, faculty (τὸ θρεπτικόν) is present in all of them alike (this also is
the faculty of generating another creature like itself, since this is a function which belongs to
every animal and plant that is perfect in its nature). . . . So then, since it makes itself grow, it is
something: and if indeed it is some one thing, and if it is this first of all, then this must of
necessity be formed first. Thus, if the heart is formed first in certain animals (or the part
analogous to the heart, in those animals which have no heart) we may suppose that it is the heart
(or its analogue) which supplies the principle. (GA 2.1 735a12–26)
So, while the formation of the heart allows the embryo to nourish itself, the
semen must continue to be present in the uterus, and its movements
operating, so long as the embryonic organs are being formed; the
movements are formative but not nutritive.91 Although the organs of the
body are developed successively, Aristotle allows that the formation of the
homeomerous parts and the anhomeomerous parts occurs simultaneously.
The process is accomplished by the movements, which produce soul, and
produce the logos, which here must refer both to the blend of elementary
bodies, and to the functional capacities, “in direct consequence of which
one thing is flesh and another bone” (GA 2.1 734b31–34).92 The
movements also use heat and cold to produce such features as hardness,
softness, toughness, brittleness, and other physical qualities.
The mechanics of this process are then: each one of the parts is formed
and acquires soul (in the sense that a heart is not a heart unless it has soul in
it, i.e., has the capacity to function as a heart). The heart is formed first on
Aristotle’s account and is responsible for the growth of the animal, because,
as we have seen, it possesses the “principle” or “origin” of growth: it
produces the blood which nourishes the embryo as it develops. This is the
same principle described in the Parts of Animals as the “principle of life,”
since Aristotle associates all forms of life with a capacity for growth. The
heart, while it is responsible for growth, is not responsible for the formation
of the other parts of the animal (because it cannot transmit the form of each
organ), which are set and shaped successively by the movements in the
semen. Animal soul is then actualized progressively through the formation
of the various organs and the activation of the capacities that require those
organs. Aristotle indicates that with the formation of the heart we can say
that an animal has been formed, but not yet that an animal of a particular
species has been formed. The embryo acquires sensitive soul as it develops
and is thus an animal from the inception of its sensitive capacities with the
formation of the heart, but “it is not the fact that when an animal is formed
at that same moment a human being, or a horse, or any other particular sort
of animal is formed” (GA 2.3 736b1–5). The species-specific
characteristics, the organs and capacities that distinguish one kind of animal
from another, are formed at the end of the process of development.93
With the formation of the heart and the actualization of its capacity for
pneumatizing the blood, an animal is determined as male or female in the
sense that the principle of maleness or femaleness is fixed. The animal will
not actually be male or female until the organs necessary to carry out the
work of that principle have been formed. In other words, although the sex
of the offspring is determined when its heart is formed and its capacity to
concoct is established, the individual is not actually male or female—but
only potentially male or female—until the sexual organs have been formed
(GA 4.1 766b3–8). But this potentiality is a higher degree of potentiality
than that of the katamênia, which is potentially male-or-female, whereas the
embryo is potentially male or potentially female once its capacity for
concoction has been determined.
2.8.3 Two questions about the determination of sex

Two related questions emerge from Aristotle’s account of sex
determination. First, ought we to understand the determination of sex as an
instance of the mechanisms of inheritance that Aristotle discusses? Does an
animal inherit maleness from its father or femaleness from its mother?
Second, is the sex of an individual an essential feature of the animal, or an
accidental feature? Or is it somehow a mistake to suppose that it must be
one or the other? Three options have been explored in recent scholarship:
either (1) sex in an individual is not an inherited feature but rather an
accident of the matter, (2) sex in an individual is inherited and is an
essential feature, or (3) sex is inherited but is not an essential feature.94 The
questions are connected, because if we assume that sex is a question of
inherited resemblance (so that, for example, a female animal is female
because it resembles its mother in that respect), then the issue is whether
sex is determined in the way that an accidental heritable feature is
determined (e.g., the shape of a snout), or rather in the way that an essential
heritable feature is determined (e.g., the formation of lungs in mammals), or
in some other way. In what follows I argue for the third of these options:
sex is heritable and non-essential to the individual.
2.8.4 The different kinds of movements in the semen

To understand sex in the individual as heritable but non-essential, we have
to consider the different kinds of movements that Aristotle distinguishes in
the male semen:
Some of the movements [in the spermata] (those of the male parent (τοῦ γεννῶντος) and those
of the universal (τῶν καθόλου), e.g., of person and animal) are present in [the semen] in
actuality, others (those of the female and those of ancestors) are present [in menses and, in the
case of ancestors, also in the semen] potentially. (GA 4.3 768a11–14)
The “potential” movements of the female will be in the menses; this makes
sense, and it is consistent with the use of the term sperma (which, as we
have seen, can refer to both male and female fertile residue) rather than
gonê (which Aristotle generally reserves for semen) in the phrase “αἱ
κινήσεις ἐν τοῖς σπέρμασι” at Generation of Animals 4.3 767b37.95 Let us
set aside these potential movements for the moment to focus on the actual
movements.
The actual movements are distinguished as (1) the movements of the
male parent and (2) the movements of the kinds to which that individual
belongs, that is, the species and genera. The latter (2) include both the
movements that determine the offspring as an animal and those that
determine it as an animal of a particular species. So, for example, a male
hedgehog will produce semen that has movements that determine the
offspring as an animal in genus and ultimately as a hedgehog in species. As
we saw in section 2.8.2, Aristotle says at Generation of Animals 2.3 736b1–
5 that an animal is formed before an animal of a particular species is
formed, suggesting that there is a phase during which the embryo belongs to
the genus animal but to no particular species. The movements that
determine the offspring as an animal will precede the movements that
determine the offspring as a hedgehog, and those movements will in turn
precede the movements that determine it as a hedgehog resembling its
parents. The stage during which the embryo is determined as an animal, but
not yet a member of a particular species, will likely also be the stage at
which it is determined as male or female. This is what we might expect
from the Metaphysics claim that sex is a distinction in the matter of the
genus (since the widest genus will be animal), and also what follows from
the claim that sex is determined in the first instance by the capacity of the
heart to concoct residual blood into semen (since the heart is the first organ
formed, prior to the development of features peculiar to the species).
The movements of the male parent (1) are twofold: (1)(a) movements of
the male and (1)(b) movements of the father. Although Aristotle thinks that
the difference in these movements is small, and in fact that they often
coincide, he allows that the movements governing maleness and the
movements governing the individual father are not identical:
Usually the natural course of events is that when [the movement of the male parent] gains the
mastery—and when it is mastered— it will do so both qua male (ᾗ ἄρρεν) and qua father (ᾗ
πατὴρ), since the difference between the two [movements] is a small one and so there is no
difficulty in their both coinciding. For Socrates is a man who, while he has the characteristics of
a kind, is also an individual (ὁ γὰρ Σωκράτης ἀνὴρ τοιόσδε τις). (GA 4.3 768a22–24)96
In this case, the “kind” is not a genus or species, but a sex: Socrates has the
characteristics of the male sex, as well as the characteristics that pick him
out as the individual Socrates, distinct from other males of the same
species. The movements that make the offspring a male are distinct, then,
from the movements that make the offspring resemble his father in other
respects. One might be a male person without resembling Socrates beyond a
resemblance of species and sex. This is consistent with Aristotle’s
understanding of maleness and femaleness as attributes that belong properly
speaking to the genus of animal. In other words, the “movements of the
male” derive from the male parent qua male animal of a certain species,
whereas the “movements of the father” are the movements that derive from
the male parent as an individual.97
Although the “movements of the male” determine the offspring as an
animal rather than as an individual, they are grouped with the “movements
of the father,” which determine the offspring as an individual, rather than
with the “movements of the universal,” as we might expect. This is because
the movements of the male, like the movements of the father, are non-
essential, since neither being male nor resembling one’s father as an
individual is an essential feature of any animal. The movements of both
male and father transmit heritable features, but those features are not part of
the species form and so are non-essential features of the offspring.98 If it is
clear that a snout shaped like one’s father’s is not part of the species form, it
is also clear that neither maleness nor femaleness is part of the essential
form. We know this from the discussion of the nature of sexual difference in
Metaphysics 10.9, explored in section 2.2: the difference of sex is a
difference at the level of the genus animal, but it is a difference in the
matter and not in the form of the genus. So the determination of sex is more
like the determination of a particular slant of snout than like the
determination of, for example, functional lungs.
We know, however, that the offspring must be determined as an animal
and as a member of a particular species at the moment when the fetation is
first formed and the movements begin to actualize the nutritive soul that is
potentially in the menses; otherwise, the formation of the organs peculiar to
animals and to species could not be successively formed. So we must
assume that the movements of the universal (i.e., of animal, and of species)
operate first and continue operating as the various organs of the animal are
formed. The movements of the male, the movements that determine sex,
will operate simultaneously with these universal movements (of the genus
and species), and prior to the movements of the individual father (although
eventually these movements may all work in conjunction). Sex is
determined in the first instance, as we have seen, by the capacity to concoct
residual blood into either semen or katamênia. That capacity, as we have
seen, is determined by the individual’s ability to transmit soul heat to the
residual blood. And that capacity is in turn determined by the ability of the
heart (in the first instance) to add pneuma to the blood, a capacity that will
differ in degree between male and female because of the size of the heart
(see section 2.4.3). The heart is the first organ to be formed in the embryo
(because it produces the blood that nourishes the embryo as it grows), prior
to any of the features whereby the offspring might resemble its father as an
individual. The universal movements—of genus and species, but also of
male—will then be followed by the movements of the father, that is, the
movements that govern resemblance to the individual male.99
2.8.5 How sex is determined in the embryo

It is clear, then, that sex is heritable but non-essential, and is determined
along with the genus and species from the moment that the heart is formed
and functional. The question now is: what determines whether a given
animal is male or female? This amounts to the question: why do some
animal offspring have bodies that can concoct residual blood to the degree
that sperma is generated with the active power to produce sensitive soul,
and some have bodies that can concoct the blood only to the degree that
sperma is generated with the passive power to have nutritive and sensitive
soul produced in it? As we might expect, it is the movements in the semen
—more specifically, the movements of the male rather than those of the
father or of the universal—that determine the sex. They do so in interaction
with the katamênia. The production of a male is the best result of this
interaction.100 The embryo is determined as female when the semen is
imperfectly concocted, so that its movements are too weak (due to
“deficient potency in the concocting and motive agent”), or, alternatively,
when the katamênia is imperfectly concocted and so too dense and cold
(owing to “the bulk and coldness of that which is being concocted and
articulated”) (GA 4.3 768b26–28). In the best case, the production of a
male, the katamênia (“that which is acted upon”) is “mastered” by the
semen (“that which acts upon it”)—or more precisely, is mastered by the
movements of the male in the semen.
Therefore, it is from the faculties (ἀπὸ τῶν δυνάμεων) of all such things as these that the
movements which are present in the spermata [i.e., male semen and female katamênia] are
derived, potentially even from the faculties of earlier ancestors, but more especially of that
which on each occasion stands closer to some individual; and by individual I mean Coriscus, or
Socrates. Now everything, when it departs from type, passes not into any casual thing but into
its own opposite; thus applying this to the process of generation, the stuff which does not get
mastered must of necessity depart from type and become the opposite in respect of that faculty
wherein the generative and motive agent has failed to gain the mastery. Hence if this is the
faculty in virtue of which the agent is male, then the offspring formed is female; if it is that in
virtue of which the agent is Coriscus or Socrates, then the offspring formed does not take after
its father but after its mother, since, just as “mother” is the opposite of “father” as a general
term, so also the individual mother is the opposite of the individual father. (GA 4.3 767b36–
768a9)
The “faculties” in this passage are dunameis or potentialities, and Aristotle

has made clear that these are the origins of the movements that will cause
the offspring to resemble its male parent with respect to sex, species, or
individual characteristics (GA 4.3 767b23–26). He calls the process of
“departing from type”—diverging from resemblance to the parent in one of
these respects—a “changing-over” or “departure” (ἔκστασις), and he uses
this mechanism to explain not only how females are produced, but more
generally to explain why an offspring might resemble its mother in any
respect (GA 4.3 767b36–768a15). Aristotle needs a special explanation for
the phenomenon of maternal resemblance because he claims that the father
is the efficient cause of generation in that semen produces the sensitive soul
that should in the ordinary course of conception and generation determine
not only the generic and specific features of the offspring, but also its
resemblance to its father (through the “movements of the father”).101
If, in ideal circumstances, the offspring resembles its father in sex as in
other non-essential features, and if we treat the resemblances in the case of
other non-essential features as heritable traits, then we should treat sex, too,
as a heritable feature of the animal—and not only in the ideal case where it
is determined as male. That is, Aristotle treats sex determination as a matter
of resemblance, and the production of a female as a case in which the
offspring resembles its female parent rather than its male parent with
respect to sex, when (and because) the “movements of the male” fail to
master the female residue. We saw in section 2.5 that matter is mastered
when it is concocted and perfected, when the vital heat and the movements
in that vital heat bestow form (i.e., when they “determine, conjoin, and
change” the matter that is mastered). We also saw that the dunamis of the
female, the potential for nutritive (and sensitive) soul, is a passive
potentiality in the katamênia. At Generation of Animals 4.3 768a14, as we
saw earlier in this section, Aristotle refers to the “movements of the female”
(αἰ τοῦ θήλεος) as present potentially (GA 4.3 768a11–14). It makes better
sense both of the immediate passage and of Aristotle’s account of the
potentialities of katamênia to suppose that these movements are “in” the
dunameis of the katamênia rather than somehow in the semen.102 As
potential movements, rather than actual movements, they must be
actualized in order to take effect, and they are actualized only when the
katamênia is able to offer some (passive) resistance to the movements in the
semen, whether that resistance is possible because of a deficiency in
strength in the actual movements of the semen or because of a great density
and coldness in the katamênia itself. Mastery in the case of sex
determination is, then, a question of preserving and imposing the actual
movements of the male in the semen, and suppressing the potential
movements of the female in the katamênia:
If the seminal residue in the menstrual fluid is well-concocted, the movement derived from the
male will make the shape after its own pattern (καθ’ἁυτὴν ποιήσει τὴν μορφὴν). . . . So that if
this movement gains the mastery it will make a male and not a female, and a male which takes
after its father, not after its mother; if, however, it fails to gain the mastery, whatever be the
faculty [δύναμις] in respect of which it has not gained the mastery, in that faculty it makes the
offspring deficient. (GA 4.3 767b16–23)
The “potential” movements that are actualized when the movements of the
male fail to gain mastery are the movements of the female, those that
determine the capacity of the heart (and other organs) to introduce soul heat
to a certain, limited degree into the blood in such a way that it can be
concocted to the point where it is menses, but not beyond that to the point
where it is semen.
The sex of an animal is, then, determined early in the process of
conception, according to whether the movements of the male in the semen
are able to master the katamênia, where the physical consequence of
mastery is the formation of a heart with the capacity to concoct the blood up
to the point where it is semen, and the failure of mastery results in a heart
with the capacity to concoct the blood, but only up to the point that it is
katamênia—although this difference is likely to be simply one of size. As
we saw in section 2.4.3, there is little evidence that the hearts of male and
female are different in morphology or physiology, although the male heart
is able to provide a higher degree of heat, probably because it is larger. At
any rate, the capacity of the heart to concoct residual blood into a fertile
residue distinguishes male from female at the outset—that is, it establishes
for any given individual that it will have either the male principle or the
female principle. This is clear, as Aristotle argues that the sexual organs that
are formed subsequent to the heart have already been determined to be male
or female.
2.8.6 The formation of sexual organs

There is another question concerned with sex determination: why do the
sexual organs that characterize male or female generally accord with the
capacity or incapacity of the heart to concoct the blood? That is, why do
male genitals generally accompany hearts that can pneumatize the excess
blood up to the point where it becomes sperma that can produce sensitive
soul, and female genitals generally accompany hearts that cannot? Aristotle
poses a question:
Considering the matter generally: to hold that the superiority of one part prevails and that this is
what makes the embryo female is certainly better than saying that heat alone is the cause
without having stopped to think about it; but the fact that at the same time the shape of the
genitals (τὴν τοῦ αἰδοίου μορφὴν) as well is different requires an explanation to show why these
parts are always of a piece with each other. If the answer is “Because they are in close
proximity,” then every one of the remaining parts ought to be all of a piece as well. (GA 4.1
764b21–26)
He is discussing Empedocles and disputing preformationist theories, but for

our purposes what is important here is his recognition that he needs to
explain why the different parts of the body necessary for the execution of
either the male or female role in generation can be counted on reliably to
occur together, rather than being mixed up, according to whether the
movements drawn from each part either master or fail to master the
menstrual fluid. The question, then, is why the principle of sex (the capacity
to transmit soul heat) and the organs that support that principle (male or
female, depending on the degree of the capacity) regularly conform to one
another. Aristotle says:
It is fantastic to imagine that these parts alone can be formed, without the whole body also
having undergone a change, and first and foremost the blood vessels, on to which the fleshy
structure of the body has been applied all round, as on to a framework. And it is reasonable to
suppose not that the blood vessels have been formed to be of a particular character on account of
the uterus, but rather that the uterus has been so formed on account of them, since although each
is a receptacle of blood in some form, the blood-vessels are prior to the uterus; and the motive
principle must of necessity be prior always and be the cause of the process of formation in virtue
of possessing a particular character. So then, this difference of the sexual parts as between males
and females is a contingent phenomenon (συμβαίνει μὲν οὖν ἡ διαφορὰ τῶν μερῶν τούτων πρὸς
ἄλληλα τοῖς θήλεσι και τοῖς ἄρρεσιν): we must not look upon it as being a principle or a cause:
this function is fulfilled by something else, even though no semen at all is discharged either by
the female or by the male and whatever the manner may really be by which the forming creature
takes shape. (GA 4.1 764b28–765a3)
The reasoning in this passage begins with the supposition that the blood
vessels are “prior” to the sexual organs, and that therefore the development
of the sexual organs is contingent on the prior development of certain
vascular structures. Aristotle does not say, but we have to assume, that the
heart is prior to the blood vessels in the same way that the blood vessels are
prior to the sexual organs. If that is right, then the blood vessels develop as
they do in order to support the function of the heart, and so their formation
requires the prior formation of the heart. The primary function of the
vascular system is nourishment: it carries the ultimate nutriment (blood) to
all the parts of the body, both during and after embryogenesis. Nourishment
and generation are both functions of the nutritive soul (DA 2.4 415a23–27).
Since the body usually produces a residue of blood, and that blood is to be
concocted further to produce fertile residues that allow for generation, the
body requires organs that can concoct and house the fertile residues. The
sexual organs cannot be formed before they can be supplied with nourishing
blood. This is true of many organs, but the sexual organs are unusual in that
they not only are nourished with blood, but also contain the product of
concocted residual blood—the fertile residues. So while the uterus, like the
vascular system, is a vessel for blood, its formation requires the prior
formation of the blood vessels. The sexual organs are not a cause or
principle in that they are contingent on the vascular system, and so they are
not formed early in the process of embryogenesis. The reason, then, that the
sexual organs in an individual animal conform to the principle of sex—
conform, that is, to the capacity for concocting the residual blood that the
animal possesses—is that the sexual organs and the blood vessels develop
in order to support the function of concoction, nourishment, and generation,
and only once those functions have been determined. This is a
manifestation of the general principle that organs are for the sake of
functions and so develop in order to serve those functions. If the capacity
for concoction in the heart is limited, then the vascular system and the
sexual organs will develop in conformity with that (in)capacity, and the
sexual organs of the female will be the result.103
Aristotle’s account of the determination of sex relies on the notions of
success and failure in mastery, and resemblance and deviation from
resemblance: if the movements in the semen master the katamênia, they
ensure a resemblance to the male parent with respect to sex; if they fail to
master the katamênia in that respect, they actualize a potential in the
katamênia for a resemblance to the female parent. In using these notions
Aristotle makes clear that he understands the determination of sex to be a
part of the mechanism of inherited resemblance, through which, in ideal
circumstances, an animal takes after its male parent, both at the level of the
universal (in genus, species, and sex) and at the level of the individual.104
So, for example, hedgehog infants should resemble male hedgehog adults
more than any other animal with respect to genus, species, and sex; and any
given offspring should resemble its father more closely than it resembles
other adults of the same species. To be male, then, is to inherit maleness
from the male parent, and to conform to the ideal instantiation of the genus
in this respect; to be female is to inherit femaleness from the female parent,
and hence to depart from the ideal instantiation of the kind (παρεκβέβηκε
γὰρ ἠ φύσις ἐν τούτοις ἐκ τοῦ γένους τρόπον τίνα) and to be imperfect, at
least in that respect (GA 4.3 767b7–8).
Although Aristotle states clearly that a female is, as such, a monstrosity,
he adds that the formation of female animals is itself natural and necessary
(ἀλλ’ αὕτη μὲν ἀναγκαία τῇ φύσει) (GA 4.3 767b8–9). To understand how
the female can be both a monstrosity (which is to say, a departure or
deviation from a norm) and at the same time necessary by nature, we need
to consider a number of questions that concern the relationship of final
cause to necessity in the phenomena of sexual difference. In the next
section I take up these questions, including (in section 2.9.4) one that
concerns the nature of the norm that the female departs from—is it that of
the essential form of the species, or of maleness, or some other norm?
2.9 The female as natural, necessary, and defective
2.9.1 Introduction
We have seen that Aristotle portrays embryological development as a
teleological process, which is to say that he understands embryogenesis as a
process driven by certain formal aims or ends, and not simply as one
determined by the qualities of matter. This is perhaps clearest in his account
of the difference between the growth of a wind-egg and that of an embryo
(see sections 2.6.3 and 2.6.4): the wind-egg does not become an animal,
although it grows, because its growth is not directed toward the telos of a
species-form. The growth of an embryo, by contrast, is directed by the
movement derived from the male (i.e., the movement in the semen) to shape
the embryo in its likeness (GA 4.3 767b3–18); nature uses the movements
in semen to shape the embryo and to actualize its form (i.e., the soul of the
animal) (GA 1.22 730b7–23). The final cause of the generation of an animal
is the form of that animal, which is to say the set of capacities that the soul
of such an animal has, and the organs it acquires as it develops to serve
those capacities. So the generation of an animal is a telos, the actualization
of the species form of that animal kind in the appropriate matter, where that
telos guides the development of the embryo. Because animal generation in a
sexually differentiated species is a collaborative activity, requiring both
male and female, this is a telos that cannot be achieved by an individual
animal. The ultimate telos of animal generation thus has subordinate teloi—
the generation of katamênia and of semen—only one of which can be
achieved by an individual animal in a sexually differentiated species.
The teleological account of embryogenesis introduces a question: is sex
included in the telos of the animal? Another way to put this would be: is the
telos at which embryogenesis aims, the species form, that of a male animal?
Does Aristotle describe the female as a deformity because he believes that
she is a departure from the species form? In this section I address these
questions and others concerned with the possibility that sexual difference,
and the generation of females, might be subject to teleological explanation.
I do so first by analyzing a number of distinctions Aristotle introduces to
the notion of necessity. I argue that the generation of females is necessary in
two distinct ways: as a conditional necessity and as a material necessity.
Aristotle recognizes that the generation of females is not necessary
conditionally for the telos that is the generation of animals (since in theory a
species might reproduce without being sexually differentiated), but he
postulates a distinct telos: the separation of efficient and material causation,
the achievement of which does make the generation of females
conditionally necessary. This informs the way in which Aristotle construes
the female as a deformity; I argue that he does not mean to say that the
female fails to achieve the species form, because while he believes that
form includes a capacity to produce a fertile residue (the subordinate telos
to the telos of generation), he does not think it includes the peculiarly male
capacity to produce semen.
2.9.2 Material and conditional necessity in biological phenomena

To understand the distinction between material necessity and conditional
necessity as these appear in the biological works, consider first the
distinction Aristotle draws between natural necessity as opposed to the
necessity of force or compulsion in the Posterior Analytics: “Necessity is
twofold: one, in accordance with nature and impulse (κατὰ φύσιν καὶ τὴν
ὁρμήν); the other, by force and contrary to impulse (βίᾳ ἡ παρὰ τὴν ὁρμήν)
—e.g. a stone travels both upwards and downwards from necessity, but not
because of the same necessity” (A.Po. 2.11 94b37–95a3). It is the necessity
that is “in accordance with nature and impulse” that figures in the biological
works and is identified here as material necessity, since the stone travels
downward of necessity in the sense that its material nature makes this
necessary.
In his discussion of necessity in the Metaphysics Aristotle again
recognizes (1) the necessity of compulsion, but distinguishes it from three
other senses of necessity: (2) conditional necessity, which takes two forms:
(2a) “that without which, as a condition, a thing cannot live”; and (2b) “the
conditions without which good cannot be or come to be” (5.5 1015a20–25).
The difference between (2a) and (2b) lies in whether the condition is
necessary for life, or for some other good. In addition to these Aristotle
mentions (3) that which cannot be otherwise (“and from this sense of
necessary all the others are somehow derived”) (Met. 5.5 1015a33–34). He
asserts that “the necessary in the primary and strict sense is the simple,”
which he identifies with the eternal and unchangeable (Met. 5.5 1015b11–
15). “That which cannot be otherwise” is (3a) sometimes identified with
material necessity (which Lennox calls “the necessity rooted in an
element’s natural propensities” [in Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, trans.
Lennox, 151]) (see Phys. 2.9 200a8, where Aristotle speaks of materials
“which have a necessary nature”; and PA 1.1 642a34–35, where he says that
in some cases “things are thus in respect of their character and nature,”
where this is described as “direct necessity” [ἤδη ἀναγκαῖον]), but (3b)
sometimes distinguished from it (at GC 2.11 338a1–5). So it should be
understood as a form of necessity with subdivisions, just as conditional
necessity has subdivisions. Finally, there is (4) the necessity of
demonstration. The sense of necessity (3) which is “that which cannot be
otherwise” has then two forms: one is identical with what I am calling
“material” necessity—the necessity rooted in the natural propensities of the
matter; the other is not.105 So the kinds of necessity as distinguished in the
Metaphysics are:
(1) compulsion
(2) conditional necessity
(a) necessary for life
(b) necessary for some other good
(3) “that which cannot be otherwise”: simple or unqualified necessity
(a) material necessity
(b) a second form of simple necessity
(4) the necessity of demonstration
Of these, it is (2) conditional necessity in both its forms and (3a) material
necessity (“that which cannot be otherwise”) that figure in the discussion of
sexual difference and determination.
In the Physics material necessity is again associated with the natures of
materials, and distinguished both from conditional necessity (which is
linked to material causation), and from final causation.106 So Aristotle
distinguishes conditional necessity and material necessity as two forms of
necessity; conditional necessity must be understood relative to a final cause,
whereas material necessity is “direct” or unmediated. What has come to be
called material necessity is exemplified when “what is heavy is naturally
carried downwards and what is light to the top” (Phys. 2.9 200a2–3).
Materials (e.g., stones) have a “necessary nature” which causes them to act
and to be affected necessarily in certain ways. What Aristotle calls
conditional necessity, by contrast, is exemplified in the case of the saw, the
purpose of which “cannot be realized unless the saw is made of iron. It is,
therefore necessary for it to be of iron, if we are to have a saw and perform
the operation of sawing” (Phys. 2.9 200a11–13). So conditional necessity
obtains only when a certain end is specified, and what is necessary is some
prior condition necessary for the attainment of that end. By contrast,
material necessity obtains when the material nature of something (e.g.,
stone or water) necessitates some effect. In other words, conditional
necessity operates relative to an established telos, whereas material
necessity operates independently of a telos.
In the Parts of Animals Aristotle draws on both material and conditional
necessity to explain biological phenomena. To explain conditional
necessity, he contrasts it with final causation, emphasizing that conditional
necessity as a cause aligns with material causation, using an example
reminiscent of the saw of the Physics:
Therefore there are these two causes, the cause for the sake of which (το θ’ οὗ ἕνεκα) and the
cause from necessity (τὸ ἐξ ἀνάγκης); for many things come to be because it is a necessity. One
might perhaps be puzzled about what sort of necessity those who say “from necessity” mean; for
it cannot be either of the two sorts defined in our philosophical discussions. But it is especially
in things that partake of generation that the third sort is present; for we say nourishment is
something necessary according to neither of those two sorts of necessity, but because it is not
possible to be without it. And this is, as it were, conditionally necessary (ἐξ ὑποθέσεως); for just
as, since the axe must split, it is a necessity that it be hard, and if hard, then made of bronze or
iron, so too since the body is an instrument (for each of the parts is for the sake of something,
and likewise also the whole), it is therefore a necessity that it be of such a character and
constituted from such things, if that is to be. (PA 1.1 642a2–14)
The “two sorts defined in our philosophical discussions” are the two senses
of necessity we saw distinguished in the Posterior Analytics: material
necessity (a form of simple necessity) and compulsion, which are contrasted
with conditional necessity (and so with material causation).107 The example
of the material of a hatchet is offered to illustrate the concept of conditional
necessity, and the body of an animal compared to that material in the sense
that both serve a purpose. Aristotle is particularly interested here in things
that “pass through a process of formation” and draws an analogy between
the process of formation of an artifact, and the process of formation of a
body. The relationship between material cause and conditional necessity is
here made plain: the material cause subserves the final cause, and so the
materials of the body serve the purposes of the body, which are prior
(causally but not temporally) to the matter. Given how Aristotle employs
teleological explanation in some cases in the biological works—in
particular in Generation of Animals 2.1—conditional necessity should be
construed broadly to obtain not only in cases where certain materials are
necessary for certain ends, but also in cases where certain material
structures (for example, organs in an individual or sexed bodies in a
species) are necessary for the realization of certain ends.108 Because the
matter, or the material structure, is determined by the purpose, the material
cause is necessary relative to the final cause, and the material cause comes
to be identified with necessity in the sense of conditional necessity. So
material necessity is again contrasted with conditional necessity, and
material causation is closely allied with conditional necessity.
In drawing the contrast between conditional necessity and material
necessity in the Parts of Animals, Aristotle emphasizes that material
necessity obtains “owing to the very nature of the things,” where the things
in question, judging by the example provided, are the materials involved in
the process. The example is respiration:
Here is an example of the method of exposition. We point out that although respiration takes
place for such and such a purpose, any one stage of the process follows upon the other by
necessity. Necessity means sometimes (a) that if this or that is to be the final cause and purpose
then such and such things must be so; but sometimes it means (b) that things are as they are
owing to their very nature, as the following shows: It is necessary that the hot substance should
go out and come in again as it offers resistance, and that the air should flow in—that is
obviously necessary. And the hot substance within, as the cooling is produced, offers resistance,
and this brings about the entrance of the air from without and also its exit. This example shows
how the method works and also illustrates the sort of things whose causes we have to discover.
(PA 1.1 642a33–642b4)
This example illustrates the difference between conditional necessity and

material necessity (“that things are as they are owing to their very nature”),
by focusing on the cooling, heating, and resistance of the materials—that is,
by pointing out the qualities of the materials that are as they are because of
the nature of the materials, which in this case are the “hot substance” and
the air.109 These materials cannot react other than they do to the cooling and
heating, given their natures. This echoes the description of material
necessity in Physics 2.9, in the appeal to the necessity of the nature of the
material. So to explain the phenomena we find in the lives of animals, we
must appeal to both conditional necessity and material necessity.110
2.9.3 Sexual difference is a telos
In Book 1 of the Generation of Animals Aristotle discusses, and defines,
male and female as causal principles (ἄρχαι) (see GA 1.2 716a4–8, and
section 2.3), describes the sexual organs in different kinds of animals (see
section 2.4) and then offers an overview of sexual generation, before
moving on in Books 2 and 3 to a more detailed account of sexual
generation. This is an instance of Aristotle offering early in a work a
general account of phenomena (sexual difference, both in causal principles
and in the organs that support them, and its role in animal generation)
before turning to more detailed accounts later in the work, and eventually to
a problem concerned with the phenomena (namely, how sex is determined
in an individual); see sections 2.1 and 2.7.1 for a discussion of this way of
proceeding. But before he turns to those more detailed accounts of sexual
generation in Book 2, Aristotle offers us, in Generation of Animals 2.1, an
argument for the value of sexual difference. How, we might wonder, does
that argument follow from the discussion of male and female as causal
principles of sexual generation in Book 1? Within Book 1 Aristotle moves
readily between speaking of male and female as principles and speaking of
them as animals (see GA 1.2 716a4–18 for a passage in which he uses male
and female in both senses). But this obscures an important point: while the
possession of the male principle marks an animal as male, and the
possession of the female principle marks an animal as female, in theory an
animal might have both principles (most plants, as Aristotle recognizes, do
have both principles). So Aristotle has to explain why it is that individuals
in most animal species have only one or the other, and not both, causal
principles of animal generation. That is what he is attempting to do in
Generation of Animals 2.1, as a preliminary to the more detailed accounts
of generation in sexually differentiated species.
Aristotle asserts at the opening of Generation of Animals 2.1 that sexual
difference (“the reason why one comes to be formed, and is, male, and
another female”) occurs both from material necessity (ἐξ ἀνάγκης) and
through final causation (τὸ βέλτιον καὶ τὴν αἰτίαν τὴν ἕνεκά τινος) (GA 2.1
731b20–24). He proposes to discuss material necessity as the book proceeds
and turns immediately to the explanation of sexual difference through final
causation.
Two claims need to be distinguished (1) it is better that there should be
male and female principles; and (2) it is better that those principles should
be separated. To justify (1) Aristotle treats the generation of animals as a
natural end or telos, which male and female are for the sake of (GA 2.1
732a2–4). He explains why the telos of animal generation is good: because
eternal being is better than contingent being, and ensouled being better than
lifeless being, and because mortal individuals cannot be eternal, and so
must aim for eternal being as a kind, through the reproduction of
individuals (GA 2.1 731b32–732a1).111 The only way in which non-rational
living things can approach eternal being is as a species, by means of the
generation of offspring.112 This establishes that the generation of animals is
“better” (where the implied comparative is: better than a state of affairs in
which animals were not generated), and so establishes that it is a telos, a
final cause and a natural purpose. Thus plants, animals, and human beings
exist eternally as kinds through the process of generation because it is better
that they should do so. Since male and female are the principles of these
kinds, male and female principles are found in individual living beings for
the sake of generation (ἕνεκα τῆς γενέσεως) (GA 2.1 732a2–4). In other
words, it is conditionally necessary that male and female principles should
occur in natural living things, and better in that sense, given that the
generation of these kinds has been established as a purpose of nature.113
This is conditional necessity in sense (2a)—male and female are necessary
for life.
The separation of male and female principles is clearly not necessary for
generation; in fact, in many ensouled beings (e.g., many plant species) the
two principles are found together in an individual. So to explain the second
claim mentioned at the opening of this section—(2) it is better that male and
female principles should occur separately, in distinct animals—Aristotle
introduces a distinct telos. His reasoning to this conclusion is simple: what
is natural must either be necessary or better, and since the separation of
male and female principles is not necessary for generation, that separation
must be better (i.e., better than the co-occurrence of male and female
principles in the individuals of a species). Aristotle must then explain why
sexual difference—the separation of male and female principles—is better,
that is, what purpose it serves. That purpose is revealed in the argument that
connects the value of sexual difference to the value of divine and eternal
being. Aristotle glosses the male as the principle of movement and the
female as the material principle: “That is why wherever possible and so far
as possible the male is separate from the female, since it is something better
and more divine (βελτίονος δὲ καὶ θειοτέρας) in that it is the principle of
movement for generated things, while the female serves as their matter”
(GA 2.1 732a7–10).114 So, sexual difference is good because it permits
separation of the efficient cause from the material cause (since on
Aristotle’s account the semen acts on the katamênia but does not combine
with it and never becomes part of the embryo). This is a telos distinct from
the telos of animal generation. The separation of male and female is then
better in the sense that it is conditionally necessary in sense (2b)—it is
necessary “for some good.”
The superiority (i.e., the superior goodness) of the male principle rests
on its status as efficient cause, and the alignment of the efficient cause with
the divine. The separation of the sexes in a species is, for Aristotle, the
separation of causal principles, and the goodness of that separation depends
on the association of one with the divine capacity to effect movement. Here,
with the unstated premises supplied, is Aristotle’s reasoning, after he
establishes that the generation of animals (sexual and non-sexual) requires a
material principle and an efficient principle:
(1) The efficient principle is better and more divine than the material.115
(2) When X is better than Y, it is better that X should be separate from Y.
(3) So it is better that the efficient principle should be separate from the material principle. (from
1 and 2)
(4) The male is the formal/efficient principle; the female is the material principle.
(5) So it is better that the male principle and the female principle should be separated in different
animals. (from 3 and 4)116
Sexual difference is good because sexual difference embodies the

separation of material and efficient causation, which is to say the separation
of the mortal from the divine. That is, since the gods are the ultimate
efficient causes, and associated with what is actual (as opposed to
potential), the male is more divine than the female because he acts as the
efficient cause of generation and actualizes the form latent in the material
(with its potentiality to become an animal) provided by the female. If
corruptible matter is precisely the element of an ensouled natural substance
—plant or animal—that makes it mortal, then even as the matter is
necessary for the existence of that individual plant or animal, it distances it
from divine existence by rendering it mortal. At the same time, human
beings resemble divine beings more than other ensouled beings, because of
their capacity for rational activity. We saw in chapter 1 the precedents for
this view in the mythical accounts of more and less “bodily” offspring.117
This is the tension in the generation of rational natural living things—as
they acquire rational soul, they come close to the divine, but in order for
their souls to function, in order to live, they must be enmattered in
corruptible bodies, and hence move away from the divine.118
Sexual difference is a feature, then, that makes some species better than
others, because in sexually differentiated species the moving cause is
independent of the material cause (it is not, of course, entirely free of
matter, since it acts through the medium of male sperma; but Aristotle
distinguishes between seminal matter as a medium, and the matter that is
acted upon by the efficient cause).119 Sexual difference just is this
separation of causes. It is not a telos that can be realized in any individual
animal—in that respect it is like the telos of generation that requires both
male and female for its realization. Moreover, sexual difference is not
primarily good for the male (although it benefits him in that he does not
have to possess the principle of material causation). Rather, it is good (1)
for the reproductive couple, making them better than a single animal
capable of reproducing by itself, in which both the principle of material
causation and that of efficient causation must be found, and (2) for the
animal species (and the genus animal as a whole), because it makes the
species better, and because it makes animals generally better than plants.120
2.9.4 Female animals are necessary

Once sexual difference is established as a telos pursued by nature in some
species, and hence as good, it follows that the generation of females (and
males) is conditionally necessary to achieve that good. That is, the
generation of female individuals is conditionally necessary for the
separation of male and female principles. This is what Aristotle means in
the opening lines of Generation of Animals 2.1, where he asserts that some
animals come to be male and others female on account of final causation;
the final cause is the telos (the separation of efficient and material cause
that is sexual difference), and individual animals of both sexes are
conditionally necessary for the achievement of that telos. Although
conditional necessity often refers to the material constitution of an
individual body, in this case it refers to the material constitution of a
species: in a sexually differentiated species, female and male bodies are
materially different for the sake of the telos that is the separation of efficient
and material causes of generation.
There is, as we have seen, a second sense in which the generation of
sexually differentiated individuals is necessary: because of material
necessity (ἐξ ἀνάγκης) (GA 2.1 731b20–24). In this sense females result
from what Lennox calls the “unqualified necessity involved in objects
obeying their natural impulses.” Aristotle makes this clear in a passage in
which he identifies the female as a deviation:
Males take after their father more than their mother, females after their mother. Some take after
none of their kindred, although they take after some human being at any rate; others do not take
after a human being at all in their appearance, but have gone so far that they resemble a
monstrosity, and, for the matter of that, anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a
way a monstrosity, since in these cases nature has in a way strayed from the generic type
(παρεκβέβηκε γὰρ ἡ φύσις ἐν τούτοις ἐκ τοῦ γένους τρόπον τινά). The first beginning of this
deviation is when a female is formed instead of a male, although this indeed is a necessity
required by nature, since the genus of those divided into male and female has got to be kept in
being. And since it is possible for the male sometimes not to gain the mastery either because of
youth or age or some other such cause, female offspring must of necessity be produced by
animals. As for monstrosities, they are not necessary so far as the purposive or final cause is
concerned (οὐκ ἀναγκαῖον πρὸς τὴν ἓνεκά του καὶ τὴν τοῦ τὲλους αἰτίαν), yet per accidens they
are necessary (κατὰ συμβεβηκὸς ἀναγκαῖον), since we must take it that their origin at any rate is
located here [i.e., in what follows]. Thus: If the seminal residue in the menstrual fluid is well-
concocted, the movement derived from the male will make the shape after its own pattern (καθ’
αὑτὴν ποιήσει τὴν μορφὴν ἡ τοῦ ἄρρενος κίνησις). (GA 4.3 767b3–18)
Aristotle here distinguishes the two senses in which the female is necessary.
In one sense the necessity is conditional (“this indeed is a necessity required
by nature, since the genus of those divided into male and female has got to
be kept in being”). In a second sense the production of females is necessary
because the male movements in the semen do not always master the matter
in the uterus. Aristotle calls this necessity “accidental” (κατὰ συμβεβηκὸς
ἀναγκαῖον), to distinguish it from conditional necessity, which is linked to a
purpose. It is the necessity that stems from the material nature of the semen
(its weakness, caused by youth or old age) or of the katamênia (when it is
too cold or too moist). This is material necessity.121 As we have seen,
certain features of the matter of the katamênia or of the semen—the degree
of cold or heat, their bulkiness or moistness—necessitate that a female
should be produced in a given instance. The reason Aristotle calls this
necessity “accidental” is that the necessity belongs to the nature of the
matter, and not to the formal nature.122
Another passage in the Parts of Animals that describes material necessity
also contrasts it with conditional necessity, without using either term. In a
discussion of different bodily residues, Aristotle acknowledges that
although some residues are for a purpose (for example, nature uses the male
sperma and the female katamênia for a purpose), others (such as bile) are
present for no particular purpose—although it is necessary that they should
occur:
Now sometimes nature even makes use of residues for some benefit, yet it is not on this account
necessary to seek what something is for (ἕνεκα τίνος) in every case; on the contrary, when
certain things are such as they are, many other such things happen from necessity. . . . So it is
apparent that bile is not for the sake of anything, but is a by-product. (PA 4.2 677a17–31)
This passage is interesting both because it allows that some parts of the
body (residues) are necessary although they have no purpose (they are then
materially necessary), and because it indicates that nature is able to put
some of the residues produced by material necessity to use for some benefit
—that is, although they are produced by material necessity, there is some
natural purpose for them.
This suggests that material necessity and conditional necessity might co-
determine a phenomenon. Aristotle says as much in a passage at Generation
of Animals 2.4 738a34–b4:
Thus the production of this residue by females is, on the one hand, the result of necessity (ἐξ
ἀνάγκης), and the reasons have been given: the female system cannot effect concoction, and
therefore of necessity residue must be formed not only from the useless nourishment, but also in
the blood-vessels, and when there is a full complement of it in those very fine blood-vessels, it
must overflow. On the other hand, in order to serve the better purpose, the end (ἕνεκα δὲ τοῦ
βελτίονος καὶ τοῦ τέλους), nature diverts it to this place and employs it there for the sake of
generation, in order that it may become another creature of the same kind as it would have
become, since even as it is, it is potentially the same in character as the body whose secretion it
is.
This passage describes an instance of the phenomenon anticipated in the

passage at Parts of Animals 4.2 677a17–31: a residue is produced by
material necessity, and nature finds a purpose for it. In this case the residue
is the katamênia, and nature uses it “for the sake of generation,” as the
matter of the offspring. The nature of the katamênia is “the result of
necessity” in the sense that the female cannot fully concoct the useful
nourishment, and so produces katamênia rather than semen; this is material
necessity. Material necessity also causes it to “overflow” out of the blood
vessels in which it is concocted. But the katamênia is also conditionally
necessary for generation, and that it should overflow into the uterus is
conditionally necessary because “in order to serve the better purpose, the
end, nature diverts it to this place [i.e., the uterus] and employs it there for
the sake of generation.” So the production of katamênia and its location in
the uterus is both a material necessity and a conditional necessity.
Katamênia is produced by conditional necessity because it is a fertile
residue, one that is useful toward the generation of an animal. In other
words, we can explain the production of katamênia in teleological terms: to
achieve the ultimate telos of the generation of an animal like itself, every
animal must achieve the subordinate telos of producing a fertile residue.
Any animal that is capable of producing one or other of the fertile residues
thus realizes that subordinate telos, and so an animal capable of producing
katamênia achieves the subordinate telos. At the same time, material
necessity is responsible for the production of katamênia because certain
material features of the female’s body—its coldness, and perhaps the size of
its heart—arrest the process of concoction after the point at which it has
produced katamênia, but prior to the complete concoction of the ultimate
nutrient. That is, material necessity is responsible for the production of
katamênia not under the unqualified description “fertile residue,” but only
under the qualified description “fertile residue incapable of initiating
generation.”
The case of the production of katamênia is linked to the case of the
production of female animals, since a female animal is one that cannot
concoct semen but can concoct katamênia. Conditional necessity is
responsible for the production of a female because the female instantiates
the species form (which, on Aristotle’s account, she does), and with respect
to generative capacities this means that she is capable of producing a fertile
residue. Material necessity is also responsible for the production of the
female, because the material necessity in the interaction of semen and
menses—the weakness of the movements in the former, or the coldness and
bulkiness of the latter—prevents the perfection of the generative capacity.
My contention is that nature aims to produce fertile residues and animals,
and both katamênia and female animals are one way in which those forms
can be realized; katamênia and female animals are manifestations of pre-
existing forms (the forms of fertile residue and of animal). It is true that
nature aims to produce perfect instantiations of animals and of fertile
residues, and on Aristotle’s account females and katamênia are imperfect
instantiations insofar as material necessity in both cases has interfered to
prevent the complete realization of the form. But, and this is the crucial
point, the teloi at which nature aims in these cases has already been
achieved before its perfection is frustrated. That is, the teloi are thresholds
or minimum standards of capacity; once that minimum has been met, there
is still room for further perfection.
Contrast this with another way of explaining how teleology and material
necessity might both play a role in the production of females—by appealing
to secondary teleology. The distinction between primary and secondary
teleology, introduced by Mariska Leunissen, contrasts primary teleology as
a process that “involves the realization of a pre-existing potential for form
through stages shaped by conditional necessity, where the fully realized
form constitutes the final cause of the process,” with secondary teleology,
which is a process that “involves a formal nature of an animal using
materials for something good, where those materials ‘happen to be
available’ in the animal, usually as the result of material necessity, and are
not strictly speaking the result of conditional necessity.”123 The contrast
between these two causal patterns centers on whether the outcome or end is
the “realization of some pre-existing form” (in the case of primary
teleology) or rather “a use made of materials” (in the case of secondary
teleology).
The question then is whether katamênia and female animals are
manifestations of a pre-existing form (in which case they would be
explained by primary teleology), or are instead useful ends to which
materials produced by material necessity have been put (in which case they
would be explained by secondary teleology). If females are to be explained
by secondary teleology, it will be because the nature of the animal does not
aim to produce an animal that will incompletely concoct the nourishment; it
aims to produce an animal that will fully concoct the nourishment into
semen.124 When, however, it fails to achieve that end because it is frustrated
by the nature of the matter, and material necessity produces an animal that
is able to concoct the surplus blood only up to the point that it is katamênia,
then the nature of the animal uses that imperfect capacity for concoction to
serve a purpose, namely the separation of the material and efficient causes
of generation. On this understanding of the production of females the
“potentials of the materials that happen to be available” are “co-opted or
adapted by the formal nature of the animal.”125
This explains how material and conditional necessity might both obtain
in the case of the production of females. Moreover, the features that are the
result of secondary teleology are on Leunissen’s account never requisite
“for the performance of a function specified in the definition of the
substantial being of the animal” but are rather “ ‘for the better’ or for ‘living
well’,”126 and this would seem to fit well with the idea that females are
“features” of species that are “for the better” rather than “necessary,” in that
they permit the separation of efficient and material causes.
But it cannot be right to attribute the generation of females to secondary
teleology, because that requires that we think the telos that is served by
females is somehow independent of the substantial being of the animal. A
phenomenon can be explained by secondary teleology only when the final
cause that it serves is not part of the original telos. But the form of the
female is inherent in the matter, and in the movements that determine sex,
from the outset. Females are not produced by material necessity and
subsequently assigned a function extrinsic to the substantial being of the
animal. They are produced by conditional necessity: the telos that governs
the generation of a female, like that of a male, is the generation of an animal
with a capacity to produce a fertile residue; the female achieves that telos
just as does the male. Females contribute to the function of generation in a
way that is as necessary, although inferior to, the way that males contribute
to generation. The inferiority of the female is not that her form is not part of
the original telos, but rather that she is an imperfect—in the sense of
incomplete—realization of that form.127 In section 2.9.5 I will consider this
point at greater length and ask how the female can have the same species
form and yet be deficient relative to the male.
For now, in considering how Aristotle accounts for the determination of
sex in the embryo, the passage at Meteor. 4.2 379b25–32, which we saw in
section 2.5.2 helps to reconcile Aristotle’s claims that the sperma katamênia
is on the one hand fertile and useful, and on the other impure and imperfect,
may also help to explain how the generation of a female can be good at the
same time that it is worse than the generation of a male. Aristotle
distinguishes in that passage between cases in which “the end of the process
is a thing’s nature, in the sense of its form and essence (ὡς εἶδος καὶ
οὐσίαν)” and cases in which the end is “the realization of some latent form
(ὑποκειμένην τινὰ μορφὴν).” The cases in question are all instances of
concoction, and one of the examples (must) is a case in which the “latent
form” is realized prior to the (complete) form and essence, which would be
that of wine. The latent form is inherent to the material and emerges in the
course of the process toward the telos of the form and essence, and not as
an alternative to that telos. This is also true in the generation of females: the
female is determined when the movements, aiming to produce an animal
capable of fully concocting surplus blood into semen, fall short of that telos,
and bring to actuality a female animal—where the female is precisely a
latent form in the matter. On this interpretation, the difference between male
and female animals is a difference in their morphê rather than their eidos,
that is, a difference in the physical manifestation of their eidos but not a
difference in their substantial being or essence. And the female is “useful
(χρήσιμόν) for something.” The female is then an imperfect or incomplete
instantiation of the telos that has its complete form in the male—but an
instantiation that achieves the telos. She has the same species eidos as the
male, but a morphê that is in some ways different.
This, like an explanation that appeals to secondary teleology, is
consistent with the claim that the female is both materially and
conditionally necessary. But it recognizes the teleological process that
produces females to be the same as that which produces males, and hence
conforms with Aristotle’s commitment to the identity of species form in the
sexes. And it has the advantage that it fits better with Aristotle’s claim in
the Metaphysics that sex is a difference in the matter rather than the form.
That is, if male and female have the same form, but different expressions of
that form in matter, so that each has a different morphê, then we can explain
how sex is a difference in the matter without abandoning the idea that the
sexes do not subdivide the species.
2.9.5 The female as a deformity

It is quite clear, as we have seen, that Aristotle believes both that the
generation of females is natural and also that a female animal constitutes
some kind of deformity. At Generation of Animals 4.6 775a15–16 he says:
“We should look upon the female state as being like a deformity, though
one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature” (see also GA 4.3 767b3–
18, cited in section 2.9.4). Aristotle treats a deformity as a deviation from
resemblance to the parent (GA 4.3 767b7–8) and identifies the female as the
“first” of such deviations. We have seen that this passage describes two
senses in which the female is necessary. The important point is that most
deformities are, on Aristotle’s account, necessary only in one sense—they
are materially necessary, and hence accidents. That is, monstrosities as a
rule are not conditionally necessary (not necessary “so far as the purposive
or final cause is concerned”), because they serve no purpose of nature (GA
4.3 767b13–15). So it is an interesting feature of females as deformities that
they are necessary conditionally as well as materially.128 This may help
explain why Aristotle appears to qualify the claim that the female is a
deformity or a monstrosity on the two occasions when he makes the claim
explicitly: at Generation of Animals 2.3 737a27–28, when he says that “the
female is as it were a deformed male” (τὸ γὰρ θῆλυ ὥσπερ ἄρρεν ἐστὶ
πεπηρωμένον), and at 4.6 775a15–16, when he says “that the female nature
is as it were a deformity” (ὥσπερ ἀναπηρίαν εἶναι τὴν θηλύτητα
φυσικήν).129 We should be careful in interpreting these qualifications.130
They do not amount to saying that the female is not a deformity, but they
suggest, as we have already seen, that the female is a deformity that is also
natural in some sense—in the sense that female animals serve a purpose of
nature.
Since a deformity is something that happens in opposition to the natural
course of events, the female is somehow both according to and in
opposition to nature. The question is how to reconcile these claims. There
are two problems, the first of which we encountered in the discussion of the
female as conditionally necessary in section 2.9.4. (1) If the female is a
deviation, that suggests that she fails to achieve a natural telos. If that telos
is the species form, then we might think that maleness should be part of the
species form. But Aristotle explicitly rejects that view in the Metaphysics,
as we saw at the beginning of this chapter. (2) If the generation of females
is according to nature, it should occur regularly, and it does; if a female is a
deformity, then we would expect females to be anomalous, and rare—but
they are at least as common as male animals.
2.9.5.1 Deformity and species form

The first problem concerns the implications of the claim that a female is a
deformity for Aristotle’s account of species essence. Conceptualizing the
female as a deformity raises a problem concerning the claim in the
Metaphysics discussed in section 2.2—the claim that sexual difference does
not divide a species, because the difference between male and female is not
a formal difference, but a difference in the matter of the genus (Met. 10.9).
This claim implies that neither male nor female belongs to the form of a
species. And that should mean that nature does not aim for either male or
female offspring, but only for offspring with the species form. But if that is
true, then a male animal is not the telos of generation, in which case, it is
unclear how the female is a deformity (and Aristotle repeats that she is at
GA 2.3 737a27–28, 4.3 767b7–10, and 4.6 775a15–17).131 That is, to say
that the female is a deformity is to imply that there is some telos that she
fails to reach. If we assume that the telos in question is the species form,
then the species form must include maleness, but by hypothesis it cannot.
And if maleness is not part of the species form, then can the process of
generation be said to have the production of male animals in particular as a
telos? So the problem in its simplest form is: how can it be true that the
female is a deformity in the sense of a departure from species form, if the
ideal achievement of that form is not a male animal? And if the ideal
achievement of the form is a male animal, then why does Aristotle indicate
that the difference between male and female is not a formal difference?
The most common approach to this problem is to allow that the female
possesses the same form as the male in any species, but assert that she is an
imperfect instantiation of that form. On this view, there is a normative ideal
at which nature aims in generation, and that ideal is male.132 This
interpretation has the virtue of explaining the way in which the female is a
deviation while having the same species form as the male. In section 2.9.4 I
sketched a variation of this interpretation, one that emphasizes the physical
differences between male and female, and I elaborate the argument for that
interpretation in this section.
A second approach to the problem, however, sees this first approach as
inadequate insofar as it fails to take seriously the idea that the normative
ideal cannot be male if we accept Aristotle’s claim in the Metaphysics that
sex is not part of the form. If we start from that point, we might reason in
this way: (1) if sex is not part of the form of the species, then (2) the
mechanism of sex determination does not occur for the sake of producing
males as opposed to females, (3) sex in the individual is an accidental
feature, and (4) the female cannot therefore be a “departure” from the
form.133 This approach then has to offer an account of deformity as
something other than a departure from species form: if the female is not a
departure from a normative ideal of maleness included in the species form,
then in what sense is she a deformity? One way to answer that question is to
interpret the lines at Generation of Animals 4.3 767b6–8 in a novel way.
They are usually taken to mean that generation aims at producing males
rather than females, but they might mean that the female is a departure not
from an ideal species form but simply from what is routine or to be
expected.134 On this view, the male is not a normative ideal, but just a
routine occurrence. And the female is a departure not from an ideal
realization of the species form, but rather from maleness, understood as an
expected, but not an ideal, outcome. The problem with this interpretation is
that it seems to discount Aristotle’s suggestions that to be female is in some
sense worse than to be male. So neither of these approaches is entirely
satisfactory. The problem is how to preserve the idea that the female is
inferior to the male without conceding that she is a departure from the
species form.
To begin with, we might state with more precision which aspect of the
species form the female departs from. That is, a species form is complex,
with several parts, and the female is not a departure from all of them. We
have seen that sex is a difference at the level of the generative faculty of
soul, and so plausibly the telos that the female fails to achieve fully is the
telos of the generative faculty of soul. The telos of the generative faculty is
defined at De anima 2.4 416b24 as “to generate another such as itself” (τὸ
γεννῆσαι οἷον αὐτό); I will call this the “ultimate” telos of the generative
faculty.135 To achieve the ultimate telos, both male and female animals must
achieve a subordinate telos: the concoction of a fertile residue. If that is
right, then the female is unable to achieve (or perhaps unable to achieve
completely) that subordinate telos because she lacks vital heat in the degree
that would allow her to concoct residual blood into semen.
There is, then, a peculiarity of the generative function: it requires both a
male and a female principle, which will not be found in the same animal in
sexually differentiated species. In such species no individual animal can
achieve the ultimate telos of the generative faculty independently, since no
individual can generate something like itself; both males and females
require the correlative capacity of another individual, because both material
and efficient causes are required for the generation of another animal such
as themselves. Although that is the ultimate telos of the generative faculty
of each individual animal, it is one that cannot be realized by an individual
animal. What each individual should ordinarily have is the capacity to
concoct a fertile residue that will play a necessary role in generation, either
as material cause or as efficient cause; this capacity for concoction will be
the telos of the generative faculty in an individual and a subordinate telos
relative to the ultimate telos of generation of something like itself. Since
Aristotle recognizes both semen and katamênia as fertile residues, both
male and female animals realize this subordinate telos of the capacity for
generation just in case they are able to concoct semen or katamênia. That is
to say, both male and female animals achieve the telos of the generative
faculty to the extent that a single individual can achieve that telos so long as
they are able to concoct a fertile residue, whether katamênia or semen. The
capacity to produce a fertile residue is a threshold feature, and an individual
passes that threshold so long as they have a capacity to produce some fertile
residue. Viewed from this perspective, the female realizes the telos of the
generative faculty insofar as that is possible for an individual, just as does
the male.
The incapacity of the female does not affect her ability to participate in
the achievement of the ultimate telos, and so it must affect in some way her
ability to achieve the subordinate telos of the concoction of a fertile residue.
We have seen (sections 2.3. and 2.5) that the female is a deformity in the
sense that she is imperfect with respect to the capacity for concoction. The
subordinate teloi of the generative faculty—the capacities to produce
katamênia and gone—while equally necessary to the accomplishment of the
ultimate telos, are not equal in value, because only the gonê can initiate
generation. This is possible because capacities are, on the one hand,
threshold features in the sense that an animal has a capacity just in case it
meets a certain minimum standard of functionality (in this case, the
minimum standard is a capacity to generate a fertile residue); on the other
hand, capacities admit of variations in competence. For example, two
rational beings might have different capacities for rational activity although
both count as rational by virtue of meeting a certain standard of rational
competence. In a similar way, the female on Aristotle’s account has a
different, and lesser, capacity for concoction while meeting the threshold of
concocting capacity. This is to say that the female is a departure not from
the telos of concocting a fertile residue, but from the telos of concocting a
fertile residue that can initiate generation. My contention is that her
deformity does not constitute a departure from the species eidos (which
includes a subordinate telos, the capacity for generating a fertile residue,
with the ultimate telos of generation), but rather a departure from the
morphê or embodiment of that part of the eidos which determines the
subordinate telos (the production of a fertile residue) but not the ultimate
telos (the generation of an animal). The female has the same species eidos,
but because she has a different (and imperfect) morphê with respect to
concoction and the generation of a fertile residue, she is a departure from
the ideal male embodiment. This notion of embodiment is not merely
cosmetic; the shape and size of a female animal’s generative organs will be
different from those of the male, and these differences will render her
imperfect with respect to the function of producing a fertile residue: she
concocts the surplus blood only up to the point at which it becomes
katamênia but cannot concoct it further into gonê.
Both the male and the female, then, individually achieve the subordinate
telos of producing a fertile residue, and together they are able to achieve the
ultimate telos of generating another animal like themselves; but the
female’s achievement of the subordinate telos is imperfect relative to the
perfect embodiment achieved by the male. This allows us to reconcile
Aristotle’s claims that the female shares an eidos with the male, but is
imperfect relative to him. Because she is deformed in morphê rather than
eidos, it makes sense that Aristotle treats her deformity as a departure from
resemblance to the parent (GA 4.3 767b7–8), by which he means the male
parent, even while believing that she shares the same species form with the
male.
This interpretation of the female as a deformity of material embodiment
is supported by the Metaphysics passage discussed in section 2.2, where the
point is that sex is a difference in the matter of the genus animal. It is the
matter that departs from a resemblance to the male parent, when a female
animal is generated. A passage at Generation of Animals 2.6 742a16–37
suggests how we might understand the female as a deformity in matter
rather than form. Aristotle distinguishes between the telos (“that for the
sake of which a thing is”), and that thing which is for its sake (i.e., for the
sake of the telos). That which is for the sake of the telos is twofold: (1) “that
whence the movement is derived” and (2) that which is employed by the
telos or “the things which are serviceable, which can be and are employed
by the end.” The example is: an animal is the telos, the part in which the
principle of movement resides (this will be the heart) is “that whence the
movement is derived,” and then the “instruments for various employments”
will be the organs of the animal’s body. By analogy, then, if the telos is the
generation of a fertile residue, and “that whence the principle of movement
is derived” is the set of movements in the semen, then the “instruments for
various employments” will be the matter of the katamênia with its
potentialities to become the organs of the body. It is with respect to those
organs that the female differs from the male: the heart will differ (if only in
size) from that of the male, with the result that it will be able to transmit a
lower degree of vital heat and hence to concoct the residual blood only to
the point that it becomes katamênia. That, in turn, will determine that the
sexual organs formed are those that conform to the female principle as
established by the physical structure of the heart and its corresponding
capacity to transmit heat. This is not a departure from the species form,
since the realization of that form requires only a capacity for the generation
of a fertile residue, and the organization of a female body is one way in
which the capacity to concoct a generative fluid can be embodied. It is,
however, a departure from the male. Nor should we take it to be
normatively neutral—it is on Aristotle’s account not only a departure from
the embodiment of the male, but also an inferior kind of embodiment. Male
and female animals are equally necessary to achieve the generation of
offspring in a sexually differentiated species, but it does not follow that they
are equally good. Both are conditionally necessary for the telos of
generation, but that necessity allows for qualitative differences in the
necessary conditions.
This interpretation also is consistent with Aristotle’s claim in the
Categories that “of the primary substances one is no more a substance than
another (οὐδὲν μᾶλλον ἕτερον ἑτέρου οὐσία ἐστίν): the individual man is no
more a substance than the individual ox” (Cat. 5 2b26–28). The implication
is that the individual man is no more a substance than the individual
woman, because in general substantial being is not a matter of degree. We
should expect, then, that the imperfection of the female is not an
imperfection in her form or substantial being, but, as I have been arguing, in
her matter, since matter does admit of degrees. The important point is that
female animals on Aristotle’s account are not imperfect with respect to the
generative capacity as such, or with respect to the species form. An animal
either has or does not have a generative capacity and is or is not a member
of the species, and a female has such a capacity and is such a member.
Female animals are different, and inferior, materially but not formally.
This last point suggests an objection: can females be inferior to males
without being formally inferior? How can an embodiment be inferior unless
it affects function and hence form? Before responding to that question, it is
important to say that the inferior embodiment of the female does affect
function: it inhibits her capacity to fully concoct.136 But it does not affect
function in the sense that it prevents the female from executing a function
that is part of the species form, since it does not prevent her from producing
a fertile residue. A deformity might be an impediment to carrying out a
function that belongs to the species form, since there is a threshold of
functionality, and a particular embodiment would constitute a deformity if it
should render the animal incapable of satisfying that function. For example,
if an animal were embodied in such a way that it could not produce a fertile
residue, it would be deformed with respect to a formal capacity. But the
female is not such an instance: she can, as Aristotle emphasizes, produce a
fertile residue, and she shares, as he insists, the same form as the male.
I have been arguing that the female is a deformity on Aristotle’s account
with respect to matter, rather than form, in a way that marks off the female
as inferior. That inferiority has to be understood in the context of the
structure of the activity of generation and its telos. Generation as an activity
is cooperative in a way that can be understood as analogous to the activities
of an animal as a whole. To operate as a functional animal, an individual
must have a number of different organs, each of which is necessary for its
survival or its diverse activities, and so each of which is valuable insofar as
its individual telos contributes to the telos of the whole. But Aristotle does
not consider all of these organs to be equally valuable. On the contrary, he
treats the heart as the controlling organ that holds the principle of
movement and is “most authoritative” relative to the other organs, as we
saw in section 2.4. So it is possible to be equally necessary for a telos while
having different degrees of value, just as the male and female are equally
necessary for the telos of generation, although they have different degrees
of value.
The sexes are, then, equally necessary for a shared telos, the
reproduction of offspring, but they are not equally valuable in their
contributions to that telos. Contributing the efficient cause is better than
contributing the material cause, although each is necessary; since the male
embodiment of a species contributes the efficient cause, a male animal is
better than a female animal. This does not mean, as we have seen, that he is
better at being an animal. It means, rather, that the male’s role in the process
of generation is the better role, because the fertile residue he produces is
better. But the ultimate telos, the generation of another animal like itself, is
unachievable by either male or female individually. So the sexes are equally
necessary to the process of generation in which they cooperate, although the
roles they play in that process are not of equal value. If each sex has a
subordinate generative telos (to produce one or the other of the fertile
residues) as well as the ultimate and common telos of generating another
animal like themselves, it will be true in one sense to say that the male is
better at achieving the subordinate telos (since the fertile residue of the
male is intrinsically better on Aristotle’s account); but in another sense it
will not be true, since both male and female achieve the subordinate telos.
Nor will it be true to say that the male is better at achieving the ultimate
telos, since that is precisely one that neither male nor female can achieve on
its own. The parallel with organs is again helpful: their subordinate teloi are
different (e.g., the heart is for producing blood, the liver for filtering it), and
so neither can be said to be better at being an organ than the other, although
the function of some organs is, on Aristotle’s account, a better function; and
the organs have a common telos, the life of the animal, to achieve which
they must cooperate.
This notion of cooperation between the sexes can also be found at
Politics 1.2 1252a27–28. Aristotle says that male and female “cannot exist
without one another”; they are necessary to one another for the generation
of another like themselves. If we pursue the account of male and female
cooperation beyond Politics 1.2, we see that not only in the process of
generation but also in the operations of the household Aristotle thinks that
the male head of household is better than the woman who is his partner,
although both are rational beings, and both are necessary for household life
and so ultimately for political life. The inferiority of a woman does not
render her less than human on Aristotle’s account; he explicitly denies this
in Politics 1.13. (I will discuss these points at greater length in chapter 3).
My suggestion, then, is that Aristotle can maintain that male and female
individuals satisfy completely the species form (as suggested by Met. 10.9)
by pointing out that each sex achieves the subordinate generative telos in
that each concocts a fertile residue, semen or katamênia, each of which is
equally necessary for the achievement of the ultimate telos of the generative
faculty: generation of another animal like themselves. At the same time, he
can argue that the female is a deformity, and inferior to the male of the same
species with respect to their subordinate teloi, by construing that deformity
as (1) an inferiority within the range of capacities for concocting a fertile
residue; (2) material rather than formal; (3) a departure from the male
embodiment (not from the species form), and so a deviation from
resemblance to the male parent in sex; and (4) an inferiority with respect to
the roles played by each residue.137 The implication is certainly that it is
better to be a male elephant than a female elephant, but not that a male
elephant is better at being an elephant than is a female elephant.
2.9.5.2 Deformity and frequency

The second problem with the notion of the female as a deformity is
explaining how something that occurs regularly might also be a deformity.
This problem is articulated lucidly by Karen Nielsen: “If male and female
embryos occur with approximately the same frequency in most species,
why assume that the production of individual male offspring is teleological,
while the production of individual female offspring is not?”138 Nielsen
argues that Aristotle did believe that males were produced “usually” but
that his “concept of the usual is exclusively a normative teleological
concept. In order to spell out what features are ‘usual’ for an organism it
suffices to determine what is the best state for organisms of its kind. What
is best need not be what occurs more frequently in organisms of its
kind.”139 The argument, building on Judson’s account of relative frequency,
is that a phenomenon (such as the generation of females) can be contrary to
nature and yet regularly occur.140 Further evidence for this view is provided
by Charlotte Witt’s work on deformed kinds. According to her analysis,
based on a consideration of a variety of cases described by Aristotle as
deformities, “Deformity is a structural, functional and teleological notion
for Aristotle. It is not a numerical or statistical notion.”141
A passage at Generation of Animals 4.4 770b9–27 explains how the
female can be a regularly occurring deformity. It distinguishes two senses in
which something might be contrary to nature, and argues that only one
occurs:
A monstrosity, of course, belongs to the class of “things contrary to nature,” although it is
contrary not to nature in its entirety but only to nature in the generality of cases. So far as
concerns the nature which is always and is by necessity, nothing occurs contrary to that; no;
unnatural occurrences are found only among those things which occur as they do in the
generality of cases, but which may occur otherwise. Why, even in those instances of the
phenomena we are considering, what occurs is contrary to this particular order, certainly, but it
never happens in a merely random fashion; and therefore it seems less of a monstrosity because
even that which is contrary to nature is, in a way, in accordance with nature (i.e. whenever the
“formal” nature has not mastered the “material” nature). Hence, people do not call things of this
sort monstrosities any more than they do in the other cases where something occurs habitually.
(GA 4.4 770b9–19)
This passage should be read in conjunction with that at Generation of

Animals 4.3 767a36–b27, and in particular the point made there at 767b7
that “any animal that does not resemble its parents is really in a way a
monstrosity” (ἤδη τρόπον τινὰ τέρας ἐστίν). The point is that such animals
occur frequently, and while they are contrary to nature in that they fail to
resemble their parents in some respect, they also exhibit regularity. Clearly
females are among these deformities, since they occur “whenever the
‘formal’ nature has not mastered the ‘material’ nature” and we know that
this is precisely how Aristotle accounts for the generation of female
animals. Because the material nature also expresses itself in regularity, they
are “contrary to this particular order (παρὰ τὴν τάξιν μὲν ταύτην)” but “not
random (μὴ τυχόντως)” (GA 4.4 770b14–15). So Aristotle allows that there
are things that are deformities, although they occur frequently and manifest,
as a group, a certain regularity.
We have seen some evidence that offspring might be contrary to the
material nature but not the formal nature. Malcolm Heath writes: “A teras is
contrary to nature as generality (ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ), but not to nature as
invariant and necessary (ἀεὶ καὶ ἐξ ἀνάγκης); so what is contrary to nature
in one sense (formal) is by nature in another (material). Hence people are
less likely to speak of a teras if the deformity is frequently recurrent (GA
4.4, 770b9–27). Women are a case in point. Aristotle thinks that females are
imperfectly formed. They are not deformities (terata), but being female is a
‘natural impairment’ (ἀναπηρία φυσική: GA 4.6, 775a15f.).”142 Philip van
der Eijk points to a related distinction, not between kinds of nature (material
or formal), but rather between different levels at which something might be
according to nature. He writes, “One might also say that the principle of
κατὰ φυσίν is applied by Aristotle at different levels: for he does not shun
from saying that even within the category of things happening παρὰ φυσίν
(such as the occurrence of deviations, deformation, and monsters), there is
such a thing as τὸ κατὰ φυσίν; deviations from the natural procedure can
nevertheless display regularity, such as, again, the melancholics, who are
said to be naturally abnormal.”143 So a deformity might occur according to
nature insofar as it displays regularity. The female is such a deformity,
natural in the sense that female animals are produced frequently, and exhibit
great regularity as a subgroup within the species. But the female is also, as I
have already argued, natural in the sense (unlike most deformities) that she
serves a natural end, the production of katamênia, and so makes possible
the separation of the material from the efficient cause.
2.10 The unity of the soul in transmission
2.10.1 The unity of animal soul

The sex of an individual animal is determined, as we have seen, as soon as
the nutritive faculty (which includes the capacity for generation) has been
actualized in the embryo, although it is not fully actualized until all the
organs required for the concoction of the fertile residue have been formed.
We have also seen that Aristotle believes that it is impossible for any part of
an animal’s body to exist as such unless sensitive soul is present in it, in
actuality or in potentiality (GA 2.5 741a10–13). So even the organs that
serve the activities of the nutritive and generative faculty must have
sensitive soul. The faculties of animal soul constitute a unity, not only in
actuality in the animal, but also in potentiality in the fertile residues, and
Aristotle is careful to preserve that unity in his account of the transmission
of soul from parents to offspring.
Aristotle’s description of the potentialities of the spermata and of the
process of conception is intended to avoid the difficulties he perceives in
the accounts of generation offered by some of his predecessors, in which
male and female contributions each contain in actuality some part of what
Aristotle understands to be the formal cause. On such accounts, he thinks it
is impossible to explain how the different parts of form can animate the
body, and how they can constitute a whole eventually in the embryo.
Aristotle’s own account of the transmission of soul avoids any actual
division of the faculties, while permitting that division in potentiality. Two
points are important. The first is that he does not see the nutritive faculty
and the sensitive faculty as two parts of a whole, discrete even while joined
in a whole, as, for example, the organs of a body are discrete. The analogy
he draws between geometrical figures and faculties of soul in both the De
anima and the Generation of Animals make clear that lower-level faculties
are subsumed into higher-level faculties, existing as potentialities within the
highest-level faculty. This is apparent when Aristotle says, in the context of
a discussion of the appropriate definition of soul:
What holds in the case of the soul is very close to what holds concerning figures (σχημάτων):
for in the case of both figures and ensouled things, what is prior is always present potentially
(ὑπάρχει δυνάμει) in what follows in a series—for example, the triangle in the square, and the
nutritive faculty in the perceptual faculty. (DA 2.3 414b28–32)
Extrapolating from this, we can say that in the fetation and the embryo, not
only is there no entity “soul” that contains both sensitive and nutritive soul
(since just as “a figure is nothing beyond a triangle and the others following
in a series,” so too “a soul is nothing beyond the things mentioned [i.e., the
faculties of the soul]” [DA 2.3 414b21–22]), but the sensitive soul is not
separate from the nutritive soul; rather, the sensitive soul is animal soul and
contains, potentially, the nutritive soul. If we ask what “potentially” means
here, the analogy with geometrical figures again suggests that it describes
the relation of nutritive soul to sensitive soul as one in which the nutritive
faculty does not maintain an existence independent of the sensitive faculty,
although they are distinguishable in definition. Moreover, it suggests that
the sensitive soul is partly constituted by the nutritive soul (if only because
the operation of the nutritive soul is a necessary condition for its own
operation).
The second point is that the characterization of the female katamênia as
containing in potentiality the nutritive and sensitive faculties as well as the
parts of the animal to be formed allows Aristotle to depict the animal that is
generated as a unity not only of body and soul, but also as possessed of a
soul that is a unity. This notion of unity is set out in the Metaphysics in a
discussion of the unity of essence.144 Aristotle addresses a problem
concerned with the unity of generated substances as well as the unity of
definitions and numbers.145 In Metaphysics 7.17 he phrases the question in
terms of parts and the whole formed by those parts: why do these parts form
this whole? He offers as an example: “Why are these materials a house?”
(Met. 7.17 1041b5–6). Aristotle’s claim is that substance is “a principle and
a cause” (Met. 7.17 1041a10). The substance is present in the whole
constituted of its parts, but it is not an element in that whole: “The syllable
is not its elements . . . nor is flesh fire and earth” (Met. 7.17 1041b10–14); it
is, rather, a principle (Met. 7.17 1041b28–31):
But if, as we say, one element is matter and another is form (τὸ μὲν ὕλη τὸ δὲ μορφή), and one is
potentially and the other actually (τὸ μὲν δυνάμει τὸ δὲ ἐνεργείᾳ), the question will no longer be
thought a difficulty. . . . The difficulty disappears, because the one is matter, the other form.
What then is the cause of this—the reason why that which was potentially is actually,—what
except, in the case of things which are generated, the agent? For there is no other reason why the
potential sphere becomes actually a sphere, but this was the essence (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) of either.
(Met. 8.6 1045a23–34)146
So the cause of actualization of a potentiality is the agent, and in the

generation of an animal the agent is the male parent (or, more precisely, the
semen, or more precisely still the motions in the semen). And Aristotle says
as much in the Metaphysics, when insisting that one should state all the
causes when inquiring into the cause of something: “For example, what is
the material cause of man? The menstrual fluid. What is the moving cause?
The semen. The formal cause? The essence. The final cause? The end. But
perhaps the latter two are the same” (Met. 8.4 1044a39–b3). The semen is
here identified with the moving cause, or the agent, and the katamênia with
the material cause (as in the GA). The moving cause makes actual the parts
that are potentially in the katamênia (the elements) and organizes them into
a whole.
Moreover, as we have seen, there are other potentialities in the
katamênia, for nutritive/generative and sensitive soul. Although the
faculties of the soul are not material parts, what is potential is always
analogous to the matter—so the passive potentiality for nutritive and
sensitive soul in the katamênia stands as a kind of matter to the active
potentiality for sensitive soul (including nutritive soul) in the semen. The
semen as moving cause actualizes the potentiality for animal soul in the
katamênia. It does so not in the way that the heat of the diaphragm might
actualize nutritive soul to produce a wind-egg. Rather, by actualizing the
sensitive soul, it also actualizes the potentiality for nutritive soul by forming
the organs and their concomitant capacities so that it becomes the nutritive
faculty of an animal, not a plant, and at the same time actualizes the
potentiality for sensitive soul in the same way. The transmission of soul
from parent to offspring in animal kinds is then a complex process in which
the moving cause in the male sperma (an active power) actualizes
potentialities (both for capacities and for organs) in the female sperma and
transmits a single and unified soul.
Attributing correlative active and passive powers to the fertile residues
produced by male and female animals serves two purposes. First, Aristotle
preserves the normative differences between male and female contributions
to generation, since the active potentiality for soul is better than the passive
potentiality. He conceptualizes these differences in both physical and
psychological terms (as we saw in section 2.7). The katamênia is inferior as
a function of its imperfect concoction; but it also is potentially alive in an
inferior sense—it has a passive rather than an active potentiality for soul.
Aristotle links the lower degree of vital heat in the female, the impurity of
the katamênia, and the lack of the “origin of soul” in a passage at
Generation of Animals 3.2 737a29–30. Although the male sperma is the
agent that initiates generation and actualizes both the faculties of soul and
the organs in the development of the fetation, embryo, and offspring, it
would be a mistake to conceive of the female sperma as lifeless or inert
matter. Female sperma is inferior to male sperma, but, it too is potentially
alive.
Second, attributing these correlative potentialities to male and female
sperma helps to explain how the species soul can be transmitted as a whole:
the katamênia has a passive potentiality for soul, and the semen an active
potentiality, so that the semen actualizes the potentiality of the katamênia
and produces soul in the embryo and ultimately in the offspring. In other
words, it is not that two distinct soul faculties are joined together in
conception, but rather that an animal soul with its characteristic faculties is
actualized.
2.10.2 The unity of human soul

Because the Generation of Animals is a treatise concerned with animals of
all kinds, Aristotle’s focus is on the transmission of sensitive soul, which is
characteristic of the genus of animals. However, he distinguishes human
beings as rational animals from all other animal kinds, so that the account
of the transmission of soul in the case of human generation must be
supplemented with a discussion of the transmission of the faculty of reason.
We have seen Aristotle say that “that which is peculiar to each thing is the
end of its process of formation” (GA 2.3 736b4–5)—and that means, in the
case of human embryological development, that we should expect the
rational faculty to be the last to develop. Moreover, since the exercise of
reason depends on imagination (which provides the objects of the intellect)
and imagination requires sensation, it is clear that the acquisition of rational
capacities cannot precede the development of sensitive capacities in a
human being. The development of the faculty of reason presents a special
difficulty, as Aristotle acknowledges:
It is a very great puzzle to answer another question, concerning reason (περὶ νοῦ). At what
moment and in what manner, do those creatures which have this principle of reason acquire their
share in it, and where does it come from? This is a very difficult problem which we must
endeavour to solve, so far as it may be solved, to the best of our power. (GA 2.3 736b5–8)
The acquisition of the faculty of reason presents a problem because of the

unusual status of reason as a faculty that does not rely directly on an organ.
We have seen that the nutritive and sensitive faculties are fully actual only
when all the organs that support their activities are formed. Since reason is
not dependent on the formation of an organ, at which moment in its
development does the embryo acquire the capacity for reason? It is clear
that the embryo of a human being must have rational soul potentially:
Aristotle asserts, as we have seen, that the fertile residues and the fetation
have nutritive soul potentially, and then adds, “And it is clear we should
follow a similar line also in our statements about sensitive soul and rational
soul, since a thing must of necessity possess every one of the sorts of soul
potentially before it possesses them in actuality” (GA 2.3 736b13–16).147
The problem is to determine at what moment and through what mechanism
its potentiality for rational soul is actualized. In the case of the other
faculties (nutritive and sensitive) we are able to answer that question, at
least in principle, by identifying when the organs required for that faculty
are fully formed and functioning.
Aristotle’s solution to the problem is presented in a passage that requires
interpretation:
Now the following considerations plainly show that they [the faculties of soul] cannot all be
present beforehand. Clearly, those principles whose activity is physical cannot be present
without a physical body—there can, for example, be no walking without feet; and this also rules
out the possibility of their entering from outside, since it is impossible either that they enter by
themselves, because they are inseparable [from a physical body], or that they enter by
transmission in some body, because the semen is a residue of the nourishment that is undergoing
change. It remains, then, that intellect (νοῦν) alone enters in, as an additional factor, from
outside (θύραθεν), and that it alone is divine, because physical activity (σωματικὴ ἐνέργεια) has
nothing whatever to do with the activity of the intellect (αὐτοῦ τῇ ἐνεργίᾳ). (GA 2.3 736b21–29)
“From outside” must mean “from outside of the fetation.” Peck is right, I
think, to see that Aristotle here is claiming that the rational soul is provided
by means of the male semen, but that it is neither introduced into the semen
nor actualized by the semen in the katamênia in the same way as the
sensitive soul.148 Aristotle has outlined various possibilities for how soul
might enter into the semen and the fetation. Some faculties of soul are
“there [in the katamênia] and some are not” (GA 2.3 736b17) and “some of
them [i.e., some of the soul faculties that are not originally in the katamênia
but are supplied by the male semen] come to be formed within the male
from some outside source” (GA 2.3 736b20–21). As we have seen, it is the
nutritive and sensitive soul faculties that are potentially present in the
katamênia, as well as in the male semen. Aristotle suggests that these
potential soul faculties are acquired as the spermata move through the
parent’s body, but the rational soul cannot be present in the semen through
its movement through the male body—because that body does not contain
particular organs that perform the activities of the rational faculty. So
although rational soul is bestowed on the human embryo by way of its
father’s semen, the presence of rational soul in the father’s semen is due to
some “external source” the nature of which is left somewhat mysterious by
Aristotle. He says as much:
Consider now the physical part of the semen (τὸ δὲ τῆς γονῆς σῶμα). (This it is which, when it
is emitted by the male, is accompanied by the portion of soul-principle (τὸ τῆς ψυχικῆς ἀρχῆς)
and acts as its vehicle. Partly this soul-principle is separable from physical matter—this applies
to those animals where some divine element is included, and what we call reason (νοῦς) is of
this character—partly it is inseparable.) (GA 2.3 737a9–12)
The soul principle that is inseparable from the physical matter of the semen
must be that of the sensitive soul, actualized in the katamênia by way of
physical movements in the semen; the soul principle that is separable is
explicitly identified as the rational faculty. Again, the mechanism by which
semen, which is the vehicle of rational soul and yet is separable from it,
transmits rational soul to the embryo is left mysterious.149 What is clear is
that the male is only indirectly a source of rational soul, which enters into
the human male’s semen “from outside.” This means that although the
faculty of reason does not have its source in either parent (unlike the
faculties of nutrition and sensation), reason is nonetheless conveyed to the
offspring by the father.150 How exactly reason enters in from outside is not
a question Aristotle addresses, but it is quite clear that he does not, in the
Generation of Animals, conceive of the faculty of reason as drawn directly
from the body of either the male or the female parent. One implication of
this is that in Aristotle’s embryology the faculty of reason is sexless. This
does not mean that there will be no differences between men and women in
rational faculties (we know that Aristotle attributes an important difference
to the “authority” of the deliberative faculties in the two sexes), but those
differences will have to emerge from physiological differences, as ways in
which the bodies of men and women affect the exercise of rational
capacities. In chapter 4 I will explore the link between embodiment and
differences in rational capacity.
To summarize the claims about the roles of male and female in the
process of generation and the transmission of soul, it is inaccurate to say
baldly that the male provides form, the female matter. The female certainly
does provide matter, and the male provides no matter, but the matter
provided by the female is already informed. It is only potentially informed,
but that is true also of male semen, of the fetation, and even of the embryo;
the soul (or faculty of soul) that is transmitted in the long process of
conception is soul in potentiality until the animal is fully formed. But the
faculties of soul are transmitted in such a way that higher faculties
actualize, and thereby contain, lower faculties, rather than being added to
them. This is crucial to Aristotle’s account, because otherwise the soul of a
living animal will not be a unity, and the account will suffer from the same
problem that he identified in the accounts of his predecessors: explaining
how different parts of form might become one. When Aristotle implies that
the female does not contribute soul, he means only that she does not
contribute the active potentiality for the sensitive faculty. What she does
contribute, as we have seen, is potentialities for the nutritive and sensitive
faculties, and in the case of human beings, a potentiality for the rational
faculty.
2.11 Conclusion
Aristotle’s account of sexual difference in the biological works emerges
from the context of his claim in the Metaphysics that sex is a difference that
belongs to the genus animal as such, but in the matter of the genus, not in
its essence. He construes male and female as contraries in a way that harks
back to the notion of sex as opposition in Pythagorean and other
predecessors, but for Aristotle contraries are those things that are most
different in the same underlying substrate: in this case, the genus animal. So
his account of sexual difference as opposition affirms the unity of male and
female in species and ultimately in genus, as well as the differences
between them. It insists that those differences are in the matter, and not the
form, of the animal.
Aristotle’s biological theory of sexual difference is developed in the
Generation of Animals as part of his account of natural generation, and on
my interpretation it again identifies sex as a difference in the matter of
individual animals. To have a sex is to have a capacity to concoct a fertile
residue; that capacity will be part of the formal nature of an animal, and so
it belongs to both sexes. Insofar as that capacity differs in male and female
animals, it is a difference in material rather than formal nature, a difference
in morphê and not in eidos. Although the sex of an individual is determined
by material necessity in the interaction of the fertile residues from male and
female and of the movements present in them, the generation of a female
animal is as much the achievement of the telos of generation as is the
generation of a male animal, because both instantiate the species form.
This is not to say that Aristotle does not express some of the
ambivalence toward the female that we have seen in his predecessors. In his
efforts to define the sexes we find Aristotle describing the female as having
both a capacity (to concoct surplus blood into a fertile residue that acts as
the material cause of the generation of an animal) and an incapacity (to
concoct the surplus blood into a residue that acts as the efficient cause). He
gives an account of the female’s fertile residue as potent, but inferior in its
passivity relative to the male’s active potency. He characterizes the
production of a female animal as a successful case of generation but one
that falls short (in its material organization or morphê) of the male. In each
of these cases, Aristotle allows that the female, or the female’s contribution
to generation, is inferior in some way, but he also argues that the female is
necessary for the achievement of the aims of nature, and valuable for that
reason.
Although Aristotle’s theory of sexual difference clearly depicts the
female as an inferior embodiment relative to the male, it also asserts that
she is good for a purpose—indeed, for more than one purpose. Male and
female must both exist, and collaborate, to achieve two distinct aims of
nature. The first is to generate another animal like themselves. As
individuals, female and male each have a subordinate telos, the generation
of a fertile residue from which the offspring will be generated, and they
share the ultimate telos of generation. The way in which the female is
inferior is connected to her capacity to collaborate in achieving the telos of
generation: the female is inferior because her role in generation is for the
sake of the role played by the male, but both roles contribute to the ultimate
telos of generation. The second natural aim that is achieved by means of
sexual difference is the separation of the efficient causal principle of
generation from the material causal principle. Again, the female is inferior
because she provides the material principle, but the existence of female
animals is good precisely because it makes possible the separation of that
inferior principle from the more divine, efficient, principle.
The way in which Aristotle navigates in the Generation of Animals
between the inferiority of the female and her status as something that has a
natural purpose is replicated in his account of sexual difference in the
political realm, to be considered in the next chapter. We have seen that
Aristotle’s account of conception and embryogenesis locates sexual
differences in the generative faculty of the soul and in the organs of the
body that serve that faculty. But his account of embryonic development in
human beings has the rational faculty entering into the semen “from the
outside.” Although it is not entirely clear what that means, it is clear that
Aristotle treats the rational faculty separately from other faculties of soul
because he does not associate it with particular organs of the body, and so
he cannot explain its appearance as a function of the development of any
particular organ or organs. If sexual difference is a difference in matter, and
the rational faculty is not a difference in matter, then we would not expect
to find sexual differences in the capacities or operations of reason. And yet,
in the Politics, Aristotle suggests just that. After examining the account of
political sexual differences in the next chapter, and in particular their
association with the rational faculty, in chapter 4 I will take up the problem
this tension presents: how can we connect the biological account of sexual
difference as located in the body with the account of political sexual
differences as differences in the rational faculty?
3
Sexual Difference in Social and Political Life
3.1 Introduction
We have seen that one way in which Aristotle understands sexual difference
in the biological context is based on a distinction between a capacity to
provide the efficient cause of generation and a capacity to provide the
material cause. Although the distinction between males and females can
thus be characterized in positive terms, it is also true that Aristotle often
describes the female as having an incapacity relative to the male—either to
concoct, or to produce sensitive soul. In this chapter I will argue that in the
context of his political philosophy Aristotle in a similar way understands
the sexes to be distinguished by a capacity and incapacity—in this case a
capacity for decision, which he believes free men have and free women do
not. The incapacity for decision that Aristotle attributes to women justifies,
on his view, the rule that men exercise (and should exercise) over women.
But it is also, as we will see, a capacity to be ruled that Aristotle sees as
beneficial to the household and the polis.
In this chapter I focus on the rule of men over women in the household
and the polis and consider three related questions. First, what does Aristotle
mean when he says that men rule “by nature” over women? Second, what
exactly is the incapacity of the deliberative faculty that distinguishes
women from men and determines that men should rule? And third, if
women have this incapacity, why is it good that they be included in the
political community? The answers to these questions will give us a picture
of Aristotle’s account of sexual difference as a political phenomenon, and
allow us then in chapter 4 to consider whether women are subject to rule by
men for a reason that can be traced back to the biology of sexual difference.
This chapter has three parts, which take up these questions in sequence.
In the first (section 3.2) I establish the distinguishing features of rule that is
natural, and hence what Aristotle means to say when he claims that men
rule over women by nature. The discussion of natural rule in the Politics
emerges from a number of familiar claims Aristotle makes about nature in
the political realm: that people are by nature political, that the polis is
natural, and that the polis is prior by nature to households and to
individuals. Natural rule, I argue, is rule that is structured teleologically and
aims at the good of the social whole in which it occurs. The rule of men
over women thus aims at the good of the whole in the context of which that
rule is exercised, namely the household; and, because the household is part
of the polis, the rule of men over women in the household contributes
ultimately to the good of the polis. If natural rule is teleological in this way
it is because the social entities (households in particular) in which it is
exercised are organic wholes, the parts of which must be distinct in kind
from one another. Rule is natural when it is exercised in the context of an
organic whole, with the aim of achieving the good of that whole. The
importance of the claim that men rule over women by nature is twofold:
first, it means that Aristotle believes it is the form of rule that should be
adopted in every household because it is best (and not a conventional or
optional social arrangement); second, it means that the relation between the
sexes is to be determined by the telos of the social whole of which that
relation is a part, that is, the telos of the household. This is not to say that
the household has a phusis, or nature, although it is, on Aristotle’s account
natural; in section 3.2.4 I explore the sense in which the household and the
polis are natural. I will argue that it is the good of the household as a whole,
and not, as is often assumed, something like the distinct natures of male and
female, that determines the rule of men over women.
In the second part (sections 3.3 and 3.4) I consider Aristotle’s conception
of sexual difference as a difference that grounds the different status of men
and women in the polis. The first task is to distinguish the case of women
from that of other natural subjects. Aristotle asserts that the rule of men
over women differs from the rule of masters over slaves and of fathers over
children (although these are all forms of natural rule), because of the
differences in the deliberative faculties of those who are ruled. In every
case, the justification for rule is based on the superiority of the deliberative
faculty in free men, but Aristotle distinguishes a number of ways in which
the deliberative faculty might be defective and thereby distinguishes kinds
among those who should be ruled by nature. My contention is that although
all these forms of rule are exercised in the household, the organic whole that
is the structure in which they occur is not the same in every instance—for
example, the whole in which men are a better part than women is not the
same as the whole in which free men are better than slaves. And although
all these forms of rule are natural in that they are teleological, the telos at
which each aims is somewhat different. So Aristotle understands natural
rule as a general kind marked off by certain features, within which more
specific forms of rule can be differentiated. The specific form of natural
rule that men exercise over women is one that Aristotle characterizes both
as aristocratic and as constitutional. That it should be aristocratic is no
surprise; that it is also constitutional seems to confuse the picture, because
constitutional rule generally presupposes equality between those who rule
and those who are ruled (although constitutional rule is structured so as to
imitate inequalities, as we will see). In what sense can the rule of men over
women be constitutional, given the inequality of men and women? I argue
that Aristotle believes that women (unlike slaves and children) can
participate in deliberation although they cannot rule, and this is why he
urges men to cede to women in certain matters. The political incapacity of
women is precise and limited, and it does not exclude them altogether from
the activities of deliberative reason.
In the third part (section 3.5) I consider Aristotle’s objections to Socratic
proposals to restructure the relations between men and women in order to
reveal what those objections tell us about Aristotle’s commitment to
preserving sexual difference in the spheres of the household and the city.
The teleological account of natural rule suggests that there is some political
good to be achieved through men’s rule over women, and it is in Aristotle’s
criticisms of Socratic proposals for equality that we find his account of that
political good. It is possible to read this debate as one in which Socrates
argues for the worth of women and Aristotle attacks it, but I contend that
we should rather understand it as one in which Socrates argues that there is
no political value in women (and hence no reason to preserve sexual
difference) and Aristotle argues that there is indeed a value to women—that
they are essential to the unity of the household and ultimately of the city. As
in the biology where, as we have seen, Aristotle asserts the conditional
value of females, so too in the Politics he urges us to accept that women are
valuable to the city as well as to the household. In setting out the
deliberative incapacity of women, Aristotle’s intention is not to show that
women are inferior to men—although he thinks that is true, and that it is
obvious. Rather, his intention is to show that the presence of women in
households and poleis is a condition for the full exercise of human virtue,
and hence a political good.
3.2 The rule of men over women is a form of natural rule
3.2.1 What it means to rule

When Aristotle speaks of men “ruling” women, he is referring to a
particular practice that is one manifestation of a widespread phenomenon in
which a person, either individually or collectively, makes decisions for
others. Aristotle offers us an analysis of the notion of rule in the
Metaphysics, and in the Politics he develops an account of the form of rule
that is natural. The relation between men and women is explained and
justified by Aristotle as an instance of natural rule, drawing on these two
discussions.
Rule is itself one form of an even more general activity, acting as a
source or origin. The noun ἀρχή and its cognate verb ἄρχειν have many
senses, which are detailed in Metaphysics 5.1. Most of these senses are
ways of being a source or origin, and in a number of cases these origins
initiate change without formulating the intention to do so. So, for example,
the efficient cause of an event will be an ἀρχή of that event; the wind is the
origin of the door slamming in this sense, the father the origin of his
offspring. But Aristotle also cites a sense in which an ἀρχή is “that by
whose choice that which is moved is moved and that which changes, e.g.
the magistracies in cities, and oligarchies and monarchies and tyrannies are
called ἄρχαι and so are the arts and of these especially the architectonic
arts” (Met. 5.1 1013a9–14). The context here is clearly political or, more
generally, social and cooperative: in a political context the one who decides
what action will be taken is the origin of that action. This social sense of
ἀρχή is continuous with the other senses that Aristotle sets out: a decision is
a starting point for a change, and so the person who makes a decision is the
origin of the action that follows on that decision. To say that men rule over
women is thus to say that men decide on the actions that women must take.
The context for these decisions is the household, understood as a part of the
city-state.
3.2.2 Rule over women as an element of the household
In the Politics the rule of men over women is treated as one of a number of
different natural relations of rule exercised in the household. “Household”
is a technical term in the Politics; it refers to the most basic social unit, in
which a free man lives with his wife, their children, household slaves, and
other dependents. I translate οἴκος throughout as “household” rather than
“family” because Aristotle’s discussion of the οἴκος, as well as
contemporary Athenian social organization, makes clear that it comprised
relations of ownership as well as kinship, and was socially and not only
legally an economic structure as much as a familial one.1 For Aristotle, a
household just is the social hierarchy in which a free adult man rules over
free women, slaves, and children, in different ways, and with the aim of
living well. The rule of men over women is compared to, and distinguished
from, the rule of free men over slaves, and of fathers over children.2 These
claims about rule have their origin in Aristotle’s analysis of the household
into certain fundamental relationships. He tells us that “the first and
smallest parts of the household are master and slave (δεσπότης καὶ δοῦλος),
husband and wife (πόσις καὶ ἄλοχος), father and children (πατὴρ καὶ
τέκνα)” (Pol. 1.3 1253b5–7). Later in Book 1 he repeats the point that the
household includes three pairings of ruler and ruled and elaborates on the
different forms of rule appropriate to these pairs:
Since there are three parts of expertise in household management—expertise in mastery
(δεσποτική), which was spoken of earlier, expertise in paternal [rule] (πατρική), and expertise in
marital [rule] (γαμική)—[the latter two must now be taken up]. For one rules over a woman
(γυναικὸς) and children (τέκνων) both as free persons, but it is not the same kind of rule: rule
over a woman is constitutional (πολιτικῶς), rule over children is kingly (βασιλικῶς). (Pol. 1.12
1259a37–b4)3
It is the free adult man who engages in household management, and he

must recognize that this management involves three distinct forms of rule,
comparable in that each is a form of natural rule.4 In effect, he must wear
three hats—those of master, husband, and father. In each case there are
relations of dependency, but the nature of the dependency differs: the sense
in which the slave and the master need each other is different from the sense
in which a free man and his wife need each other. This is, for Aristotle, a
fundamental point, and one that links his discussion of relations of rule
within the household to relations of rule in the polis. His discussion of the
household in Book 1 is intended to support two central claims that
contribute to the larger aims of his Politics: (1) that there are different kinds
of rule (Pol. 1.1 1252a9–17), and (2) that the polis, the households that
make up a polis, and the relationships that make up the household are
natural (Pol. 1.2 1252b30–32).
If we consider the method Aristotle adopts in Book 1 of the Politics, we
can see this link between the discussion of the household and the way in
which Aristotle understands sexual difference as a matter of political
importance. The examination of the household in Book 1 is intended as an
extended analysis of the parts of the polis.5 Aristotle has announced as a
general methodological principle that to understand a compound entity one
should analyze it into its parts:
For just as it is necessary elsewhere to divide a compound (τὸ σύνθετον) into its uncompounded
elements (τῶν ἀσυνθέτων) (for these are the smallest parts of the whole), so too by investigating
what the city is composed of we shall gain a better view concerning these [kinds of rule] as well,
both as how they differ from one another and as to whether there is some expertise characteristic
of an art that can be acquired in connection with each of those mentioned. Now in these matters
as elsewhere it is by looking at how things develop naturally from the beginning that one may
best study them. (Pol. 1.1 1252a17–1.2 1252a26)
And he has told us that the parts of the polis are households (Pol. 1.2
1253b1), and that the parts of the household are the three relations of
natural rule (Pol. 1.12 1259a37–b4). The first step in examining the simple
elements of the polis is the distinction Aristotle draws between two kinds of
those “who cannot exist without each other,” the male and female, and the
master and slave (Pol. 1.2 1252a26–7). In this context the elements of the
state are not individual citizens. The elements are the pairings of the free
adult male head of household with slave and wife within the household,
each bound by a relation of rule; by considering these we will discover the
varieties of natural rule, and an understanding of those varieties will inform
Aristotle’s discussion of the polis and the forms of rule possible and
desirable within it.6 On this view, then, household governance is a subject
distinct from political governance, but linked to it because political society
is composed of households, as Aristotle says at Politics 1.3 1253b1–2.7
It is worth asking, however, why an account of the elements of a
composite is necessary for an account of the composite. That is, why will
understanding households and the relations of natural rule that constitute
households help us to understand the polis? The answer lies in Aristotle’s
understanding of the relation of the simple elements of the polis (i.e., the
parts of the household) to the polis itself. He takes the whole to be prior, in
an analytical rather than a temporal sense, to the part; insofar as the polis is
like an organism, the polis is prior to its parts in the same way that a body is
prior to its parts. Since the “parts” in this case are ultimately the three
pairings that involve different forms of rule, the polis is prior to these. This
analytical priority also has a teleological dimension, as suggested by the
analogy with an animal body: the polis is prior to the household, and so the
household is for the sake of the polis. In a similar way, the household is
prior to its parts—namely the pairings of master/slave, husband/wife, and
father/child—and so each of these is for the sake of the household, and
ultimately for the sake of the polis. And because the household is for the
sake of the polis, the polis determines what the household is like, or should
be like, just as, for example, the form of an animal determines what the
different parts of the animal will be, because those parts are for the sake of
the animal as a whole. The parts should then reveal to us something of the
whole, precisely insofar as they have been determined by the nature of the
whole. In other words, we inquire into the elements of a political
community not to confirm that the polis is indeed constituted out of
households, or that those households are constituted by certain pairings
involving natural rule (i.e., not to establish these facts, which Aristotle
thinks we already know), but because this investigation will tell us
something about what the polis should be.
3.2.3 There are different kinds of rule

This investigation—the analysis of the parts of the household—will
ultimately make clear that there is by nature more than one kind of person,
and therefore more than one kind of natural rule, both in the household,
and, by implication, in the city. Aristotle said as much when he announced
that we should look at the elements of the polis “in order that we may see in
what the different kinds of rule differ from one another” (Pol. 1.1 1252a22).
This conclusion is first anticipated when Aristotle asserts in Politics 1.1 that
it is a mistake to suppose that there is only one kind of rule. Evidence for it
can be found in the discussion of slavery in 1.4–7 and the argument to the
claim that there are different kinds of virtue in 1.13, both of which are
intended to establish that there are different kinds of people (because
different capacities, moral and intellectual, will distinguish different kinds).
That there are different kinds of people helps to establish that ruling is not
merely a question of science, which, once achieved, can be transferred from
one context to another. This is because the ruler must not only have a
certain knowledge—he must also be a certain kind of person, and his rule
must differ according to the nature of his subjects. The natural ruler will be
distinguished from the natural subject not only by the possession of the
science of rule, but also by the possession of certain virtues essential to
rule.8
To understand the claim that men rule over women by nature in this
context, then, is to see that the claim must be intended to help demonstrate
either that rule over some kinds of people is just, because those people are
different from those who have the capacity to rule, or that the capacity for
rule (in general) is not simply a science, but also a moral qualification. In
fact it does both. It is, on Aristotle’s view, natural and just that men should
rule over women, because of the kinds of people that men and women are.
And when we explore the differences Aristotle attributes to men and
women, we see that the legitimacy of the rule of men over women is a
question not so much of the science of rule, as of a certain moral authority
that men have in virtue of their role in the polis and the capacity of their
deliberative faculty. In section 3.4 we will consider the nature of that moral
authority. Before that, we need to examine some of the claims about wholes
and parts that are the starting points for Aristotle’s understanding of natural
rule.
3.2.4 Rule, household, and polis as natural
3.2.4.1 Rule in composites

I have been arguing that the discussion of the household, and the
characterization of the rule of men over women as natural, contribute to the
aim of demonstrating that there are different kinds of rule; I will have more
to say about that here and in section 3.4, when we consider the ways in
which the deliberative faculties of women, natural slaves, and children are
different. For now I turn to the second of the claims that link the discussion
of the household with Aristotle’s account of the polis: that the relations of
rule within the household, the household itself, and the polis are all natural
in some sense. Two features in particular characterize natural rule for
Aristotle: (1) it emerges in composite wholes and (2) it is teleological.
Rule that is natural is exercised within a composite entity, in which the
different parts are different in kind. Differences among kinds of natural rule
are a function of the structure of the whole that gives rise to the rule in
question, and the claim that there are different kinds of rule is based on the
variety of possible structures. When Aristotle examines rule as it operates in
different contexts in Book 1, he appeals to the forms of rule that he believes
occur naturally in certain elementary composite wholes as models for rule
in more complex wholes.9 Consider a passage in Book 1 of the Politics,
quoted here at length:
Ruling and being ruled (τὸ γὰρ ἄρχειν καὶ ἄρχεσθαι) belong not only among things necessary
but also among things advantageous (τῶν συμφερόντων). And immediately from birth certain
things diverge, some toward being ruled, others toward ruling. There are many kinds both of
ruling and ruled [things], and the better rule is always that over ruled [things] that are better, for
example over a human being rather than a beast; for the work (τὸ ἔργον) performed by the better
is better, and wherever something rules and something is ruled there is a certain work belonging
to these together. For whatever is constituted out of a number of things—whether continuous or
discrete—and becomes a single common thing always displays a ruling and a ruled element; this
is something that animate things derive from all of nature, for even in things that do not share in
life there is a sort of rule, for example in a harmony. But these matters perhaps belong to a more
external sort of investigation. But an animal is the first thing constituted out of soul and body, of
which the one is the ruling element by nature, the other the ruled. It is in things whose condition
is according to nature that one ought particularly to investigate what is by nature, not in things
that are defective. Thus the human being to be studied is one whose state is best both in body
and in soul—in him this is clear; for in the case of the depraved, or those in a depraved
condition, the body is often held to rule the soul on account of their being in a condition that is
bad and unnatural. It is then in an animal, as we were saying, that one can first discern both the
sort of rule characteristic of a master and political rule. For the soul rules the body with the rule
characteristic of a master (δεσποτικὴν ἀρχήν), while intellect (ὁ νοῦς) rules appetite (ἡ ὄρεξις)
with political [or constitutional] and kingly rule (πολιτικὴν καὶ βασιλικήν [ἀρχήν]); and this
makes it evident that it is according to nature and advantageous for the body to be ruled by the
soul and the passionate part [of the soul] by intellect and the part having reason, while it is
harmful to both if the relation is equal or reversed. The same holds with respect to man and the
other animals; tame animals have a better nature than wild ones, and it is better for all of them to
be ruled by man, since in this way their preservation is ensured. Further, the relation of male to
female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled (τὸ ἄρρεν πρὸς τὸ θῆλυ
φύσει τὸ μὲν κρεῖττον τὸ δὲ χεῖρον, τὸ μὲν ἄρχον τὸ δ᾿ ἀρχόμενον). The same must of necessity
hold in the case of human beings generally (ἐπὶ πάντων ἀνθρώπων). (Italics added) (Pol. 1.5
1254a20–b20)
This is the passage in which the claim that the male rules by nature, and the
female is ruled by nature, is stated most clearly. Although the passage is
intended as a justification of the form of rule that is appropriate to slavery
(despotism—“the rule characteristic of a master”), it serves more generally
as an argument that rule in different forms (despotical, constitutional, and
kingly) is both necessary and natural.10 The argument begins with the
premise that in any composite whole constituted out of parts there will be a
ruling element and an element that is subject to rule. Aristotle takes that to
be a fact of nature (“this [the distinction between a ruling and a ruled part]
is something that animate things derive from all of nature”).
Aristotle mentions a variety of wholes that require different structures of
rule. He suggests that what makes each of these examples a whole—what
makes a person, a soul, a polis, the pairing of master and slave, or the
pairing of a man and his wife into a whole—is that the parts of each are
engaged in some collective task. Notice that this is also how he
characterizes the notion of the political: an animal species is political if,
most fundamentally, different individuals of that species cooperate to
perform some task (HA 1.1 488a7–10; see also Pol. 1.2 1253a8–10). It
makes sense then that the wholes in question in the passage at Politics 1.5
1254a20–b20 might be models for social and political wholes, constituted
of parts that have some unified agency when engaged in their collective
task.11
Two forms of rule provide the paradigms for natural rule: the rule of soul
over body in the case of a person, and the rule of the intellect over the
appetite in the case of the soul. In the first instance we have the composite
whole constituted from soul and body, in the second the composite whole
constituted by the parts or faculties of the soul. The difference between
these is significant. The former is a model of despotical rule, the latter of
constitutional and royal rule. While Aristotle compares the rule of free man
over slave to that of the soul over the body, thereby identifying it as
despotical, he indicates that we ought to understand the relation of rule
between men and women on the model of the rule that the intellect (νοῦς),
as the part that has reason (λόγος), exercises over the faculty in the soul that
experiences emotion and desire (τῷ παθητικῷ μορίῳ), which can be trained
to obey the intellect. Since intellect rules appetite in a constitutional or
kingly way, the rule of men over women should be constitutional and royal,
rather than despotical (the analogy between forms of household rule and
forms of political rule is discussed further in section 3.4).
The distinction between slaves and women with respect to their
subjection to rule is then established. Natural slaves are subject to free men
by nature because “their business is to use their body”; they are the living
tools of their masters, and so their bodies are the instruments of others.
Women, by contrast, are subject to men without being tools of, or parts of,
the men who rule them. In section 3.4 I will elaborate on the differences
Aristotle takes to be the grounds for the different political status of slaves
and women. It is worth emphasizing here, as a preliminary point, that
Aristotle appeals to bodily differences in slaves to justify their subjection to
free men, but in justifying the subjection of women to the rule of men he
says nothing about the ways in which women’s bodies differ from those of
men. In particular, he says nothing about women’s childbearing capacities.
However Aristotle might justify the political inferiority of women, he does
not do so by pointing to some purported disabling effect of gestation and
childbirth.
3.2.4.2 Rule is toward a telos

It is clear, then, that natural rule occurs in composite wholes; although the
composition of those wholes will differ, they all manifest a distinction
between a ruling part and a part that is naturally subject to rule. An
important aspect of the discussion of natural rulers and subjects is
Aristotle’s recognition that “the intentions of nature” are not always
realized in the relations of rule that obtain between the parts of a given
whole. We cannot select a whole at random and, from its analysis,
understand how nature intended the relation of rule among its parts to be
organized; we must choose the healthy rather than the corrupted examples
of a given kind of whole. We might think that this will lead to an unhelpful
circularity: to know which part should rule, choose the healthy example; to
know which examples are healthy, check whether the correct part rules. But
Aristotle probably believed that the healthy examples could be determined
on independent grounds. We can, for instance, pick out those who are
eudaimones without checking for the dominance of intellect over appetite in
particular. In the case of the rule of reason over appetite, on which the rule
of men over women is modeled, we can know that reason by nature rules
appetite (even though in many cases reason does not in fact govern
appetite), presumably by seeing what becomes of those who fail to master
their appetites, who lack sôphrosunê. We can infer from this that the
subjection of women to men, like the subjection of appetite to reason, is
natural in the sense that it is better, even if there are cases in which women
rule over men (contrary to nature).
That men should rule over women (and generally natural rulers over
natural subjects) because it is better suggests that the second feature of
natural rule, which emerges from the structure of whole and part in which it
occurs, is that natural rule is rule that aims at a telos or end, determined by
the whole. In the passage from Politics 1.5 quoted earlier, Aristotle draws
an analogy between certain composites (the composites of body and soul, or
of intellect and desire) and the bodies of animals, the point of which is that
the relation between the parts and the whole is similar in the two cases. He
has already invoked this analogy at Politics 1.2 1253a19–27 in the account
of the origins of the polis. In that passage Aristotle draws an implicit
comparison between certain social entities (households, villages, and
poleis) and living organisms by suggesting that smaller social entities are
parts of larger wholes in the same way that the organs of an animal are parts
of a larger whole:
The city is thus prior by nature to the household and to each of us. For the whole must of
necessity be prior to the part; for if the whole [body] is destroyed there will not be a foot or a
hand, unless in the sense that the term is similar (as when one speaks of a ‘hand’ made of stone),
but the thing itself will be defective. . . . That the city is both by nature prior to each individual,
then, is clear. For if the individual when separated [from it] is not self-sufficient, he will be in a
condition similar to that of the other parts in relation to the whole. (Pol. 1.2 1253a19–27)
The relation of individuals and households to poleis is analogous to the

relation of organs to the body. In both cases the whole is prior to the part,
not in a temporal sense (the body does not come into being prior to the
organs, nor the polis prior to the households that make it up), but in an
analytical sense: the parts do not have an existence independent of the
whole.12 This is what Aristotle means when he says that the individual, and
by analogy the organ, is not “self-sufficing.” So the claim that the polis is
prior to the household and to individuals means both (1) that no household
or individual can exist without being part of a polis and (2) that the polis is
a more complete or self-sufficient social whole.13 Of course, these senses
are related: the polis is prior to households and individuals because it
provides them with the structure necessary to fulfill their function, and this
provision is both what it means for the polis to be more self-sufficient and
the reason that individuals and households cannot exist outside of the
context of the polis.
Some commentators have been reluctant to accept that Aristotle means
to say that individuals are dependent on the polis for their existence. One
might think that the description at Politics 1.2 1252b10–30 of a natural
progression from households through villages to a polis is a historical
account, in which case it would be evidence that Aristotle thought that
couples or households might exist independently of a polis, but, as I have
suggested, that description is intended as an analysis of the parts of a polis,
not as a set of claims about the temporal priority of smaller over larger
social units. Moreover, we need not interpret the claim that no household or
individual can exist except as a part of a polis to mean that individuals or
households could not survive physically outside the polis.14 Rather, the
analogy between organic wholes and the whole that is the polis indicates
that the telos of the polis supersedes and subsumes the aims of individual
citizens—so that the functions, and hence the aims of the individual and the
household, serve the aims of the polis and cannot be exercised or achieved
outside it.15 This point applies more broadly, beyond the polis, to the more
primitive social entities that are the parts of larger composites. Ruler and
ruled are the parts of the three primary relations of rule (master/slave,
husband/wife, father/child), which are the parts of the household, and
households are the parts of the polis. Since the parts are for the sake of the
whole, natural subjects and natural rulers perform their functions for the
sake of the relation of rule, and those relations of rule are for the sake of the
household, which is for the sake of the polis. It follows that the aims of
those relations of rule are determined by and subservient to the telos of the
polis. Understanding the claim that men rule over women by nature in the
household, then, has to be understood in the context of the description of
polis and household as natural structures in which the household and its
relations of rule act as a part of the polis and serve its ends.
Because the analogy between social and biological wholes might lead
one to believe that the naturalness of household rule is to be understood as a
manifestation of biological nature, it is important to distinguish a political
sense of natural from the biological, while allowing that they share features.
In the Physics, to have a nature is to have an internal impulse to change or
to remain the same (2.1 192b10–33). The claim that people are political
animals (Pol. 1.2 1253a8–10, 1.5 1254a20–b20) can be understood as an
instance of the biological sense in which the nature of something is an
internal predisposition to arrive at a certain end. That is, it is a teleological
claim; people are by nature possessed of certain capacities for social and
political life, and also therefore predisposed to live in political
communities.16 People are political animals by nature because they are
naturally able and naturally inclined to form political communities. It
follows that those political communities are the ends sought by human
nature. This informs the sense we should give to the claim that the polis is
natural (Pol. 1.2 1253a1–2). The claim is not that the polis itself has an
internal impulse to form itself (it does not have its own phusis), but rather
that human nature propels people to constitute political communities.17 To
explain this, Miller has introduced the notion of an extended sense of
“natural existence” according to which a “thing exists by nature if, and only
if, it has as its function the promotion of an organism’s natural ends and it
results, in whole or in part, from the organism’s natural capacities and
impulses.”18 This is the sense in which the polis exists by nature; Miller
calls it the teleological interpretation of the claim that the polis is natural.19
But individuals, on Aristotle’s account, do not build poleis immediately;
they first enter into more basic associations (the pairings that constitute the
household, and the household itself), all of which are natural in the
teleological sense. These social entities do not have impulses internal to
themselves as such (i.e., as do the pairs of husband/wife or master/slave, or
households). They are natural, rather, in the extended sense, because they
are the result of the human impulse to form associations (koinôniai), and
they promote the end of political life for human beings. Rule is natural in
the context of the relations that constitute the household because each is
organized like a living organism in the priority of the whole over its parts
and the orientation toward an end.
The functions of the parts (ruler and ruled) in these social entities
contribute to the function of the whole. The analogy between social entities
and organisms is meant to capture this similarity: in both cases the parts are
for the sake of the whole in the sense that the activities of the parts ought to
serve the activity of the whole. The organs in a body have functions that are
distinct from the function of the animal as a whole (the work of a squirrel’s
eyes, for example, can be distinguished from the work of the squirrel).
Although the functions of the organs can be distinguished, then, from the
function of the animal, the work performed by the organs is determined, on
Aristotle’s view, by the work to be performed by the animal. So, although
sight is the function of the eyes, the animal has eyes because the function of
the animal is in some way supported by sight. Social entities resemble
organisms in their structure and their function in that each part has its own
work and yet acts for the sake of the end of the whole. So men and women
each have a function in the couple considered as a composite whole; men
are to rule and women are to be ruled (in section 3.4 I will examine this
claim in more detail), and when they each perform their function, the whole
that is the couple achieves its end, which is in turn oriented toward the
household, and ultimately toward the polis and its telos of living well.
The analogy between social entities and organisms, in emphasizing the
teleological structure of both, also makes clear that Aristotle does not
understand natural rule to be a question of forcing those who are ruled to
submit to governance. The eyes of an animal are ruled by the heart, both of
which are ruled by the animal as a whole, in the sense that the function of
the eyes is determined or directed by the heart and then by the animal—
force plays no role. In the same way, the rule of men over women in the
household is not a relation of force. The man sets the aims of the woman,
and if she and he both fulfill their functions, the aims of the whole of which
they are parts—the couple—will be realized.
I have been arguing that to understand what Aristotle means in calling
the rule of women by men “natural” we have to see the relationship
between men and women in the household as a composite whole, in which
one part is better than another; the superiority of one part not only entitles it
to rule, but obliges it to rule. Moreover, we have to understand that
composite whole by analogy with living organic beings, in which the parts
are also “ruled” by some one dominant part, or by the whole (e.g., in an
animal, by the heart or by the animal as a whole). The analogy makes clear
that natural rule is a question of submitting the ends of the part to the ends
of the whole—so that the activities of those who are naturally ruled are for
the sake of the ends of the natural ruler. Thus natural rule presupposes a
teleological structure in which the rule is exercised.
The forms of rule exercised in the household are natural, then, in the
teleological sense that the polis is natural, as indicated by the analogy with
organisms. The teleological sense implies two normative claims. The first is
that the rule of men over women as a social entity (a whole composed of
parts) is good—conditionally good—because it contributes to the telos of
human life: living well in a polis. This is a familiar point because Aristotle
identifies the nature of something with its end or final cause, where this is
not only its mature state but also the best state for it (Phys. 2 .2 194a27–29).
The final cause of the authority of natural rulers over natural subjects in the
household is a good (living well), so the rule itself is good. Thus, it is better
that the association of men and women—the relation of rule—should occur,
because it is one of the parts that constitutes the household and ultimately
serves the telos of the polis. The analysis of parts and wholes, and the
understanding of their relation as teleologically arranged, thus underpins
this first normative claim. The rule of men over women is good because it is
a part of the household, which is a part of the polis, and the goodness of the
final cause that is responsible for the polis also confers value on the parts of
the polis, down to the pairings of natural rulers with natural subjects. The
relative value of whole and part are to be explained in terms of a general
principle: if X is the whole of which Y is a part, then X is better than Y
because Y is for the sake of X. So the polis is better than the household, and
the household is better than than the pairing of man and woman, because
the latter are for the sake of the former. And natural subjects are for the sake
of natural rulers in the sense that their actions are determined by, and should
promote, the ends of the ruler.
This suggests the second normative principle: men should rule over
women because men are better than women. The part/whole analysis we
have considered makes clear that parts are for the sake of the whole, and so
it is true to say that both men and women function in the couple for the sake
of the whole that is their pairing (and in general the good function of each
household relation will depend on both members performing their own
function well). But Aristotle needs to justify the claim that men are the
natural rulers and women the natural subjects. In the passage at Politics 1.5
1254a20–b20 he treats the distinction between natural rulers and natural
subjects as a fact of nature. But this does not mean that it cannot be
explained. Since rule is a relation that is natural only when the ruler is better
(in some sense) than the ruled, it suggests that we should ask in what sense
men are better than women, in order to justify the relation of rule that
Aristotle thinks should obtain between them. And when Aristotle in that
same passage models the rule of men over women on the rule of reason
over desire, we are given reason to believe that we should be able to explain
the superiority of men over women on grounds independent of the relation
of rule.
It is not sufficient to say that men rule over women because women (or
the function of women) are for the sake of men (or the function of men).
This is Aristotle’s view, but it displaces the question rather than answering
it, since we might ask why women are for the sake of men. It is evident that
Aristotle believes that the better should rule over the worse (that is an
important point in the passage at Pol. 1.5), and so men are intended by
nature to rule over women just in case they are better. So if the functions
that women perform are for the sake of those that men perform, it will be
because men are better than women; ultimately Aristotle must justify the
rule that men exercise over women by demonstrating the superiority of
men. But how does Aristotle characterize the superiority of men and the
inferiority of women? And how does the rule of men over women promote
the telos of all human associations, living well?
More precisely, since the male head of household is on Aristotle’s view
better than women and also better than both slaves and children, how does
the inferiority of women differ from that of other natural subjects? From the
opening chapters of Politics 1, we know that the sense in which the master
and slave cannot exist without one another is different from the sense in
which man and woman cannot exist without one another. In the case of
master and slave, they must form a union “on account of preservation,” that
is, the preservation of individual slaves and masters (Pol. 1.2 1252a30–
32).20 In the case of male and female, however, they must form a union in
order that the species may be preserved. So the aim or the final cause of
natural rule in these two cases is somewhat different, even though in both
instances the ultimate end is the good of the household and of the polis.
Moreover, not only are their aims different, but their origins are as well.
The inferiority of the slave is something different from the inferiority of the
woman. So the goodness of natural rule in these two cases differs in each of
the two ways: the deficiency that defines the natural subject must be
different in each case, and the good that is the immediate telos must also be
different. What exactly are these differences, and how do they serve the
interests of the polis? That is, why is it better, politically, that there should
be more than one form of natural rule?
3.3 Women are capable of virtue
3.3.1 Women and phronêsis

It might seem that Aristotle’s account of political sexual difference is
founded on a belief in the radical moral inferiority of women to men—the
view that women are incapable of human virtue. In fact, when we consider
the claims about the deliberative faculty in children, natural slaves, women,
and free men in Politics 1 in light of the moral psychology Aristotle
elaborates in the Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere, we might wonder
whether anyone other than adult men is capable of human virtue. The virtue
of the deliberative faculty is phronêsis, an intellectual virtue that Aristotle
defines as a “disposition accompanied by rational prescription, true, in the
sphere of human goods, relating to action” (EN 6.5 1140b20–21). And there
is reason to believe that Aristotle thinks women cannot acquire phronêsis.
The political superiority of free adult men, and the inferiority of women,
slaves, and children, is certainly a function of the capacity of their
respective deliberative faculties, the virtue of which is phronêsis. The
crucial passage is in Book 1 of the Politics:
Thus by nature most things are ruling (τὰ ἄρχοντα) and ruled (ἀρχόμενα). For the free person
rules the slave, the male the female, and the man the child in different ways. The parts of the
soul (τὰ μόρια τῆς ψυχῆς) are present in all, but they are present in a different way. The slave is
wholly lacking the deliberative element [βουλευτικόν]; the female has it but it lacks authority
[ἄκυρον]; the child has it but it is incomplete. (Pol. 1.13 1260a7–14)
Children are ruled so long as they are children: boys as well as girls have
immature—that is, incomplete—deliberative faculties, which makes them
natural subjects, but only (in the case of boys) until such time as their
deliberative faculties should be fully developed. So children (at least free
male children) are natural subjects, but only temporarily. The case of
women and natural slaves is different in that they must expect to be natural
subjects all their lives, because the deficiencies of their deliberative
faculties will not be remedied by maturity.21 Aristotle characterizes those
deficiencies in this passage only cryptically: the deliberative faculty of
women is “without authority,” and in the natural slave it is absent
altogether. These differences in deliberative capacity among free men,
women, and natural slaves are the cause of the different capacities for virtue
each displays. Those differences in virtue then in turn justify the natural
rule of free men in the household. The question is whether those differences
amount to an incapacity for human virtue in women.
In characterizing the deliberative faculty of women as without authority
Aristotle’s language is reminiscent of two other contexts, legal and
biological. We saw in chapter 1, section 1.5.1, that in Athens the man who
held legal control over a woman, most often her father or husband, was
referred to as her kurios, usually translated as “guardian.” This person made
decisions for her, including decisions that involved the disposition of her
person or her property (which was not in fact her property): marriage,
divorce, and dowry. So there is a legal context to the notion of a kurios at
the time Aristotle is writing, and an understanding that it would be usual for
a woman to be subject to the authority of a man, where that authority was
exercised precisely in making decisions that would determine the actions
and the interests of the woman. And in chapter 2, section 2.4.3, we saw that
Aristotle employs the notion of authority in describing the relation of the
heart to the other organs in the body. In the biological context it is clear that
authority is not a question of decision-making in any intentional sense, but
in a related way it is a question of establishing the ends towards which other
organs must function. We will see that in the political context Aristotle
draws on both the legal and the biological connotations of the term kurios.
3.3.2 The virtue of natural subjects

One of the implications of saying that the faculty of deliberation in women
is without authority seems to be that women cannot develop phronêsis in
the strict sense,22 because phronêsis is a virtue of the deliberative part of the
rational soul, the part that takes as its objects those things that might be
otherwise (EN 6.1 1139a5–14; Pol. 7.14 1333a16–30). Since Aristotle
believes that phronêsis is a necessary component of virtue (EN 6.13
1144b30–32), if we suppose that women cannot develop phronêsis in the
same way that free men do, then we might doubt that women can have
human virtue. Some commentators have gone so far as to assert that natural
slaves and women cannot be counted as human beings if they are defective
in some way with respect to reason.23 But several points tell against the
view that Aristotle believes women to be inferior in the sense of incapable
of virtue.
First, the account of natural rule, and the analogy between natural rule
and the rule of the most authoritative body part over other organs, never
suggest that those who are ruled are incapable of excellence in their
functions. On the contrary, rule will depend on organs carrying out their
functions well, and the health of the household will depend on the women
and natural slaves who belong to that household conducting their tasks with
excellence.
Second, at Politics 1.13 1260a2–4 Aristotle asserts that both natural
rulers and natural subjects “must of necessity share in [human] virtue.” He
has two motives for making this assertion, although these are not
immediately expressed. The first is that he wants to distinguish natural rule
from the forms of coercion and force that might be employed in order to
secure compliance from those subjected to illegitimate forms of power.
Natural rule, by contrast with the exercise of illegitimate power, has to
involve persuasion, and if natural subjects are to be persuaded, they must
have, at least, a kind of passive reason—the ability to understand and accept
reasons for certain courses of action. And natural subjects must have
sufficient reason to recognize the superiority of natural rulers, because that,
ultimately, is the only effective way to produce stability in the relation of
rule. The second reason Aristotle has for attributing a capacity of virtue to
women in particular, and for distinguishing that virtue in kind from the
virtue that free men are capable of, is that he wants to allow that women are
good in some way. He does not, as we will see, argue that they are the same
as men, nor that they are just as good as men. But it is important to him to
attribute some moral worth to women and to the kind of virtue that they can
cultivate and exercise as natural subjects. So in Politics 1 and 2 he is not so
much arguing that women are inferior to men as he is arguing that, despite
being inferior, they are capable of virtue and are a benefit to the polis.
Third, if we consider Aristotle’s account of the relation between
phronêsis and the moral virtues, we will see that he can consistently
attribute virtue to women while denying that they have an authoritative
deliberative faculty. In order to explain how women can possess virtue
when they have a deliberative faculty without authority, we must look to the
distinction Aristotle draws between virtues of the subject and virtues of the
ruler. To be a virtuous subject is to be someone who is good at obeying, and
so one will have to have the excellence of that part of the soul that is
capable of obedience, which Aristotle identifies with the part that generates
desires (EN 1.13 1102b28–33); these are the moral virtues. It is clear that
women ought to have the virtues of the subject, which are the moral virtues.
In a passage at Politics 3.4 Aristotle compares the relation between the
virtue of ruling and the virtue of obeying (both of which are present in the
good person) with the relation between male and female virtue (Pol. 3.4
1277b17–25). Together the passages at EN 1.13 and at Politics 3.4 suggest
two points: first, that the relation between male and female virtue manifests
the relation between the virtue of the ruler and the virtue of the subject;
second, that the relation between male and female is like the relation
between two forms of virtue (intellectual and moral) within a single
individual: as practical reason is to the moral virtues, so men are to women.
Construed in this way, a man and his wife, as the first social entity, form a
single agent. Now, just as the individual desires must be trained by
phronêsis if a person is to have the virtues of the desiring part of the soul,
so too in the couple, a woman’s desires must be trained by phronêsis if she
is to have the virtues of obedience. If women cannot, on Aristotle’s account,
have phronêsis, at least in its complete or perfect form, the question is how
they can acquire the virtue that he attributes to them.
The answer is that natural subjects acquire virtue by borrowing the
phronêsis of a natural ruler.24 Phronêsis, Aristotle tells us at Politics 3.4
1277b25–26, is the only virtue peculiar to the ruler. The faculty of desire in
natural subjects must be trained to submit to reason—ultimately desire must
be trained only to produce desires in accordance with reason. The reason in
question need not be, however, the reason of the natural subject; it might,
rather, be that of the natural ruler. There is evidence to indicate that
Aristotle conceives of the development of virtue in natural subjects in this
way, as a process in which they use or borrow from the phronêsis of the
natural ruler. In Book 1 of the Politics he says:
Since a child is incomplete (ἀτελής), it is clear that its virtue too is not its own as relating to
itself (οὐκ αὐτοῦ πρὸς αὑτόν ἐστιν) but as relating to (πρὸς) its end and the person leading it.
The same is true of the virtue of the slave in relation to the master. (Pol. 1.13 1260a31–3)
And in a passage in the Rhetoric where Aristotle discusses shame, he says

that “it is necessary to be ashamed about bad things of any sort such that
they seem to be shameful for ourselves or it follows that we feel shame at
such bad things as we think are disgraceful to ourselves or to those for
whom we exercise practical wisdom (ὧν φροντίζει)” (Rhet. 2.6 1383b16–
18).
Virtue is then relative to the person in authority, the person who
exercises practical wisdom for someone else, and yet it belongs to the child
or the slave, so that we can speak of the virtue of the slave or of the child,
and not only of the virtue of the person in authority. We can extend this
claim to the case of women, since Aristotle regularly links the discussion of
the virtue of women with the (different, yet comparable) virtue of slaves
and children, since all are natural subjects. What is important is that the
virtue of child, slave, or woman is possible only because, while the
phronêsis must be borrowed from the person in authority, the correct desire
will belong to the natural subject.
The importance of correct desire for virtue is evident when Aristotle
argues elsewhere that it is desire rather than any other faculty that is the
ultimate origin of action. At De anima 3.9 432a15–22, he asks what there is
in the soul that is responsible for movement. His answer is that the faculty
of desire, rather than the whole soul, produces movement (DA 3.10 433a21;
433b10–11). This is because there is no movement without desire—and
(since one might object that neither is there movement without some faculty
of judgment or intellect, however primitive) because desire provides the
origin of the movement for reason or judgment, in providing the object of
desire (DA 3.10 433a18–21). If desire rather than intellect is the faculty that
produces action, then it makes sense for Aristotle to argue that virtue can be
said to belong to the child, slave, or woman, so long as the desire belongs to
them. Because Aristotle locates the source of action in the faculty of desire
rather than in reason, he can more plausibly claim that the slave and the
woman who borrow phronêsis from a master or a husband can nonetheless
be virtuous in their own right; it will be a matter of cultivating correct
desires.
But the virtue of natural subjects must be rational if it is to be human
virtue. And in a passage in Book 1 of the Politics, Aristotle argues that the
virtue of natural subjects has a rational component, even if it relies on
borrowed phronêsis:
It is evident, therefore, that the master should be responsible (αἴτιον εἶναι δεῖ) for [instilling] this
sort of virtue in the slave; he is not merely someone possessing an expertise in mastery which
instructs the slave in his work. Those who deny reason to slaves and assert that commands only
should be used with them do not argue rightly: admonition is to be used with slaves more than
with children. (Pol. 1.13 1260b3–7)
In saying that we ought to admonish (νουθετέω) slaves, Aristotle means

that we ought to offer them reasons, in the sense of motives, for their
actions, with the expectation that the desires of the slave can be formed in
the light of those reasons. The master is the cause of virtue in the slave
because the master, using his faculty of deliberation and admonishing the
slave appropriately, can cause the slave to have correct desires, which will
then be the foundation of the virtue proper to the slave. That the master
does not, or should not, merely issue commands to the slave, but should
rather offer reasons, makes it clear that the desires of the slave are subject to
reason, if not to his own reason. And if slaves can be persuaded by reasons,
even though they do not possess a faculty of deliberative reason, then surely
women, who do possess such a faculty, can also be persuaded by reasons.
The account Aristotle offers us in the Politics and the Nicomachean
Ethics of the role of reason relative to nature and habituation supports the
suggestion that so long as one has a capacity to be persuaded by reason, one
has the necessary rational faculty for the development of properly human
virtue. At Politics 7.13 1332a40–b6, Aristotle notes three things that make
people virtuous: nature (φύσις), habit (ἔθος), and reason (λόγος). He
remarks that people “act in many ways contrary to their habituation and
their nature through reason, if they are persuaded (ἐὰν πεισθῶσιν) that some
other condition is better” (Pol. 7.13 1332b6–8). The importance of reason,
then, in the development of virtue is not so much that it can produce reasons
for acting other than according to nature and habit, but rather that it can
respond to reasons offered (by oneself or by some other rational agent) for
acting otherwise. That is, it is the capacity to be persuaded by reasons for
action that Aristotle identifies here as a factor in the acquisition of human
virtue. A parallel passage at Nicomachean Ethics 10.9 makes the same point
in slightly different terms:
Talk (ὁ λόγος) and teaching (ἡ διδαχὴ) may well not have force under all circumstances, and the
soul of the hearer has to have been prepared beforehand through its habits in order to delight in
and loathe the right things (τὸ καλῶς χαίρειν καὶ μισεῖν), just as one has to prepare soil if it is
going to nourish the seed. For the person who lives according to emotion will not listen to talk
that tries to turn him away from it, nor again will he comprehend such talk; how will it be
possible to persuade someone like this to change? (EN 10.9 1179b23–28)
Hearing and understanding reason are here the necessary preconditions for
being persuaded, which suggests that the capacity for being persuaded
entails capacities for listening to and understanding reasons offered for and
against certain actions. Again, virtue depends crucially on this capacity for
understanding reason, rather than producing reason. Aristotle introduces the
passage by saying, “Now some people think we become good by nature,
while others think it is by habituation, and others again by teaching” (EN
10.9 1179b20–21). The “teaching” in this line becomes “talk [ὁ λόγος] and
teaching,” susceptibility to which, as we have learned, depends on being
able to listen to, understand, and be persuaded by reasons. The point, then,
is that Aristotle’s moral psychology sustains the claim in the Politics that
those with deliberative faculties that are absent or deficient in some way
can have moral virtue—that it is possible for the natural subject to acquire
moral virtue without having phronêsis himself or herself, just so long as he
or she has access to phronêsis in someone else (who will be a natural ruler)
and has the capacity to understand reason.
In the discussion of natural rule we saw that Aristotle understood the
pair of man and woman to be an entity, a whole composed of two people.
That understanding is reflected again in the way in which he understands
virtue to be manifested in the household. The virtue of the natural ruler
must be exercised relative to some natural subject (among whom are
women); without a natural subject over whom he rules, the natural ruler will
not be able to realize fully his virtue. At the same time, the virtue of a
woman will depend on her relation to a free adult man and his virtue as a
man and as a ruler, since she must have access to phronêsis through him.
The dependence of women on men for the realization of their virtue
suggests a way in which women might be inferior to men morally on
Aristotle’s account: they are inferior because they are dependent. That
dependency, we will see, takes the form of a particular deliberative
incapacity that Aristotle ascribes to women.
3.4 The political inferiority of women: a deliberative faculty

without authority
We have established, then, that women are capable of human virtue on
Aristotle’s account, and hence that the superiority of men—their claim to
natural rule—is not that they have human virtue whereas women do not.
Aristotle makes the more modest claim that women are natural subjects
because their deliberative faculty is deficient in a particular respect: it is
without authority (ἄκυρον). We can infer that the deliberative faculty of free
men is, by contrast, authoritative. But it is not clear what it means for a
rational faculty to be without authority, and Aristotle does not, in Politics
1.13, elaborate on this point. Since this is the deficiency that constitutes the
political inferiority of women and justifies the rule of men, we need to
reconstruct what Aristotle might mean.
3.4.1 Three lines of interpretation
Three lines of interpretation have prevailed, each of which has some merit.
According to one, Aristotle means to say that the deliberative faculty of
women is without authority relative to her own faculty of appetite, so that
deliberative reason in women is easily overcome by her own non-rational
desires.25 This interpretation draws on the parallel, drawn in Politics 1.5,
between the relation of reason and desire, on the one hand, and the relation
of men and women, on the other: if men rule women as reason rules desire,
then women are somehow identified with the faculty of desire; to say that
women lack authority is to say that they are more susceptible than men to
being swayed by desire. But the point of the analogy between women and
the faculty of desire, and the sense of authority as Aristotle uses it, is, as I
will argue, structural—that the work of the appetites is for the sake of the
work of reason, just as the tasks that women perform are for the sake of the
tasks that men perform. There is some textual evidence for the claim that
women are “softer” in a moral sense than men (EN 7.7 1150a32–b16), and
this might mean that they have greater difficulty mastering their emotions
or submitting desire to reason. But that interpretation is not obviously right.
(I will take up this question in chapter 4, section 4.2.26) Moreover, if this
were what Aristotle meant, then he would have viewed women as
congenitally weak of will and hence incapable of virtue.27 But he asserts, as
we have seen, that women are capable of acquiring and manifesting virtue.
The second interpretation, proposed by Dobbs, attributes to Aristotle a
belief in the “natural complementarity” of the sexes and construes the claim
that women have a deliberative faculty deficient in authority as flagging a
difference between men and women but not a defect in women.28 On this
interpretation, the deliberative faculty of men is authoritative in the sense of
“lordly” or willful and imperious. Although the complementarity of the
sexes requires that the male should be head of the household, it does not
imply any superiority on the part of the male, according to Dobbs, who
asserts that “Aristotle gives no indication whatever that women are inferior
to men in capacity for achieving human virtue.”29 Indeed, he suggests that a
woman will be superior to her husband: “The husband’s headship is not a
reward for moral or intellectual excellence. As such it is in no way
inconsistent with his wife’s being his moral and intellectual superior.”30 The
moral and intellectual superiority of women stems from their “stable and
fundamentally sound appetites” in contrast with the “protean and morally
ambiguous appetites of men.”31 On Dobbs’s view, this is the meaning
implicit in the claim that the deliberative faculties of women are “without
authority”—that they are stable and sound rather than “protean.” He says
that a male head of household has authority over his wife “because it is an
office somehow suited to the peculiar formation, and hence functional role,
of the male sex.”32 The “peculiar formation” is the disposition of appetite in
men: Dobbs says that “the very unsettledness of the male appetite makes it
a fit subject for the authoritative and lordly ordering operation of
deliberation. . . . So the reason that the female’s deliberative capacity is less
lordly in its operation than the male’s is simply that her desires are better
ordered—one might even say more reasonable—to begin with.”33 This
interpretation is interesting in drawing attention to a neglected feature of
Aristotle’s discussion of sexual difference (the role of differences in
“spiritedness” to account for moral differences between the sexes), but it is
in conflict with two important and explicit claims of Aristotle’s political
philosophy. First, it refuses to acknowledge, and so cannot make sense of,
Aristotle’s reiterated claim that men are better than women. Although there
is some evidence (as we have seen) for the view that Aristotle believed the
sexes to be the same in some respects, there is clear evidence in Politics
1.13 that women, as natural subjects, do not have the same kind of virtue as
men, and that the difference in kind is not morally neutral. Second, this
interpretation seems to suppose that what it means for a deliberative faculty
to be “authoritative” is for it to be willful, unsettled and unreasonable.
Although, as we will see in chapter 4, Aristotle does sometimes associate
the capacity to rule with a thumotic (spirited) disposition (which might be
what Dobbs means in calling men “protean” and “unsettled”), to suggest
that women are less fit to exert authority because they are more reasonable
is inconsistent with Aristotle’s account of legitimate rule, which is directed
at the benefit of those who are ruled, and in accordance with reason. If men
were given authority over women as a kind of therapy for ungoverned and
unreasonable appetites, Aristotle would not treat that as an instance of
natural or legitimate rule.
According to the third line of interpretation, the deliberative faculty of
women is without authority by convention in the political context in relation
to the deliberative faculties of men.34 That is, women have a deliberative
faculty that is, for reasons of convention, limited or restricted in its use, but
not incapable. This interpretation accords with Aristotle’s use of the term
ἄκυρος elsewhere, where he applies it, for example, to superseded contracts
and inoperative laws. Although the passage at 1.13 1260a13 contains the
sole occurrence of ἄκυρος in the Politics, it occurs in ten other passages in
the corpus, twice in the Rhetoric (1.15 1376b12, 1.15 1376b27), once in the
Nicomachean Ethics (7.9 1151b15), three times in the zoological works
(GA 4.4 772b27, 4.10 778a1; MA 2 698b7), three times in the Constitution
of Athens (45.3.3,4.1, 68.3.5, 68.4.9), and once in the Rhetoric to Alexander
(1443a28 [23.5]).35 In the Rhetoric it is a contract or business arrangement
that is said to be ἄκυρος, and the sense is clearly “without binding force” or
“invalid.” In the Rhetoric to Alexander it is used to describe invalid laws.
The sense of the one instance of ἄκυρος in the Nicomachean Ethics is
closely related; the arguments or opinions of a person are said to be ἄκυρα
like ψηφίσματα (the pebbles used for voting): Gauthier and Jolif translate it
as nuls et non avenus.36 The occurrences in the Constitution of Athens have
a similar sense—in one case, the Council is said to be ἄκυρος in the sense
that it does not have jurisdiction; in the two other cases, in the same passage
in which Aristotle discusses voting procedures for juries, he refers to one
ballot box as ἄκυρος and to the ballots that are deposited in this box as
ἄκυροι. The box that is κύριος (authoritative) is distinguished from one that
is ἄκυρος by its material (wood rather than bronze); this evidently does not
affect its function, but serves only to make it identifiable; and nothing at all
distinguishes the κύριος ψήφος (valid pebble) from the one that is ἄκυρος
except the box into which it is deposited. All this suggests that ἄκυρος
means “without authority” when the absence of authority is due not to any
incapacity on the part of that which is ἄκυρος, but simply to convention.
But the instances of ἄκυρος and its cognates in the biological treatises do
seem to refer to cases where something is without authority by nature.37
Moreover, there is a serious drawback to interpreting the use of ἄκυρος in
the Politics in a conventional sense: it seems to be incompatible with
Aristotle’s reiterated claim that women are naturally subject to men, which,
as we have seen, means that men are in some sense better by nature than
women. If Aristotle believed that the lack of authority he ascribed to
women were customary rather than natural, he would not say that it is
natural that women should be ruled by men—but he does.
3.4.2 The rule of men is both aristocratic and constitutional

What these attempts to interpret the meaning of the claim that the
deliberative faculty of women is without authority reveal is a background
tension that must be resolved: the tension between Aristotle’s claim that the
rule of men over women is aristocratic (or, sometimes, “kingly”) and the
claim that it is “constitutional.” Each of them emphasizes one of these
claims over the other (the first two the aristocratic claim, the third the
constitutional claim). However we construe the authority of men’s
deliberative faculty, it must resolve that tension. Consider first the two
claims. The evidence that the rule of men over women is aristocratic or
kingly—that is, that it is founded on the superiority of men—is both
implicit and explicit. In the passage at Politics 1.5 Aristotle says “the
relation of male to female is by nature (φύσει) a relation of superior
(κρεῖττον) to inferior (χεῖρον), and ruler to ruled” (1254b13–14). And in a
passage in the Nicomachean Ethics 8.10 1160b33–35 Aristotle identifies the
rule of a man over his wife as aristocratic: “The community formed by man
and wife is clearly of an aristocratic kind; for the man rules on the basis of
worth (κατ᾿ ἀξίαν), and in the spheres where a man should rule; those
where it is fitting for a woman to rule he gives over to her.” When worth is
the foundation of rule, that rule is aristocratic. And natural rule in all its
different forms is based, as we have seen, on the superiority of the ruling
part.
But Aristotle also claims that the rule of men over women is
constitutional or political (πολιτικῶς). That claim is made explicit in a
passage in Book 1 of the Politics, the first part of which we have already
seen:
Since there are three parts of expertise in household management—expertise in mastery
(δεσποτική), which was spoken of earlier, expertise in paternal [rule] (πατρική), and expertise in
marital [rule] (γαμική)—[the latter two must now be taken up.] For one rules over a woman
(γυναικὸς) and children (τέκνων) both as free persons, but it is not the same kind of rule: rule
over a woman is constitutional (πολιτικῶς), rule over children is kingly (βασιλικῶς). For the
male, unless constituted in some respect contrary to nature, is by nature more expert at leading
than the female, and the elder and more complete [is by nature more expert at leading] than the
younger and incomplete. In most political offices, it is true, there is an alternation of ruler and
ruled, since they tend by their nature to be on an equal footing and to differ in nothing; all the
same, when one rules and the other is ruled, [the ruler] seeks to establish differences in external
appearance, forms of address, and prerogatives, as in the story Amasis told about his footpan.
(Pol. 1.12 1259a37–b9)38
This is the passage that might seem to support the view that Aristotle
believes the sexes are “complementary,” as in Dobbs account, or that the
political differences between them are merely conventional. But, as I will
argue, if we consider the story of Amasis we are led to a different
conclusion.
The claim that the rule of men over women is aristocratic might seem
incompatible with the claim that it is constitutional—I have described them
as being in tension—but Aristotle himself will describe it as both.39 So, for
example, at Politics 1.5 1254b5–6 he says that the rule of the intellect over
desire is “constitutional and kingly.” Since, as we have seen, he compares
the rule of men over women with the rule of intellect over desire, it follows
that he believed the rule of men over women to be both constitutional and
kingly or aristocratic. The claim that the deliberative faculty of women is
without authority has to be interpreted in light of this analogy to a mixed
form of rule in which there is both some superiority on the part of men and
some measure of sameness shared by the sexes as the basis for
constitutional rule.40
To understand the way in which women might be subject to rule that is
simultaneously aristocratic and constitutional, consider the allusion to
Amasis and his foot-pan in the passage at Politics 1.12.Aristotle recognizes
that in most constitutional states the citizens rule and are ruled in turn,
because they are equal by nature and do not differ from one another. This
suggests that the exchange of rule is a mark of the equality between ruler
and ruled in constitutional states, and we might draw the inference that
women and men enjoy the same equality. But Aristotle is not arguing that
women should rule by turns with men in the household, nor is he asserting
that there is no difference between men and women. Moreover, he points
out that even in constitutional states, that is, even when ruler and ruled are
by nature equal, one seeks to establish differences between ruler and ruled,
in “external appearances (σχήμασι), forms of address (λόγοις), and
prerogatives (τιμαῖς)” (Pol. 1.12 1259b8–9), and alludes to the story
Herodotus tells of Amasis:
Among the countless treasures in his possession there was a golden foot-basin in which Amasis
himself and all his dinner guests were accustomed to wash their feet. Amasis caused this foot-
basin to be broken in pieces, and made of the gold a statue of one of the gods, which he set up in
the most conspicuous place in the city. The Egyptians, constantly passing the statue, treated it
with great reverence. Hearing of this, Amasis called an assembly and revealed that the statue
they so revered was once a foot-basin, in which they had vomited, urinated, and washed their
feet. His own case, he said, resembled that of the foot-basin, in that formerly he had been only a
commoner and was now their king, so they had better honor and reverence him. In this way
Amasis won over the Egyptians and made them content to serve him. (Herodotus, Histories
2.172)41
We have to be careful in interpreting Aristotle’s intentions in invoking this

story. He is certainly suggesting that just as the gold was such that it might
be either a foot-basin or an image of a god, so too a man (Amasis, in this
case) might be either subject to rule or a ruler. But he is also suggesting that
when the gold is fashioned into the statue of a god, and when Amasis is
established as king, a transformation occurs; the statue of a god is not a
foot-basin, and a king is not a subject. The moral is not that the statue of a
god is merely a foot-basin, nor that Amasis himself is no different from his
subjects; on the contrary, the point is that the same matter or substratum can
assume different shapes, and that those shapes will differ in value: Amasis
really is a king, whom his people should be happy to serve because he
really is better than them, although king and subjects all belong to the same
natural kind. Aristotle concludes that “the relation of the male to the female
is always of this kind” (Pol. 1.12 1259b10–11). Although this is an opaque
remark in the context of 1.12, if we construe it in light of the story of
Amasis and the foot-pan, we can make some sense of it. A person who is a
man might have been something else—a woman—but because he is in fact
a man he is also better and so entitled to rule. Just as Amasis in assuming
the role of king becomes a king, so too a human being in assuming the
shape and the role of a man becomes a natural ruler. So in saying that the
rule of men over women is constitutional, Aristotle is not saying that it is
illegitimate, or a mere pretense. Rather, he is saying that there is some
sameness under the appearance of difference between men and women: the
sameness of natural kind.42
The Amasis anecdote suggests then one way in which natural,
aristocratic rule might also be constitutional rule in a sense: when the
superiority that is the basis of natural rule is the superiority of a non-
essential feature. It is kingly (or, as Aristotle will also say, aristocratic)
because men are better than women in that their deliberative faculty has
greater authority. It is constitutional, however, insofar as there is an
underlying sameness to men and women: both are persons. The point of the
story is then this: just as a statue of a god is better than a foot-basin, so too
men are better than women. But just as the gold from which the foot-basin
was made is the same as the gold from which the statue was made, so too
the matter and the essential form are the same in men and women, although
differently organized or shaped.43 The difference in the political roles of
men and women (and the difference in the political roles of king and
subject) is analogous to the morphological differences distinguishing a gold
foot-basin from a gold statue.
There is a second way to understand how the rule of men over women
might combine the superiority of natural rule with the sameness of
constitutional rule. In the passage at Nicomachean Ethics 8.10 1160b22–
1161a9, mentioned earlier, Aristotle says that the rule of men over women
should be aristocratic, and that if a man oversteps the boundaries of his
authority it becomes oligarchic. The point is that there are limits on the
aristocratic rule of men:
The community formed by man and wife is clearly of an aristocratic kind; for the man rules on
the basis of worth, and in the spheres where a man should rule; those where it is fitting for a
woman to rule he gives over to her. If the man lords it over everything, his rule changes into
oligarchy; for the distribution in that case takes no account of worth, or of where his superiority
lies. (EN 8.10 1160b32–1161a1)44
This sheds some light on Aristotle’s intention in comparing the rule of men
over women to a modified constitutional rule, and on how he thinks that
comparison might support (rather than undermine) the claim that men rule
over women naturally. The legitimacy of the rule of men over women is
founded on the superior worth of men, but Aristotle indicates that men
should rule women only within a restricted sphere, suggesting both that
there is some limit on the superiority of their worth and that women too
have some worth. It is striking that Aristotle compares the rule of a man
who exercises his authority beyond a certain domain to oligarchic rule,
since oligarchy is one of the deviant forms of constitution, characterized by
its mistaken aim: an oligarchic constitution aims at the interests of the ruler
rather than of those ruled. The implication is that a man who fails to give a
woman authority in some respects is no longer ruling the household in the
interests of those over whom he rules, but in his own interests—and is
therefore no longer legitimately ruling.
Women, then, have some worth and ought to exercise authority in some
sphere. A passage in Book 3 of the Politics clarifies the nature of the
particular domain in which women should exercise authority. Aristotle has
been arguing that there are different forms of virtue, including differences
between the virtues appropriate to men and those appropriate to women:
For a man would be held a coward if he were as courageous as a courageous woman, and a
woman talkative if she were as modest as the good man; and household management differs for
a man and a woman as well, for it is the work of man to acquire (κτᾶσθαι) and of the woman to
guard (φυλάττειν). But phronêsis is the only virtue peculiar to the ruler. The others, it would
seem, must necessarily be common to both rulers and ruled, but phronêsis is not a virtue of one
ruled, but rather true opinion (δόξα ἀληθής); for the one ruled is like a flute maker, while the
ruler is like a flute player, the user [of what the other makes]. (Pol. 3.4 1277b21–30)
Considered in light of the passage at EN 8.10, the point is that a man ought
to give to a woman authority in the household in matters concerned with
guarding or preserving, while retaining for himself authority in matters of
acquiring. There is no question but that his role has authority over hers, in
the sense that we should understand her role to be for the sake of his.
Nonetheless, because this arrangement involves sharing or dividing power
and authority, it offers some insight into the claim that in one sense men
rule over women constitutionally. When Aristotle says that men should rule
women constitutionally, he is drawing on the notion of constitutional rule as
shared rule. Typically in constitutional rule the rule is shared in turn by
citizens who are equal in some politically salient way, but Aristotle is
suggesting that there is another way to share rule: women do not share in it
as citizens might, but rather by exercising some authority in a particular
domain appropriate to them. So the sharing occurs across domains of
authority rather than over time. There is more to say about the passage just
cited, in particular about the claim that only the ruler has the virtue of
phronêsis; we will return to this in section 3.4.3.
Taking stock of our conclusions thus far, we know that men are better
than women because their faculty of deliberation has authority whereas the
deliberative faculty of women lacks authority, and that this is the basis of
the natural and aristocratic rule that men exercise over women. At the same
time, this natural rule is also constitutional, and we have identified two
points that make that true. First, the metaphysical point: women and men
belong to the same natural kind and so are fundamentally the same,
although men are superior in non-essential features. So the rule is
constitutional because ruler and ruled belong to the same natural kind,
although men are better than women and so also rule aristocratically.
Second, the political point: the rule is constitutional because it is shared in
some sense. It is shared not in turn, but through the division of domains of
authority. This sense of constitutionality is again consistent with natural rule
and the superiority of men because the domain in which men rule is
superior to the one in which women rule—where that means that the
domain in which women exercise rule is for the sake of the domain in
which men rule.
3.4.3 Women’s deliberative faculty is without authority

The question, then, is, how we should construe the claim that the
deliberative faculty of women is without authority, bearing in mind that it
should make sense of the various features Aristotle attributes to the rule of
men over women: that it is natural, constitutional, and aristocratic.
We have seen that it is natural because (1) in the organic whole that is
the household men, as the better part, rule by nature and (2) the telos of the
household is established by the male, and the rule of men over women is
natural in that it serves that telos. In asserting that women do not have
deliberative authority, Aristotle is making a claim about the position of a
free woman relative to the man who is head of the household, not a claim
about the capacity of women to submit their desires or passions to reason.
The evidence for this lies in two kinds of discussion: first, in the account of
the part/whole structure in which the relation between men and women is
conducted, and second, in the account of deliberation and decision-making
later in the Politics.
Consider first the structure of the rule of men over women and the ways
in which it differs from the rule of free men over natural slaves. At Politics
1.5 1254a24–b16, Aristotle, as we have seen, distinguishes a number of
different kinds of wholes: a person (composed of body and soul), the soul
(with its faculties as parts), the relation of people to animals, and the
relation of men to women. To understand what he means by “whole” here
we must turn to the Metaphysics:
While in a sense we call anything one if it is a quantity and continuous, in a sense we do not
unless it is a whole, i.e. unless it has one form; for example, if we saw the parts of a shoe put
together anyhow we should not call them one all the same . . . we do this only if they are put
together so as to be a shoe and have thereby some one form. (Met. 5.6 1016b11–16)
Having one form here is a question of function as well as shape, if to be a

shoe means to function as a shoe and not only to have the shape of a shoe.
So something is a whole if it both has parts and if those parts are organized
so as to function as a single thing.45
The different wholes named in Politics 1.5 are all constituted by a ruling
part and a ruled part, and whenever one thing rules and another is ruled
these parts are engaged in some collective task (Pol. 1.5 1254a27–28). The
collective task will be determined by the form of the whole in question,
which includes its function.46 The form and the function, and hence the aim
and the excellence, of each of these wholes will be distinct. In the wholes
that Aristotle mentions in Politics 1.5, there are two basic structures
underlying the relation of ruler and ruled. In one, X is naturally subject to Y
if Y is the whole of which X is the part. That is, the element that is ruled is
a part of the whole which, as a whole, rules. Now, Aristotle says both that
slaves are parts of their masters and that children are parts of their father,
and this status as parts is the basis for the subjection of both slaves and
children.
We have seen that natural subjects can have virtue, although they do not
have phronêsis in a full sense, because they can borrow phronêsis from the
male head of the household, and that is sufficient to allow them to develop
correct desires. In the case of the natural slave, the borrowing is possible
because the slave is a part of the master (Pol. 1.6 1255b11–12). This
part/whole relation helps to explain how the virtue of the slave is human
and yet distinct from the virtue of the master. A slave is a part of the master
because he is a possession of his master, and possessions are like parts: “A
possession (τὸ κτῆμα) is spoken of in the same way as a part. A part is not
only part of something else, but belongs wholly to something else; similarly
with a possession” (Pol. 1.4 1254a8–11). This relation of belonging is part
of the definition of slave at Politics 1.4 1254a14–16. A passage in the
Eudemian Ethics explains this part/whole relation by analogy with other
such relations:
The relations of soul to body, of a craftsman to his tool, and of a master to his slave are all
similar. There is no community between them, since there are not two things, but just the one,
and the other belongs to the one. Nor is the good separable for each of them, but the good of
both is in fact the good of the one for whose sake the other exists. (EE 7.9 1241b17–22)47
The analogy drawn in this passage illuminates how the slave might be both
part of the master and yet capable of human virtue. It makes sense to speak
of the excellence of the tool of a craftsman, although the tool is a part of the
craftsman, and although its excellence depends on its use in the hands of the
craftsman. Similarly, the virtue of the slave belongs to him or her, although
it is dependent on the master. Aristotle allies the case of children to that of
slaves. At Nicomachean Ethics 5.6 1134b9–13 he also describes children as
“like” parts of their fathers and compares this whole/part relation to that
which obtains between slaves and masters: “For there is no injustice in an
unqualified sense in relation to what is one’s own, and a chattel (κτῆμα), or
a child until it is of a certain age and becomes independent, is like a part of
oneself.”48
Now women are not, on Aristotle’s account, parts of men in the same
way that slaves are parts of their masters, or children of their fathers, and it
is striking that he does not speak of women as the possessions of men.49
This means that the authority men exercise over women is not to be
justified in the same way as that exercised over slaves (or children): it is not
because women are part of men that they are subject to the rule of men. But
the passage in Politics 1.5 offers a second structure that can underlie the
relation of ruler and ruled in a whole. This is one in which, when X and Y
are both parts of the whole Z, and Y is better than X, then X is naturally
subject to Y. It is the structure modeled by the relation of the faculty of
reason to the faculty of desire in the soul; it is not the case that one is part of
the other, but rather that both are parts of the same whole, and the basis of
the rule is not that the whole rules its parts, but rather that the better part
rules the worse part.50 It is in this sense that Aristotle in the biological
context will speak of the heart as the “most authoritative” organ (Juv. 3
469a5): it is the organ that rules the others, although all of them are organs
of the whole that is the body.
So there is a structural difference between master/slave and paternal
relations on the one hand, and relations between men and women on the
other, and that structural difference recalls the metaphysical point about
ruler and ruled in the case of constitutional rule that we raised earlier: rule
will be constitutional only when there is some claim to sameness on the part
of ruler and ruled. The structure of parts and wholes is such that when the
ruler is one of the parts rather than the whole, ruler and ruled resemble one
another insofar as they are both parts (although one is better than the other),
whereas when the ruler is the whole, there is no claim to parity between
ruler and ruled. Saying that women have a deliberative faculty although it is
without authority means then, in part, that there is a similarity between men
and women: both have a deliberative faculty (unlike natural slaves, who
lack this faculty). But to understand fully what it means for the deliberative
faculty of women to be without authority, we have to consider not only the
structural but also the functional differences between slaves and women
with respect to the faculty of deliberation. What is it to exercise authority
over those who are not parts of oneself, and who do have a deliberative
faculty?
Recall that to rule in a social context is to make decisions that determine
which actions will be undertaken. In the case of the household, then, the
male head of the household rules over his wife, children, and slaves in the
sense that he makes decisions that bind them as well as himself. He chooses
not only which actions he will undertake as an individual, but also which
actions the household as a collective (a κοινωνία) will undertake, and hence
decides on actions the other individual members of the household will take.
The free male head of the household rules, then, because he is the origin of
the actions of everyone in that household. This is a general account of rule
in the household, but there must be some feature of the way in which men
rule over women—make decisions for women—that distinguishes that form
of rule from the rule exercised over children or natural slaves. I contend that
the distinctive feature of the rule of men over women is that women do
participate in deliberation about household matters, although they do not
participate in decision-making, whereas slaves and children do not
participate in deliberation. In practice this would be analogous to having a
voice but not a vote on a committee: one is entitled to express an opinion,
and in principle that opinion should be taken into account by those who do
vote in making their decision. This is the content of the claim that women
have a deliberative faculty, but one that is without authority. It is consistent
with the use of ἄκυρος in legal contexts to mean non-binding or non-
operative, and consistent with its use in biological contexts to mean non-
functional (see section 3.4.1).
There is evidence for this interpretation of “without authority” in the
account of constitutional rule that Aristotle offers in later books of the
Politics. First, we should notice that under constitutional rule, those who are
ruled are free citizens, who participate in deliberation and in judging
because they “are similar in stock and free” (Pol. 3.4 1277b6–9).51 But
deliberating and judging are not, under this constitution, identical with
ruling. So to be among those who are ruled rather than ruling does not
imply that one cannot participate in deliberation and judgment; on the
contrary, it suggests that one will participate in these activities so long as
one is a citizen.
Moreover, as we have seen, under constitutional rule those who are ruled
need not have phronêsis or practical wisdom, so the virtues available to
women are sufficient for the status of those ruled constitutionally, “for the
virtue of ruler and citizen is not the same” (Pol. 3.4 1277a24). Aristotle
elaborates on the difference in the virtues of ruler and ruled when these are
“similar in stock and free,” that is, under constitutional rule: those who are
ruled need not have phronêsis, although they should have all the other
virtues (Pol. 3.4 1277b25–30; see section 3.4.2). So if citizens under
constitutional rule do not have phronêsis but do have the other virtues, we
should expect that women ruled “constitutionally” by men should similarly
have the other virtues. And Aristotle says just this, as we have seen, in
Politics 1.13, when he argues that natural subjects do have virtue, although
it is not the same in kind as the virtue of natural rulers. He reiterates the
point in Book 3:
For it is clear that a virtue—of justice, for example—would not be a single thing for a ruler
(ἀρχομένου) and for a ruled but free person (ἐλευθέρου) who is good, but has different kinds in
accordance with which one will rule or be ruled, just as moderation and courage differ in a man
and a woman. (Pol. 3.4 1277b18–21)
Although they need not have phronêsis, those who are ruled
constitutionally need to have “true opinion.” This “true opinion” is clearly a
virtue, and related to, but not identical with, phronêsis. What is it and what
does it allow one to do well? The best suggestion is that it corresponds here
to the virtue Aristotle calls sunesis:
Comprehension [σύνεσις·sunesis] is concerned with the same things as practical wisdom
[φρονήσις·phronêsis]; but comprehension and practical wisdom are not the same thing. For
[practical] wisdom is prescriptive (ἐπιτακτική ἐστιν): what one should do or not do—this is its
end, whereas comprehension is merely discriminative (κριτικὴ μόνον). (EN 6.10 1143a6–10)
The suggestion is, then, that while phronêsis commands, sunesis judges.
This fits well with the claim that phronêsis is the virtue peculiar to the ruler,
who must command in that he makes decisions not only for himself but also
for those over whom he rules, and it indicates that those who are free but
ruled have a role to play in “discriminating.” Aristotle elaborates on the
activity of which sunesis is the excellence: “one ‘comprehends’ when
exercising judgment (ἐν τῷ χρῆσθαι τῇ δόξῃ) in order to discriminate (ἐπὶ
τὸ κρίνειν) about the things [practical] wisdom deals with, when someone
else is speaking—and exercising it in order to discriminate rightly (κρίνειν
καλῶς)” (EN 6.10 1143a13–16). This account of sunesis seems, then, to be
an account of what those who are ruled constitutionally need to have
instead of phronêsis: a capacity to judge, and judge well, whether a
proposal is sound, without being those who formulate the proposal. In this
way those with sunesis participate in deliberation, although they do not
make the decisions that are the ultimate outcome of deliberation. So judging
the proposals of others seems to be what it means to have “true opinion,”
the virtue both of the citizens who are ruled constitutionally in a polis, and
of women who are ruled constitutionally by men in the household.52 And if
that is right, then women in the household do participate in deliberation,
although they do not “command” or decide.53
We can now discern how women’s capacity for deliberation will differ
both from that of free men and from that of slaves. Unlike free men, women
will not make decisions; they will participate in deliberation only in the
sense that they will help to evaluate the proposals or possibilities put
forward by free men, in the domain of the household; this will include
moral deliberation, and not only technical deliberation. This distinguishes
women from natural slaves, who are excluded from moral deliberations
altogether.54 Both women and slaves are subject to the decisions made by
free men, and hence both are natural subjects, who should cultivate the
virtues of the natural subject, in particular the virtue of obedience. But the
difference in the deliberative faculties of women and slaves requires that the
obedience they practice should be different. The obedience practiced by
women is not slavish; rather, it resembles that of those who are ruled in a
constitutional state. It is an obedience consistent with participation in
deliberation. This makes sense of the two problematic claims that are the
focus of this section: (1) that women do have a faculty of deliberation
(unlike slaves) although it is “without authority,” and (2) that women are
ruled by men “constitutionally” and also “aristocratically”—constitutionally
because women do engage in deliberation, aristocratically because men,
who are better than women in that they have authoritative deliberative
faculties, make the decisions for the household and command its
inhabitants. Women act for the sake of the ends determined by men. At the
same time, on this interpretation women are not akratic (which would make
them by nature incapable of virtue)—it is not that they make decisions but
cannot abide by them, but rather that they do not make the guiding
decisions of the household at all.
The deliberative authority of men, I have argued, is based on their
capacity to make decisions, that is, to establish ends, for those over whom
they rule; this is just what it means to rule. This is consistent with the
constitutional rule of men over women, because in constitutional rule one
can participate in deliberation without engaging in decision-making. One
can deliberate without having phronêsis, and so women can participate in
deliberation, although they do not themselves have phronêsis as men do.
This, then, allows us to see how women and slaves differ: women
participate in deliberation, although they do not make decisions, while
slaves neither make decisions nor deliberate about matters concerned with
living well.55 The deliberative faculty of women is without authority in the
sense that it is subject to the authority of the person who establishes the
telos; thus, it is without authority relative to the male head of the household.
3.5 The political benefit of sexual difference

3.5.1 Introduction
The focus of this chapter is the rule of men over women, its structure, and
its justification in Aristotle’s political philosophy. I have been considering
the first two questions raised in the introduction: Why are women subject to
rule by men? And how exactly are women politically inferior to men? In
section 3.2 I provided an analysis of Aristotle’s claim that men rule over
women by nature and explored the notion of natural rule to understand both
its structure and its justification. In section 3.3 I argued that Aristotle
believed that women possessed a capacity for virtue despite their status as
natural subjects, and hence that his claim is not that women are incapable of
human virtue. In section 3.4 we saw that he conceived of the inferiority of
women in precise terms: women are able to deliberate, but not to decide
questions of living well. This is why they are subject to natural rule despite
a capacity for virtue. We have seen that Aristotle distinguishes natural rule
over women from that over other natural subjects (slaves and children) by
characterizing it as both constitutional and aristocratic. The basis for that
distinction is the capacity that women have for deliberation (a capacity
neither slaves nor children have); the implication is that women should
participate in deliberation about matters of living well in the household, but
should not engage in decision-making.
What we have yet to consider is why Aristotle thinks it is important to
maintain the distinction between men and women in the household and in
the polis: why is sexual difference good for the polis, and how does it serve
the ends of political life? There are hints in Politics 1, when he argues for a
special status for women, saying that those who treat women like slaves
become slavish themselves and make their city into an association of slaves
rather than of free persons (Pol. 1.2 1252b4–6; see also 1.13 1260a8–10).
But to understand what Aristotle thinks is at stake in describing, justifying,
and institutionalizing sexual difference in the household and polis, we must
look to his criticisms in Politics 2 of Socrates’s proposals for the regulation
of sexual difference in Republic 5. The Socratic proposals aim to eliminate
or at least diminish sexual difference, and Aristotle, in arguing against
them, is arguing for the importance of maintaining sexual difference. If
Politics 1 makes the case that there are different kinds of person and hence
different kinds of rule, Politics 2 argues that this is good.
In this section I demonstrate that Aristotle believed that there were
political benefits to be gained from maintaining sexual difference. This is
not to deny that he understood political sexual differences as natural, nor to
deny that he may have advocated the exclusion of women from decision-
making because he held a conventional conception of the capacities of
women and was reluctant to introduce radical change. But Politics 2 makes
clear that Aristotle’s analysis of sexual difference as a political
phenomenon, and his insistence on preserving a sexual hierarchy in the
household and the polis, is motivated at least in part by his view that
important political benefits accrue from that hierarchy. One benefit is unity.
The focus of Politics 2 is on what we should share, or hold in common,
within a polis. In chapter 1 we saw that Socrates in Republic 5 proposes that
women and children, at least in the guardian class, should be shared, or
“held in common.” The question Aristotle poses in Politics 2.1 is: would it
be better to keep “our present condition” (ὡς νῦν οὕτω . . . ἔχειν) (i.e., to
retain differentiated roles for men and women, and private households), or
to adopt the law laid down in the Republic with respect to having wives and
children, as well as property, in common (Pol. 2.1 1261a8–9)? Asking
whether it would be better is asking in the first instance whether it would
promote unity; this becomes clear, as we will see, as Aristotle formulates
his objections to the proposals. But unity is of instrumental value: it allows
for the cultivation of virtue and noble action, and so it is a condition that
helps the polis to achieve its aim. Sexual difference provides a second
benefit that contributes directly to the aim of the polis: it helps to make
possible the full range of human noble action, in the household and the city.
So Aristotle objects to diminishing the differences between men and women
in the polis not because (or not merely because) he adopts a conservative
attitude to change, but because he sees political value for the community as
a whole in the structure of sexual difference.
3.5.2 Aristotle’s criticisms of the Socratic proposals

Politics 2 presents itself as a review of various constitutions, actual and
proposed, and the thematic focus is on political unity and how a constitution
might promote or undermine that unity. Aristotle’s objections to the
Socratic proposals concerned with holding women in common are
articulated in the context of this discussion of unity. He mentions two
objections:
(1) The object (final cause) for the sake of which Socrates recommends holding women in
common evidently is not borne out (i.e., not proved to be a desirable object) by his arguments
(Pol. 2.1 1261a10–12).
(2) As a means to the end (unity) the possession of women in common is not practicable (Pol. 2.1
1261a13–14).56
That is, Aristotle claims (1) that Socrates believes that these arrangements
would promote unity; but his arguments do not demonstrate that making the
city as unified as possible is good—not, that is, if the unity Socrates has in
mind were to be realized. In (2) he continues that even if we assume that
unity is a good thing in a city, the common possession of women would not
lead to unity.
These objections focus on the Socratic proposal to abolish the household
and to hold women in common, because the question that guides the
discussion of Book 2 is how much should be held in common in a city. But
they bear also on the proposal to train women as men and to assign to them
the same tasks, since, as we have seen, political sexual differences as
Aristotle understands them are bound up with the structure of the
household. Aristotle does not distinguish carefully between the Socratic
proposals, seeing them as part of the same program and mutually necessary:
if women are held in common, then private households will disappear,
women will be trained and employed as men are, and sexual difference will
lose significance; and if women are trained and employed as men are, then
private households will disappear, women will be held in common, and
sexual difference will lose significance. This is clear from a passage in
Politics 2.5 (alluded to earlier):
But if he is going to make women common and property private, who will manage the
household while the men work in the fields? (Or, for that matter, if property and the wives of the
farmers are both common?) Moreover, it is odd that in order to show that women should have
the same pursuits as men he makes a comparison with the animals, among which household
management is nonexistent. (Pol. 2.5 1264b1–6)
The objection to holding women and property in common is that it will

dissolve the household, and the objection to allowing women and men to be
employed in the same tasks is the same. Aristotle’s criticisms of the
Socratic proposals highlight the fundamental role that the household as a
social structure plays in his political philosophy.
The household is on Aristotle’s account a necessary social structure,
integral to the polis, and not simply one among many ways of organizing
social life. In the discussion of the appropriate roles for women and men in
the polis in Books 1 and 2 of the Politics, it is striking that he treats the
household as a requisite for a good human life. He acknowledges that we
organize ourselves politically in diverse ways, and he recognizes several
different correct constitutions—in other words, he allows that there are
different possible political arrangements that will be adequate for human
flourishing. He does not, however, allow that the household is a contingent
social institution, or suggest that without it we might nonetheless fashion a
polis in which living well might be achieved.
The necessity of the household is at the heart of his views on sexual
difference.57 In response to Socrates’ observation that animals of both sexes
perform the same tasks and do not practice a sexual division of labor (Rep.
5 451d–e), and the implication that we too might construct our associations
without instituting sexual difference, Aristotle says in effect (as we see in
the passage quoted earlier): but wolves and sheep do not have households to
manage. The implication is not simply that we as a matter of fact do have
households, but that we must live in households in order to live as human
beings. If the household is necessary to living well as people, it is because it
is the structure that embodies the naturalness of the differences between the
sexes (and between mature and immature, free and unfree) and organizes
these differences into a hierarchy that permits living well—the aim of our
social entities.58 So sexual differences, and the division of tasks according
to sex in the household and the polis, are necessary for human flourishing.
The force of Aristotle’s arguments in Politics 2.2 is that the Socratic
proposals will effectively suppress difference within the household and the
city. Those arguments will be considered in more detail later, but the point
of importance here is that Aristotle clearly believes that holding women in
common will reduce difference within the city, and that will undermine
rather than promote the aims of the polis. We might understand him to be
suggesting that holding women in common will reduce differences among
the men who inhabit a city, and that is one of his points. But since the
differences that he emphasizes are differences between those who rule and
those who are ruled, and since men are natural rulers and women natural
subjects, he is also suggesting that employing women and men in the same
ways will reduce the differences between natural subjects and natural rulers.
This would undermine the unity not only of the household, but also of the
polis; and it will limit the kinds of human virtue that can be manifested in
household and city.
3.5.3 The household as a community

Before determining the benefits of sexual difference for the household and
the polis, consider Aristotle’s account of the household as a koinônia, a
community of persons rather than simply an association of persons. The
importance that Aristotle accords to the household as a community helps to
explain why he sees the Socratic proposals as a threat to the polis. The
status of the household as a community grounds Aristotle’s commitment to
it as a fundamental social structure for a polis in which living well is the
aim and hence helps to explain the importance of the relation between men
and women in the household. All communities—including the relations of
natural rule—function for the sake of some benefit or advantage to the
community (see EN 5.6 1134a26–7, 8.9 1160a9–11). The benefit in the case
of political community is noble action, which is the aim of living together
in city-states and, by extension, in households. Aristotle assumes that the
political community that takes as its aim the promotion of virtue and
virtuous acts is the best community, and that unity is a necessary condition
for the achievement of such a community.
Three features in particular distinguish a community from a mere
association: an origin in affection (which is a decision to live together based
on shared moral commitments), a particular aim (noble action), and certain
practices of exchange. First, the origin of a household and of a political
community is a form of affection (philia).59 Aristotle defines philia in the
context of a community as “the intentional decision to live together” (ἡ γὰρ
τοῦ συζῆν προαίρεσις φιλία) (Pol. 3.9 1280b38–39). This is quite different
from the affection that Socrates proposes should be cultivated among the
citizens (as we will see), and it is one of the distinguishing marks of a
community. That is, while slaves and animals form “associations” among
themselves in some sense, their associations do not involve shared
happiness, and they do not decide to live together (because neither slaves
nor animals have a capacity for decision in the strict sense [Pol. 3.9
1280a31–34; see also 3.9 1281a3]).
Second, the affection that is a decision to live together in a community is
based on shared perceptions of moral qualities, and this is why Aristotle
will not allow that slaves or animals might form such communities: he
believes they are incapable of deliberation and of independent moral
perception. At Politics 1.2 1253a15–18 Aristotle specifies that a city-state,
as well as a household, is a koinônia in the sense that the members of the
community share moral judgments: “For it is peculiar to people as
compared to the other animals that they alone have a perception of good
and bad and just and unjust and the other things [of this sort], and
community in these things is what makes a household and a city.” Thus, a
household as well as a city-state is an association distinguished by its aim—
living well—and by its origin in a decision to live together for the sake of
that aim, a decision based on shared perceptions of right and wrong that
give rise to the appropriate form of affection, philia. That decision will have
been taken by men—women will not, on Aristotle’s view, have the
autonomy to make such decisions for themselves. But if women are to
participate in deliberations within the household, they will need to share the
perceptions of right and wrong of the male head of the household.
Third, the activity that is characteristic of a political community and of
the household is exchange (see, e.g., EN 5.5 1132b32, 1133a17–b16). The
function of this exchange is to equalize the differences among the parts,
which implies that there must be such differences. Every community is a
whole made up of parts, and in a political community these parts are rulers
and ruled (Pol. 7.14 1332b12). In section 3.2 I examined the structure of
parts and whole in the household where natural rule obtains, and we saw
that the parts will be distinguished in value and not only in function. Those
differences in value will be reflected in the structure of exchange, as
Aristotle makes clear in the Eudemian Ethics when he says that the
exchange between ruler and ruled is an exchange of services for honor:
So one has to find some other basis for equalization (ἁνισάσαι) and for setting up the proportion
(ποῆσαι ἀνάλογον). And this is honour (ἡ τιμή), which belongs naturally to the ruler (compared
to the ruled) and to a god. The profit (τὸ κέρδος) has to be equalized with the honour. (EE 7.10
1242b18–20)
In other words, those who are ruled will profit from the community, and
those who rule will be honored in the community. This applies to the
household as well as to the city-state, because the free man who is the head
of a household is able to bestow certain benefits on the women, children,
and slaves who exchange honor for those benefits. At the same time, the
nature of those benefits, and of the honor exchanged for those benefits, will
differ from woman to child to slave. (I will say more about the exchange
between natural ruler and natural subject in section 3.5.5.)
Returning now to Aristotle’s objections to the abolition of private
households and the suppression of sexual difference, we will see that they
focus on the requirements of community, and its need for difference.
Aristotle shows that Socrates emphasizes the wrong kind of affection,
misunderstands how to promote shared moral perceptions, and fails to see
the importance of exchange and hence of difference. The overall objection
is that dismantling the household and treating women and men alike will
not achieve the political aim of noble action. It will fail both because it will
not promote the correct kind and degree of unity (a prerequisite for virtuous
action) and because it will not make room for the full range of human
virtuous action. Maintaining sexual difference as a social fact is on
Aristotle’s view necessary for the achievement of the aims of the polis.
3.5.4 Sexual difference promotes unity

Socrates, as Aristotle represents him, believed that by abolishing sexual
difference (i.e., by treating men and women as the same), and thereby
abolishing private households as the fundamental structure of social life,
one might ensure the unity of the polis. Aristotle disputes this, arguing that
unity in social units is to be secured not through sameness, but rather
through differences in the capacities, virtues, and tasks of the different
parts, beginning with differences between the sexes. The unity of a
community requires moral differences between rulers and ruled; it follows
that the unity of a household depends on moral differences between those
who rule and those who are ruled, that is, between the free men who govern
the household and the women over whom (among others) they rule.
Aristotle attacks Socrates’ vision of the dissolution of private households
through the institution of something like sexual equality by arguing that the
effect of egalitarianism—where that means making people as similar as
possible—will be to dissolve social unity rather than to promote and
preserve it.60
Aristotle’s criticisms of the Socratic proposals are founded on the view
that social entities (households and poleis) have, by nature, a characteristic
kind of unity. The right kind of unity for any social whole will be organic,
which is to say, the kind of unity that belongs to those wholes that have
parts which are different in kind. Each part will have a task to perform that
will contribute somehow to the aims of the whole. The right degree of unity
will be inversely proportional to the self-sufficiency of which the social
entity is capable: the less self-sufficient, the more unified. If social unity
depends on certain differences among people, and social unity is a
necessary condition for human flourishing, then those differences are
valuable.
That there should be differences among the people within a household is
evident from Aristotle’s description of the three primitive pairings of
different kinds of people in the first chapters of Book 1; the point is
repeated at 1.12 1259b3–9 and in 1.13, where he emphasizes that although
free adult men, women, slaves, and children share a common humanity,
there are important natural differences among them. It is not, then,
surprising that Aristotle argues in Book 2 that a city should be made up of
elements that are different in kind:
The city is made up not only of a number of human beings, but also of human beings differing
in kind (εἴδει διαφερόντων): a city does not arise from persons who are similar. A city is
different from a military alliance. The latter is useful by its quantity, even if [its parts are] the
same in kind (since an alliance exists by nature for mutual assistance), as when a greater weight
is added to the scale. In this sort of way, too, a city differs from a nation, when the multitude is
not separated in villages but rather is like the Arcadians. Those from whom a unity should arise
differ in kind. (Pol. 2.2 1261a22–30)61
Although Aristotle concedes here that the association of large numbers of

people who are the same might be useful in forming or conjoining forces,
sameness will not be useful in the same way for the inhabitants of a city-
state. On the contrary, differences among the elements of the city are
valuable for three reasons, each of which contributes to the right kind of
unity: (1) they allow for the right kind of affection, (2) they foster like-
mindedness, and (3) they promote exchanges. That is, these differences are
necessary to create the distinctive features of community life.
There are three arguments Aristotle uses to criticize the Socratic
proposals, each focusing on one of these features. They are aimed in the
first instance at establishing the importance of differences among men for
the unity of the political community. But they imply also that distinct roles
for men and women are vital for household unity, which is in turn
propitious for political unity. In other words, the arguments against the
Socratic proposal to hold women in common are also arguments in favor of
preserving sexual differences in the polis, with the aim of promoting unity
at all levels of community.
The first of these arguments concerns affection. Aristotle argues that the
mechanisms Socrates proposes will not bring about the right kind of
affection among the citizens. At Politics 2.4 1262b7–14 he says that
Socrates has in mind the kind of unity attributed to the lovers in “the erotic
speeches,” where Aristophanes says that the lovers, because of an excess of
affection, desire to grow together (συμφῦναι) and to become a double one
from being two; but then of necessity one or both will die (see Plato, Smp.
191a–b). The erotic affection pursued and exhibited by Aristophanes’
halved creatures is an unhealthy model for the affection to be sought in a
community, because erotic affection promotes a unity in which the parts are
no longer distinct, whereas the parts that constitute a community should
remain distinct (Pol. 2.4 1262b12–15).62
The correct affection between husband and wife, as among the citizens
of the polis, is based on shared moral perceptions, rather than erotic
impulse. In the best case, the affection of husband and wife will be
“because of excellence (δι’ ἀρετήν), if husband and wife were to be decent
characters (ἐπιεικεῖς), since there is an excellence that belongs to each, and
it could be that each took delight in someone with that proper excellence”
(EN 8.12 1162a25–27). Husband and wife must then preserve their different
virtues since “the household and the city should be one in a sense, but not in
every sense” (Pol. 2.5 1263b31–32). But the Socratic proposal imagines a
city in which men and women will play the same roles in the guardian class,
ruling and fighting alongside one another, and hence will have the same
virtues. Whereas erotic affection eliminates differences, the affection based
on shared moral perceptions preserves the differences in virtue that create
unity.
The second argument Aristotle brings to bear against the proposals made
by Socrates concerns the assumption (one that the two men share) that unity
is fostered when citizens are “of one mind” (ὁμονοητικόν). The view that
Aristotle attributes to Socrates is that homogeneity among the members of a
community is likely to make them of one mind; if people have everything in
common, they will agree on the aims of the community and on questions of
value. Aristotle argues, on the contrary, that it is differences—the right
differences—that are more likely to promote like-mindedness and hence
unity. He disagrees with Socrates both about what it means to be of one
mind and about the means by which the members of a social whole might
become of one mind (see Pol. 2.3 1261b30–32).63
What it means to be of one mind, as we know from the Nicomachean
Ethics at 9.6 1167a26–28, is to share judgments about what is beneficial,
and to choose the same things—which will follow from shared moral
perceptions. As we have seen, Aristotle believes that the choice to live
together in a community, and so the very origin of that community, is based
on a shared perception of good and bad, which is also the basis of affection.
To have shared moral perceptions one need not be the same, nor hold
everything in common.64 To share judgments about what is beneficial and
to choose the same things is, rather, to agree to accept differences among
the elements of the social whole because those differences promote a shared
end. Just as organs in a body will have very different tasks to perform even
as each aims to support the function of the body as a whole, so too the
households in a city and the elements in the household should have different
capacities, virtues, and tasks while sharing in perceptions of the good for
the city or the household as a whole. Aristotle is arguing, then, that although
being of one mind is crucial to unity in household or city-state, sameness
among the members is not a requirement for like-mindedness. More
important is agreement on the different tasks and roles to be performed.
Thus, preserving sexual difference and private households is more
conducive to the like-mindedness that will unify the household than is
holding women and children in common and eliminating sexual difference.
Difference rather than sameness produces the right kind of unity in a
community for a third reason, intimated in the discussion of affection:
different kinds of people are necessary for exchange and for reciprocal
equality, a principle that Aristotle holds to be necessary for life in a
community properly speaking. When Aristotle says that women and men
(as well as slaves and masters, and parents and children) need one another
in order to survive, he means that they need one another, and are able to
meet one another’s needs, precisely because they are different. The needs
reflect the differences, and the exchanges that occur between men and
women are unifying. Aristotle says, “The friendship (φιλία) of husband for
wife is the same as that in an aristocracy; for it is based on excellence,
assigning more of what is good to the better, and what is fitting to each”
(EN 8.11 1161a22–25). In the household, unity is produced by the exchange
in which the woman offers more affection than she receives, because she
obtains from her husband certain other benefits (material benefits, but also
moral ones: it is his deliberative faculty that provides practical wisdom for
the household). In the same way, in a city it is the differences among the
citizens, the different capacities and incapacities, that promote unity
through exchange. Holding women privately rather than in common and
preserving separate roles for men and women will promote exchange both
in the household and in the larger polis: in the larger polis, because not
holding women in common entails private households, which will be in a
position to exchange with one another, and in the household, because
having distinct roles will make men and women dependent on one another.
This much is clear then about Aristotle’s position: Socrates is mistaken
in supposing that the unity of a community (household or city) will be
intensified by making its members more alike. Differences, far from being
inimical to unity, are crucial to community, on Aristotle’s account, because
they make possible three things, each of which is conducive to unity: (1)
they allow the right kind of affection to grow, (2) they promote rather than
undermine like-mindedness in the sense of shared perceptions of right and
wrong among the elements of the community, and (3) they create the
possibility of exchange. If the right kind of unity depends on the differences
among the elements to be united, then sexual difference, among other
differences, is important for the social cohesion that is necessary to achieve
the end of living well in household or city.65 In other words, the first
political benefit of sexual difference is its contribution to social unity, which
Aristotle sees as a necessary condition for living well.
3.5.5 Sexual difference contributes to the full range of human

virtue
Living well—the proper aim of any community, including the city-state—is
a question of cultivating and manifesting virtue. We have seen that a
community can live well only when its elements have the organic unity that
is characteristic of bodies (though not to the same degree), and that depends
on differences in kind among those elements or parts. I have been arguing
that Aristotle advocates preserving political sexual differences because they
benefit the community by promoting unity, and that one of his objections to
Socratic proposals to hold women and children in common and thereby
eliminate or de-emphasize sexual difference is that these proposals will not
allow the organic unity necessary to community.
There is a second, more direct political benefit of sexual differences
(among other differences) that emerges from Aristotle’s criticisms of the
Socratic proposals: moral self-sufficiency. In discussing the unity of the
city-state, Aristotle introduces the notion of self-sufficiency as one that
admits of degrees:
It is evident in another way as well that to seek to unify the city excessively is not good. For a
household is more self-sufficient (αὐταρκέστερον) than one person, and a city than a household;
and a city tends to come into being at the point when the community formed by a multitude is
self-sufficient. If, therefore, the more self-sufficient is more choiceworthy (αἱρετώτερον), what
is less a unity (τὸ ἧττον ἓν) is more choiceworthy than what is more a unity. (Pol. 2.2 1261b10–
15)
That is, the lesser degree of unity is desirable for a city-state, a higher
degree for the household, and the highest for the individual. The more
unified a social entity, the less self-sufficient it will be. Since complete self-
sufficiency is desirable in a city-state, a lesser degree of unity will also be
desirable; since a lower degree of self-sufficiency is expected in a
household, it will have a higher degree of unity.66 When we consider the
reasons Aristotle offers for the claim that a city is more self-sufficient (and
hence better) when it is less unified, we learn something more about the
nature of the differences among members of the household, and about the
political benefits of sexual difference.
There are two senses of “unity” at work in this discussion. One is that of
Socratic unity, which involves having everything in common, and so being
the same. The primary reason that the city should be less unified on
Aristotle’s account is that we need people with whom we do not share
everything (people who are different from us with respect to what they
have) in order to be able to exercise the full range of human virtues. The
elements of a city-state should have less in common (and be more different
in this sense) than the elements of a household because certain opportunities
to perform virtuous actions are lost if the community is too unified in the
Socratic sense of being constituted by people who have everything in
common (Pol. 2.5 1263b4–14; 1263b29–37). In particular, temperance with
respect to women and liberality with respect to property are virtues that are
lost in cities that are excessively unified. This makes clear that here what
Aristotle means by excessive unity (excessive, that is, for a city-state) is the
circumstance in which everything is held in common: when women and
property are held in common by the members of a community, then
individual members have no opportunity to exercise self-control with
respect to women held by others, and no opportunity to exercise generosity
by offering private property to others.
A second sense of unity, however, is the organic sense that Aristotle
recommends, which involves preserving differences. Holding women in
common and eliminating the sexual division of roles in the household and
the city will increase unity in the Socratic sense of sameness, but not in the
organic sense. So on the one hand, Aristotle says that the city will be “more
unified” or have “too much unity” when women are shared (this is a form
of Socratic unity, which Aristotle elsewhere disparages as appropriate only
for military alliances). On the other, he says that the city will be unified
only when women are held privately (this is the organic unity that he holds
to be appropriate for a community and necessary for its aim of living well).
One of Aristotle’s points is, then, that free male adults in the city, those
citizens who deliberate and decide on the actions of the city, must be
different from one another in order to be able to manifest the full range of
human virtue. The differences between free male adults will be differences
in the possession of women, children, and property, and those differences
will allow them to cultivate and exercise the virtues of self-control and
generosity, opportunities for which will be diminished should they hold
everything in common. That the city will be self-sufficient only when the
full range of human virtue is manifested in it suggests that we should
understand self-sufficiency primarily in a moral sense.
Further evidence that the notion of self-sufficiency in Politics 2 is
primarily moral is found in Aristotle’s criticism of the Socratic Kallipolis
with respect precisely to the notion of self-sufficiency as a sufficient
diversity of “necessary things”:
Hence what is said in the Republic, though sophisticated, is not adequate. For Socrates asserts
that a city is composed of the four most necessary persons, and he says these are a weaver, a
farmer, a shoemaker, and a builder; and then on the grounds that these are not self-sufficient (ὡς
οὐχ αὐτάρκων τούτων), he adds a smith and persons in charge of the necessary herds, and
further both a trader and a person engaged in commerce. All of these make up the complement
of the first city as if every city were constituted for the sake of the necessary things and not
rather for the sake of what is noble. (Pol. 4.4 1291a10–19)
Because the aim of a city is noble action, living well, a city will be self-
sufficient when it has whatever is required for noble action. Although
Aristotle would not deny that noble action will be difficult for citizens
whose material needs are not met, his point is that the city should be
organized not only so that the citizens may live—be self-sufficient in that
limited sense—but so that they may live well, where that will mean that
they flourish morally.
Some commentators have construed the notion of self-sufficiency in
Politics 2 in material rather than, as I propose, in moral terms.67 Two points
might lead one to suppose that by “self-sufficiency” Aristotle intends
material self-sufficiency, and hence that the differences among people
necessary for self-sufficiency will be differences in skills (the differences,
that distinguish, for example, philosophers, farmers, and doctors). The first
is that Aristotle makes reference to a community that is “large enough” to
be self-sufficient. We might suppose that size is a question of a diversity of
skills and is related to a concern for satisfying the physical needs of the
inhabitants; on that view, only a city large enough to include farmers and
cobblers and bakers and a military, among others, will be a self-sufficient
city. But we should not suppose that self-sufficiency is only a matter of size,
since we know that a city-state is not simply a large household (Aristotle
disparages that view at Pol. 1.1 1252a12–13), and that what distinguishes a
city from a household is not merely the number of its members.
The second point is that Aristotle places great emphasis on the
importance of relations of exchange in establishing unity in a community.
Whatever the degree of unity, every community must have unity, that unity
will be established and maintained through relations of exchange, and
exchange will require that each element of the community has some good to
exchange with the others. But Aristotle does not understand the goods that
are exchanged in strictly material terms. In a passage we have already
considered (Pol. 2.2 1261a29–b5), he states the principle of reciprocal
equality and refers us to the Nicomachean Ethics for its first formulation:
In commercial associations (ἐν ταῖς κοινωνίαις ταῖς ἀλλακτικαῖς), however, the parties are
bound together by a form of the just that is like this, i.e. what is reciprocal in proportional terms
(τὸ ἀντιπεπονθὸς κατ’ ἀναλογίαν), not in terms of numerical equality (κατ’ ἰσότητα). For it is
reciprocal action governed by proportion that keeps the city together. Either people seek to
return evil for evil, and if they don’t, it seems like slavery; or they seek to return good for good,
and if they don’t, there is no giving in exchange, and it is exchange that keeps them together. . . .
For it is not two doctors that become partners to an exchange, but rather a doctor and a farmer,
and in general people who are of different sorts (ὅλως ἑτέρων) and not in a relation of equality
to each other (οὐκ ἴσων); they therefore have to be equalized. (EN 5.5 1132b31–1133a18)
Although the exchanges between doctors and farmers in the city-state are
clearly necessary in order to provide it with “necessary things,” they are not
enough to provide it with self-sufficiency in the moral sense. Exchange is
always based on some differences in the goods possessed by those who
enter into exchange, but those goods are not exclusively material goods or
skills. They are also aesthetic and moral goods, and can be such things as
pleasure or honor (for pleasure, see EN 8.4 1157a3–10, 8.6 1158b1–3; for
honor, see EN 8.11 1161a20–21). Moreover, as many commentators have
pointed out, differences in professional skills cannot exhaust the differences
Aristotle has in mind as necessary for self-sufficiency, since Socrates
proposed a division of labor in the Kallipolis and yet Aristotle is here
critical of Socrates for failing to ensure self-sufficiency in the city. Thus,
while it is true that a self-sufficient city will be one in which the material
needs of the population are met, and hence one in which a wide diversity of
skills will be found, the notion of self-sufficiency in Aristotle extends
beyond living per se—beyond meeting the bodily requirements of people—
to living well. We are self-sufficient as people only when we have a context
in which to exercise fully our capacity for virtue.
This point can be extended to the household, and in particular to the
relation between men and women. That relation manifests itself in a
division of labor and distinct sets of skills, but it also must manifest itself in
distinct kinds of virtue, since the aim of the koinônia that is the couple is
moral as well as pragmatic. Aristotle recognizes the way in which practical
needs and moral needs might both be satisfied within the structure of the
couple and the household:
For man is naturally a coupler (συνδυαστικόν) more than he is naturally a civic being
(πολιτικόν), to the extent that a household is something prior to and more necessary than a city,
and to the extent that producing offspring is something more widely shared among animals.
With the other animals, the sharing only goes this far, whereas human beings cohabit not only
for the sake of producing offspring (τῆς τεκνοποιίας χάριν) but also for the sake of the
necessities of life (τῶν εἰς τὸν βίον); for from the beginning their functions are differentiated, so
that the man’s are different from the woman’s and so they complement (ἐπαρκοῦσιν) each other,
making what belongs to each available to both in common. These points suggest that both the
element of the useful and that of the pleasant are present in this kind of friendship; but it might
also be because of excellence, if husband and wife were to be decent characters, since there is an
excellence that belongs to each, and it could be that each took delight in someone with that
proper excellence. (EN 8.12 1162a17–27)
A man and a woman in the household have distinct tasks from the outset (of
the household), and this benefits each of them insofar as they share with
each other. But in the best case, at least, each will have not only a distinct
set of tasks, but a distinct kind of virtue—and they will enjoy one another’s
virtue as well as benefit from one another’s skills. It is clear that the tasks
are for the sake of the virtue, and hence that the completion of the tasks
does not constitute self-sufficiency, even in the household. The “full range”
of human virtues includes not only all of the virtues that are desirable in a
free male adult, but all of the virtues that are desirable in any person. A city
will only be able to manifest all of the human virtues when (1) the heads of
household are different from one another in the sense that they do not hold
everything in common and (2) the inhabitants are different enough from one
another in the sense that some are natural subjects and some natural rulers.
Since the full range of human virtues includes the virtues of obedience as
well as the virtues of rule, only a structure in which rule is embedded in all
its forms will have the greatest degree of self-sufficiency. The differences in
kind among children, slaves, women, and free male adults are necessary if
the entire range of opportunities for virtuous action is to be possible. In
other words, if sexual difference were eliminated or minimized, the range of
human virtues would be reduced. So sexual differences are a political
benefit insofar as they extend the range of virtues that may be cultivated
and expressed in a city.
Differences among the members of a community are a benefit, then,
because they make possible the full range of expression of human virtue:
they make living well in the complete sense possible. But to ensure a
complete range, there needs to be not only the range of virtues available to
free adult male citizens in the community, but also the range of virtues
available to natural slaves and women, which are virtues of obedience. The
Socratic proposal to hold women in common would undermine the capacity
of free male citizens to manifest all their virtues, and the proposal to
educate and employ women in the same way as men, and thus to make
women and men more alike, would diminish the range of virtues that are
developed and manifested through sexual difference. Sexual difference in
political roles is valuable, then, for the household and the polis, more than it
is good for men. As we saw in chapter 2, Aristotle conceived of the value of
biological sexual difference as a benefit primarily to the reproductive
couple and to the species (while maintaining that it is better to be male than
to be female). Similarly, he conceives of the value of political sexual
difference as a benefit that accrues to the household as a whole and
ultimately to the polis, rather than to individual men or to men as a sex.
3.5.6 The virtues of natural rulers and natural subjects

I have been arguing that Aristotle’s criticisms of the Socratic proposals to
abolish private households in the guardian class, hold women in common,
and train them in the same way as men reveal what he perceives to be the
benefits of sexual difference: first, it promotes the organic unity that is
appropriate to any social entity, and, second, it allows for a full range of
human virtue, from the virtues of obedience through to the virtues of the
ruler. This last point is important: it is not just any kind of difference that
promotes unity and permits the full manifestation of virtue. Let us consider
in more detail Aristotle’s reasons for believing that the differences between
natural ruler and natural subject, with which I began this chapter, are so
important.
Although differences among the elements of a political community are
necessary for its unity, not all differences are equally good for ensuring
unity. Many communities fail because they fall prey to conflicts that emerge
from cultivating, or at least tolerating, the wrong kinds of differences (Pol.
3.9 1280a9–25, 4.11 1295b34–1296a17, 5.3 1303a24–b7). The differences
that promote organic unity and self-sufficiency will be differences of virtue,
and in particular differences between the virtues of the ruling element in a
community and the virtues of those who are ruled. These are the differences
that will give those who are ruled an enduring motive to agree to be ruled,
and give those who rule a legitimate basis on which to assert authority.
One of Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s Laws is that it fails to elaborate or
to give content to the differences between rulers and subjects: “Socrates
does not tell us how the rulers differ from their subjects; he only says that
they should be related as the warp and the woof, which are made out of
different wools” (Pol. 2.6 1265b18–21). And in criticizing the Republic
Aristotle is concerned that Socrates has not specified how the citizens who
are not guardians will differ from those who are:
If everything is to be common to all in the same manner, how will these differ from the
guardians? What more will they get by submitting to their rule? Or how will they be forced to
submit to it, unless the guardians act the sophist and devise something like the Cretans have?
For these allow their slaves to have the same things as themselves, except that they forbid them
exercises and the possession of arms. (Pol. 2.5 1264a16–22)
The concern here is that those who are to be ruled should understand the
reason that they are ruled—should, in effect, agree that it is good that they
should submit to rule. Such agreement, Aristotle believes, can only be
secured if people believe not only that there are differences between the
ruling element and the ruled, but also that the difference in question is one
that justifies the different status of ruler and ruled. This is what it means for
the members of a community to be of one mind, and to hold shared moral
perceptions. And such a difference can only be a difference in virtue.
We have seen that Aristotle says of those who are ruled as a class that
they must have all the virtues of those who rule with the exception of
phronêsis, but that these virtues will differ in kind, despite having the same
names (Pol. 1.13 1259b31ff.). It is these differences in virtue that justify the
relation of ruler to ruled. This is not to deny that in some communities rule
is established independently of these moral differences, according to
freedom, wealth, or some other measure. But it is to assert that such
communities are susceptible to failure because they will not have the unity
necessary for living well or the self-sufficiency provided by diverse forms
of virtue that is necessary for survival over time. Further evidence that
Aristotle understands the difference between ruler and ruled to be
fundamentally a moral difference can be found in his discussion of the
relation between the good person and the good citizen. He draws an
analogy, famously, between the sailors on a ship and the citizens in a city:
Now just as a sailor is one of number of members of a community (τις τῶν κοινωνῶν), so, we
assert, is the citizen. Although sailors are dissimilar in their capacities (τὴν δύναμιν) (one is a
rower, another is a pilot, another a lookout, and others have similar sorts of titles), it is clear that
the most precise account of their virtue (τῆς ἀρετῆς) will be that peculiar to each sort
individually, but that a common account will in a similar way fit all. For the preservation of the
ship in its voyage is the work of all of them, and each of the sailors strives for this. Similarly,
although citizens are dissimilar (ἀνομοίων), preservation of the community is their task, and the
politeia is [this] community; hence the virtue of the citizen must necessarily be with a view to
the politeia. (Pol. 3.4 1276b20–31)
In this passage Aristotle compares certain qualities of sailors, that he

calls both “capacities” and “virtues,” to the different virtues of citizens in a
city-state. Of course the skills of sailors will differ insofar as their virtues or
excellences do—and insofar as their capacities do—but there is no reason to
restrict the meaning of the excellences in question to non-moral
excellences. This is confirmed later in the same chapter when Aristotle,
while claiming that the virtues of the ruler and of the ruled are sometimes
found in the same person, adds that “the virtue of ruler and citizen is not the
same” (Pol. 3.4 1277a23). Virtues track functions, so if the functions of a
ruler and a subject are different, we should expect that their virtues will be
different; and if the rule in question is natural, then these will be natural
differences.
3.5.7 Living well requires the household
Aristotle takes the household to be a necessary rather than a contingent
social structure—necessary, that is, for the achievement of the aim of the
city-state, which is to live well in the sense of virtuously. The structure,
function, and unity of the household depend on preserving sexual
difference. The benefits of retaining the household as the fundamental
social structure and maintaining sexual differences are, first, that the
organic unity of the household is ensured through these differences, and
second, that the full range of human virtues, those of ruler and of ruled, are
preserved in these differences.
Just as a city needs farmers as well as philosophers, so too a household
needs women as well as men. This is not so much because men and women,
like farmers and philosophers, perform different tasks in the city, each of
which is necessary for the city to flourish, although that is true. It is rather
that women and men will have different virtues, and only if they are both
included in the city will the community be one in which all virtues are
manifested. A city without women would not only be deprived of those best
suited to perform certain tasks, it would also be one in which certain virtues
would be absent—hence, it would be morally deprived. The designation
“women” in this context is not biological, but social. Aristotle’s objections
to the Socratic proposals is not that they would literally eliminate women,
but rather that they would eliminate the role for women that Aristotle
believes is natural. That role, we should note, is not described in the Politics
in terms of the bearing or rearing of children, but in terms of the
preservation of household goods and obedience to the determinations or
decisions of the head of the household, together (implicitly) with
participation in the deliberations that lead to those decisions. Aristotle does
not doubt, nor does he argue, that women are morally inferior to men in the
sense that their role is non-authoritative and their tasks are for the sake of
the tasks performed by men. His argument, in Politics 2, is that it is good
that there should be those who play the role of women in the household, and
hence in the city made up of households. It is good because it makes the
household, and the community as a whole, unified and morally better—
morally complete.
A household, like a city, is a koinônia with moral aims that are more
important than its material aims. This is indicated by the relation between
moral and material aims: the latter, which include the acquisition of wealth
and the preservation of goods, are for the sake of the former. Aristotle’s
commitment to this ordering of aims lies behind his objections to Socrates’
proposal to eliminate households among the guardian class of the
Kallipolis. The discussion of sexual difference in the Republic suggests that
the material functions of the household—feeding and lodging its inhabitants
—could just as easily be accomplished through different social institutions.
Aristotle recognizes the truth of this and even acknowledges that in material
terms it might be better (for example, he is aware of Spartan arrangements
for communal dining; see Pol. 2.9 1271a26–35 and 2.11 1272b32–33). It is
not the pragmatic innovation, but the moral implications of the abolition of
households among the political elite of the Kallipolis, to which Aristotle
objects. In abolishing the household, Socrates, on Aristotle’s account, is
attempting to minimize the natural moral differences between men and
women, and to abolish the social hierarchy of the household, which, as
Aristotle sees it, is the natural structure in which to express those
differences. Both household and city are natural in the sense that they are
the correct structures in which persons can express their moral natures fully.
It is because Aristotle sees the importance of sexual difference in terms of
its capacity to promote moral completeness, rather than in terms of its
pragmatic benefits, that he is opposed to any alternative arrangement.
This is not to say that the dispute between Aristotle and Socrates on the
question of the sexes is about whether the treatment of the sexes is an
economic or a moral question; they clearly agree that it is a moral question.
Socrates, as Aristotle recognizes, also argues for his proposals on moral
grounds; he is not asserting that it will be more efficient or cost-effective to
eliminate households among the guardians and equalize the treatment of the
sexes, but rather that it will promote unity by promoting the correct moral
stance of guardian to guardian. Aristotle’s criticism is precisely that he
doubts that the Socratic proposals will promote unity of the right kind or
degree—namely, the kind and degree that will promote living well. So
behind Aristotle’s criticisms of the Socratic proposals is his conviction that
unity, whether in a household or in a city, is only an instrumental good,
good only insofar as it promotes living well. If living well depends, as
Aristotle believes it does, on the exercise of the full range of moral virtues,
and some of those virtues, notably the virtues of obedience, will be
suppressed in a context where sexual differences are suppressed, then living
well depends on the preservation of the household, not its abolition, and on
the differential education and employment of the sexes.
3.6 Conclusion
I began this chapter by exploring Aristotle’s claim that men rule over
women by nature. We have seen that he conceives of this rule as necessarily
structured by the household, which is itself a natural form of association on
Aristotle’s account. One form of natural rule in the household is that in
which men determine the activities of women, because those activities are
for the sake of the tasks that belong to men (section 3.2). It does not follow
that women are incapable of human virtue; on the contrary, as we have
seen, Aristotle insists that women will have virtue, although it will be
different in kind, not simply in degree, from that of men (section 3.3). But
his vision of sexual difference is not one of complementarity, because these
differences are not value-neutral. He clearly believes that these differences
constitute a hierarchy in which men, who have fully operative deliberative
faculties, are better than women, who lack authority. The superiority of men
is manifest in their decision-making activities. Whereas men are able both
to deliberate and to decide, women are restricted to a deliberative capacity.
This is what it means to say that their deliberative faculty is without
authority (section 3.4), and it amounts to a moral rather than an intellectual
defect, an incapacity for command with an implication of political
incapacity. As in the biological context where Aristotle represents the
female as inferior, then, there can be no doubt that Aristotle conceives of
women as politically inferior. But, again as in the biology, the point of his
argument is not to demonstrate that inferiority, but rather to show that
despite their inferiority, women are good, which is to say that they have a
function and serve a purpose that supports the ultimate telos of the polis
(section 3.5).
Both when he maintains that women are different and inferior and when
he maintains that it is good that there should be women, Aristotle represents
his position as a counter-argument to the Socratic proposals. He construes
those proposals as an attempt to make women more like men, and hence to
rid the polis of sexual difference, or at least to mute the differences between
the sexes. On this reading the Socratic proposals are not about equality—
certainly not about gaining equality as a matter of justice—but about
reducing the womanliness of women, precisely because that womanliness is
a kind of inferiority. Aristotle does not dispute that it is a form of inferiority,
but he does argue that sexual difference benefits the community.
In chapter 1 we saw that both Aristophanes and Socrates introduce the
possibility that women might engage in political activity with the aim of
benefiting the polis as a whole (section 1.5.4). Aristotle’s arguments against
sharing women in common among men and training women to participate
in political life are aimed at showing that such proposals would not promote
the common good, but would, on the contrary, undermine it. He shares with
Socrates the idea that the common good must decide the question of the
value of sexual difference. But whereas Socrates argues that minimizing
sexual difference will promote the common good, Aristotle argues that
treating women like men, and hence making them more like men, will
undermine the common good. Aristotle’s criticisms of the Socratic
proposals demonstrate that he is committed to the view that sexual
difference is good, and that its benefit to the household and the city lies
both in the way that it promotes unity and in the contribution it makes to the
full range of human virtue. So women are worse than men, but the
household and the city are better for the inclusion of women.
In this chapter we have considered how Aristotle conceives of the
political differences between men and women. As we saw in chapter 1, one
effect of the Socratic proposals is to suggest that women and men may not
be significantly different in any way that affects their suitability for political
engagement. Aristotle in the Politics attempts to maintain the idea that the
sexes are indeed different, although he is constrained here, as in his work on
biology, by his own conception of the unity of species. To maintain his
position he must show that however women differ from men, they do not do
so in essential features. That is why he maintains that women have a
capacity for reason, even while claiming that it is limited in some way.
We know from Politics 1.13 that Aristotle thinks that the difference
between men and women cannot simply be one of degree, because that
would not be sufficient to exclude women from political authority. But if
the difference is neither one of degree nor one of essential features, what is
it? Aristotle’s answer to that is that it is a difference in the matter. In the
case of biology, we have seen him elaborate that answer in terms of
physiological function (in chapter 2). It is not obvious, however, how he
would argue that the political sexual difference he identifies—the difference
between the authoritative deliberative faculty of men and the deliberative
faculty lacking in authority in women—is a difference in the matter. In the
next chapter, I take up the question of the possibility of grounding the
deliberative deficiency Aristotle attributes to women in their material
nature.
4
The Relation between Biological and Political
Sexual Differences
4.1 Introduction
4.1.1 The question

In chapters 2 and 3 I considered Aristotle’s discussions in the Generation of
Animals and the Politics as independent treatments of sexual difference.
There are two reasons for doing so. First, the Generation of Animals is a
work that Aristotle would classify as a theoretical treatise, whereas the
Politics is a contribution to practical philosophy, and we should be cautious
in importing the results from one branch of philosophy to the other, or
assuming links between them.1 Second, the two discussions of sexual
difference have little in common, starting from different assumptions and
employing different terms and distinctions. For example, in the Generation
of Animals the discussion centers on the different roles played in
reproduction by male and female in a variety of animal species. In the
Politics, by contrast, Aristotle is concerned with women and men—not
male and female—and is largely silent on the question of the reproduction
and nurture of offspring; the focus is on the deliberative capacities, tasks,
and virtues of women and men. It is not so much that there are
discrepancies or inconsistencies between the two accounts, as that they do
not seem to speak to each other. There is no obvious connection between
the claim in the Generation of Animals that the female is inferior and the
claim in the Politics that women should be subject to the authority of men.
Moreover, as we saw in chapter 2, section 2.2, there appears, at least at first
glance, to be an impediment to drawing such a connection: that Aristotle
maintains sexual difference is in the body and does not think that reason is
dependent (at least directly) on the formation or perfection of any bodily
organs. That suggests that there should be no sexual differences in the
rational activities characteristic of persons.
Yet that is not what Aristotle maintains in the Politics. In this chapter I
take up one of the questions that emerge from this gap between the
discussions of biological and political sexual differences. That question
concerns the relation between the biological and the political accounts of
sexual difference. Commentators who have considered that relation have
tended to assert, or assume, that Aristotle ascribes to women a deliberative
faculty without authority and assigns them a role in political life that is
inferior to the role played by men because he believes that their physiology
somehow causes them to be unfit for full political participation. On this
view Aristotle not only understood the sexes to be functionally different by
nature in political as well as physiological terms (which I take to be
uncontroversial), but also believed that the political differences stemmed
from the physiological (which is less obvious). That is, it is often assumed
that on Aristotle’s account political sexual differences are the result of
physiological differences. In this chapter I consider two plausible paths to
establishing a causal foundation for women’s political inferiority in their
physiological incapacity. The aim is to determine, in the embryological
development of the female person, or in the physiology of the female body,
evidence of some defect in the body that could, in Aristotelian terms, be
responsible for the lack of authority attributed to deliberative reason in
women.
This introductory section includes, in section 4.1.2, a discussion of some
of the principles of Aristotle’s metaphysics and natural philosophy that
structure how we might determine the relation between physiological and
psychological sexual differences. In section 4.1.3 I set out two hypotheses
—what I call the “teleological hypothesis” and the “material hypothesis”—
to account for the production in nature of females, which might be invoked
as part of either path (these hypotheses are linked to the notions of
conditional necessity and material necessity, discussed in chapter 2, section
2.9.2). In section 4.1.4 I refine the question of the link between
psychological and physiological sexual differences to clarify the focus of
this chapter.
The first path to an explanation of political sexual differences by appeal
to physiology traces defects in heat to impurity of the blood, and then to
defects in perception and imagination, and ultimately to defects in rational
capacity.2 How might we fill in the gaps in this sketch? How might
Aristotle have argued that the reproductive physiology of female persons
has an impact on their perceptual and imaginative capacities, in such a way
that ultimately their deliberative powers are affected? I take up these
questions in section 4.2.
A second path to demonstrating a causal link between female physiology
and the lack of authority of the deliberative faculty in women runs not from
the perceptual capacities to the rational, but from the degree of thumos
(“spirit”) that Aristotle attributes to women to the capacity for rule. The
physiological basis of this account is found in the link that Aristotle
suggests between heat, certain types of blood, and the degree of thumos in
an animal species or a sex, and the link he posits between maleness, a
higher degree of thumos, and a capacity for rule. This path has been
explored largely by commentators who see it as a way of understanding
Aristotle to have maintained a position of neutrality on the question of the
relative value of the sexes, or to have viewed men and women as
“complementary” in their roles and merits.3 It has often involved an
interpretation of Aristotle’s account of sexual difference that is implausible
on several counts, but it does suggest a promising way of understanding
how the physiological differences Aristotle attributes to the sexes might
underpin their social and political roles in the household and the polis.4 If a
higher degree of thumos is bestowed on men because their bodies are hotter
than those of women, and if thumos is either a requirement or a
qualification for political rule, then there is some reason to suppose that
Aristotle might have traced the political role he designates for free men
back to their physiology. I explore that possibility in section 4.3. My aim,
then, in sections 4.2 and 4.3 is to consider the two most promising ways of
establishing a causal foundation for the political incapacity that Aristotle
attributes to women in a biological incapacity of the female, determining
the evidence that might support each path of explanation, and engaging in
conjecture when necessary to complete the explanations. Once the most
charitable reconstructions have been developed, section 4.4 offers an
assessment of the plausibility of each path. I argue that it is more likely that
Aristotle would trace the particular psychological deficit that he attributes
to women to the lower degree of thumos in the female body, and hence that
the second path offers a better explanation.
4.1.2 Basic principles governing the question
In Aristotle’s embryology there are two ways, in principle, in which sexual
difference that is intellectual or moral in character might be introduced in
the development of the embryo. In the first, weak movements in the semen,
or excessive coldness or bulk of the menses, directly causes two distinct
effects: (1) it determines the embryo as female, which causes it to have an
incapacity to concoct the ultimate residue, and (2) it produces a distinct
incapacity for deliberation in females of the human species. In the second
way, weak movements or excessive coldness or bulk in the fertile residues
is only indirectly responsible for the deliberative incapacity of women: it
causes the coldness that renders the female incapable of complete
concoction, with the result that the quality of her blood hinders perception
or the development of thumos in such a way that the function of the
deliberative faculty is affected. In other words, in one case the female
embryo is flawed in two distinct ways—physical and psychological—by
defects in the fertile residues; in the other, the embryo is flawed in a single,
physical, way but the result has two manifestations: incapacity for
concoction and a lack of authority in the deliberative faculty.
It is unlikely that Aristotle believed women were compromised in their
deliberative abilities in the first of these ways, since that would require that
a weakness in the fertile residues undermined the rational capacity in a way
unmediated by the body. But, as we have seen, in the Metaphysics Aristotle
describes sex as a difference in the matter, and so we should expect it to
manifest itself in the body, through which certain effects on the soul might
be produced. Moreover, because Aristotle treats the rational faculty of soul
as distinct from other faculties in his account of the transmission of soul (as
we saw in chapter 2, section 2.10) and believes that it is not located in a
particular organ or organs of the body in the way that other capacities of the
soul are, it is difficult to see how weak movements in the semen or defects
in the menses might directly produce intellectual defects, since those
movements and defects can only act on the organs of the body.
It is more likely, then, that Aristotle believed that sexual differences in
deliberative capacity are produced in the second way—that a female body is
somehow less apt to support the deliberative capacity. That is, as members
of the human species, men and women would have the same rational
capacities in principle, but because the female body is less well able to
support those capacities, the result is the impaired deliberative capacity of
women. So the possibilities suggested by the second way (where weak
movements or excessive coldness or bulk in the fertile residues is indirectly
responsible for the deliberative incapacity of women) are the focus of this
chapter. I will assume that fertile residues with weak movements or
excessive coldness or bulk produce bodies that are colder and less capable
of concoction, and will investigate the ways in which that coldness might
affect other aspects of the body such that women might develop the
incapacities Aristotle attributes to them as a justification for their limited
political status.
There are reasons one might think that Aristotle should believe that
differences in the rational capacities of the sexes will determine differences
in their bodies, rather than their bodies determining their rational capacities.
Let me set those out before suggesting that Aristotle has other reasons to
suppose that bodies can influence or determine soul faculties. To understand
how the physiology of the sexed body might be related to the deliberative
capacities of the soul, we should begin by noting that Aristotle holds as a
general principle the priority of efficient and final causes (“nature as mover
and nature as end”) over material causes (nature “as matter”) (PA 1.1
641a15–33). The natural scientist ought to proceed by identifying in the
first instance the phenomena and then the causes of the phenomena, which
should be considered in a particular order: we ought first to take “nature as
substance,” by which Aristotle means the formal and final causes, and then
“nature as material,” that is, the material causes (PA 1.1 641a27). The point
is not only procedural. Natural scientists should set the causes out in the
prescribed order because it will reflect the character of natural phenomena
—that their matter is determined by their end or final cause. This point is
emphasized in Book 2 of Parts of Animals:
In generation things are opposed to the way they are in substance; for things posterior in
generation are prior in nature, and the final stage in generation is primary in nature. For
instance, a house is not for the sake of bricks and stones, but rather these are for the sake of the
house—and so it is with other matter. . . . So the matter and the generation are necessarily prior
in time, but in account (τῷ λόγῳ) the substance and the shape of each thing (τὴν οὐσίαν καὶ τὴν
ἑκάστου μορφήν) [is prior]. (PA 2.1 646a24–b2)
The contrast in this passage between priority in the process of generation

and priority in nature describes the difference between the temporal priority
of the matter out of which something is generated and the ontological
priority of the formal and final causes of that which is generated. Aristotle
acknowledges that material causes might seem to be prior to formal (and
hence final) causes, because when something is generated the material
cause must be prior in time to the fully realized substance. He insists,
however, that the formal and final causes are what the matter is “for the
sake of”—and so the matter is to be understood in light of the substance.
That is the reason that the natural scientist should first consider the final
cause, the end, and the substance itself, and then consider its material
causes. In the case of a living being, this means that one should consider
first the soul and its faculties and then ask what sorts of material causes the
soul requires for its operations, because the material causes, including the
organs of the body, will develop “for the sake of” the activities of the soul.
The point of the passage at Parts of Animals 2.1 646a24–b2 quoted
earlier is that the natural philosopher must be concerned (up to a point) with
the soul precisely because the parts of the body are determined by the
capacities of the soul that they serve. Thus, the sexual organs are
determined by, and informed by, the reproductive capacity of the soul. We
see this reasoning in the Generation of Animals: “Since they [male and
female] are distinguished by a capacity and hence by some function, and for
all functions there is need of organs, and the organs for these capacities are
the parts of the body, it is necessary that there should be parts for
reproduction and intercourse” (1.2 716a23–26; my translation). We should
not, for example, explain the capacity to produce semen by the presence of
spermatic ducts; rather, we should explain the presence of the ducts by the
capacity to produce semen. The reproductive organs are for the sake of the
reproductive capacities (GA 1.2 716a24–28); souls and their faculties have
priority—ontologically and causally if not temporally—over the organs of
the body, because they are the final causes of ensouled beings.
A second principle that we should bear in mind in considering how the
sexed body might affect the deliberative capacities of the soul is that higher
faculties of soul determine the lower faculties. Aristotle describes the
structure of the soul by analogy with geometrical figures where the lower
are contained within the higher (DA 2.3 414b29–415a11). The integrated
nature of the faculties of soul and Aristotle’s teleological account of the
activities of ensouled beings suggest that higher faculties should determine
at least in part any lower faculties. So, for example, living beings in
possession of a capacity for locomotion will execute the functions of the
reproductive faculty in ways that reflect that capacity, and they will
reproduce in ways that differ from the reproductive operations of plants;
individuals in sexually differentiated animal species are able to move in
order to find partners for generation, but those in sexually differentiated
plant species must find other strategies, such as pollination. Since there are
significant differences between brute animals and human beings both in the
highest soul faculty and in the telos at which they aim, we should expect
that the manifestation of sexual difference in human beings might differ
from that in other animals. The highest soul faculty in human beings will be
reason, but in most animals it will be a kind of imagination. The final cause
of most animal species is the generation of other animals of the same
species (DA 2.4 415a23–b7).5 This is not, however, the case for human
beings, who, because they have a rational faculty, are able not only to
survive and reproduce themselves, but also to live well, a complex activity
(including the exercise of the rational faculty and the development of
human virtue) that is their final cause (see Pol. 1.2 1252b29–30 for the
distinction between living and living well); and the community of husband
and wife is for the sake of life and not only for the sake of reproduction, as
with other animals (EN 8.12 1162a19–22) (although at Pol. 1.2 1252a28
Aristotle describes the couple as being for the sake of generation).6 As we
have seen in chapters 2 and 3, Aristotle identifies sexual differences in the
operations of both the rational faculty and the nutritive/reproductive faculty
in human beings. Given the principle that higher faculties in part determine
lower faculties, we might expect the sexual differences in the rational
faculty—in particular, differences in the capacities for deliberation and
decision—to produce differences in the reproductive faculty, such as
differences in the capacity for concoction (although, as I will argue later,
this is not Aristotle’s view).
There are, then, two different principles that govern the relations
between soul and body that might lead us to reject the notion that
physiological differences between the sexes produce psychological
differences. The first principle is that the soul determines (“rules,” in
Aristotle’s language) the body in the sense that the latter is “for the sake of”
the former—so physiological differences should somehow be for the sake
of psychological differences. The second is that higher faculties in part
determine lower faculties, so that we should expect differences in the
nutritive capacity to be for the sake of differences in the deliberative
capacity. Both principles suggest that psychological differences are not
produced by physiological differences; on the contrary, they should be prior
to them, and determine them. On this view, these differences are a natural
end for the human species, and male and female physiological capacities for
concoction and reproduction, together with the bodily organs that support
them, are conditionally necessary to that end.
If these principles governed the link between sexual differences in the
rational soul and in the reproductive soul, then we would expect the
explanation for the correlation between these differences to be something
like this: The rational faculty in some people (men) has authority, and in
others (women) it does not. These differences in the rational faculty require
that the lower soul faculties should differ in certain ways—the faculty of
imagination in men and women might differ, and hence so too would the
faculty of sensation (since imagination depends on sensation); alternatively,
the faculty responsible for thumos (which is probably imagination) might be
different in men and women. In either of these scenarios, the differences in
the higher faculty—reason—would determine differences in the lower
faculties—imagination, sensation, or desire—and, ultimately, differences in
the reproductive faculty responsible for the different capacities to produce
fertile residues that characterize men and women. These differences in the
reproductive faculty would then require differences in the organs of the
body. The important point governing this sort of explanation is that the
differences in reason that distinguish men and women would determine,
directly or indirectly, that there should be differences in the lower soul
faculties reaching down to the reproductive faculty, and that those
differences in the lowest soul faculty would produce bodily differences. All
these differences—both those in the body and those in the lower faculties—
would ultimately be explained by reference to differences in the rational
faculty. This view depends on the assumption that in sexually differentiated
species both male and female animals are not only teloi of nature, but
distinct teloi; and so men and women would have different final causes, but
each would be an end for the species.
But this explanation in terms of the priority of formal and final causes
over material causes and of higher soul faculties over lower is not the only
way to construe a causal relation between deliberative capacities and
capacities for concoction. Aristotle allows that matter that is not properly or
optimally arranged might interfere with the exercise of a soul faculty (for
example, as we have seen, the ability to concoct residual blood into sperma
capable of initiating generation is impaired by low levels of vital heat); this
is a third principle.7 So another way to understand how the biological
incapacity for concoction in females is linked with the political incapacity
Aristotle identifies in women is to see the former as the cause of the latter.
On such a view, the biological defect in the female is not only temporally
prior to but also responsible for the psychological deficit; the incapacity for
concoction interferes somehow with the human capacity for deliberation,
rather than serving in some way a peculiarly feminine incapacity for
deliberation. Biological sexual differences would thus explain political
sexual differences: the lack of vital heat in women’s bodies would not only
interfere with the capacity for concoction in such a way that it renders
women incapable of producing sperma that can act as an efficient cause of
generation, but it would also interfere with the operation of deliberative
reason so that women, although they are incapable of (or ill-suited to)
decision-making are nonetheless capable of participating in deliberation. On
this view, the female is defective physiologically in a way that results in
women’s being limited as political beings. In contrast with the view
sketched earlier, on this account the female is not a distinct telos of animal
generation alongside the male, but rather a deviation from the telos that is
the male, or a being that falls short of that telos. In chapter 2, section 2.9.5,
I considered the question of the female as a telos or a defect and suggested a
way to reconcile those options. I take up that question again later to argue
that the two possibilities distinguished here—that defective materials are
responsible for the production of a female and that nature aims to produce
females—are not incompatible; each helps to explain the link between
material deficiencies and political deficiencies attributed to the female by
Aristotle.
4.1.3 Two hypotheses to explain how the female body might

compromise the deliberative capacity
These principles and possibilities suggest two ways in which the production
of females (and women) might be explained as natural; I will call the first
the “teleological hypothesis” and the second the “material hypothesis” (they
track explanations by conditional necessity and by material necessity, as
discussed in chapter 2, section 2.9). On the first hypothesis, if we take the
governing principle to be that nature determines first the function and
capacities of an animal and then creates the organs necessary to serve those
capacities, then we should suppose that the production of females as well as
males is a telos of animal generation (in the case of sexually differentiated
species). On that hypothesis, there are two instantiations of the reproductive
faculty—one male and one female—with different functions and hence
different subordinate ends (concoction of semen or of menses), but the same
ultimate end (generation). Nature, in other words, aims to produce both
females and males, and so the production of the female is not a failure of
the generative process but the achievement of a telos, just as is the
production of a male. The realization of either the male or the female telos
in an individual will count as a success with respect to the ultimate telos of
making a species reproductively functional.8 This hypothesis offers a
teleological explanation for the production of females and so treats the
production of females (as well as males) as a good precisely because it is an
aim of nature, if not the ultimate aim. There are several disadvantages to the
teleological hypothesis: (1) it makes it more difficult to understand sexually
differentiated species as one in form, since the species form is manifested in
two ways that are distinct in function, each with its own telos; (2) it is
incompatible with Aristotle’s description of females as imperfect males; and
(3) it is inconsistent with Aristotle’s claim in the Metaphysics that sexual
differences are material differences (see chapter 2, section 2.2).
According to the second (i.e., the material) hypothesis, the production of
females is the result of a failure in the determination of physiological
function and the process of organ formation during embryological
development. In this scenario, the production of a female is not a telos of
nature, but a failure to achieve the telos, which is the production of a male.9
That is, females are imperfect instances of the species, produced by
accident and through material necessity when the male’s semen fails to
master the matter of the menses fully during embryological development.
This way of explaining the generation of female animals is better able to
account for the unity of species form despite the different capacities of the
sexes; the female is functionally the same as the male, but imperfect or
defective—like the male, she concocts the ultimate nutriment into blood
and eventually into a fertile residue, but the lower degree of vital heat in her
body is an obstacle to the perfect function of concoction and the complete
realization of the fertile residue. The reproductive capacities of male and
female are different, then, not in kind, but in degree. In this explanation
matter interferes with the perfect realization of a single telos rather than
serving the realization of two distinct teloi. But if we adopt this view it is
more difficult to understand why the production of females should be good,
since it conceives of the female as defective.
There are important implications for our understanding of sexual
difference as a political phenomenon that follow from each of these
hypotheses. In the first, there are two distinct human norms, one for men,
the other for women: women are natural in the same way that men are, and
their compromised capacity for deliberation is a teleological outcome just
as much as the authoritative deliberative capacity of men is an end of nature
(to understand a compromised capacity as good requires that we accept that
it somehow “complements” the capacity of men, or establishes women in
their natural place in the household); both kinds of deliberative capacity
will be natural ends and valuable as such. The implication of the second
scenario, by contrast, is that the male is the sole telos of human generation,
and his capacity for deliberation is the norm for all human beings.
According to this hypothesis, women are a departure from that norm and
hence imperfect as human beings and as political beings.
There is some evidence for each of these hypotheses (for the first,
Aristotle’s claims that the female is natural and necessary, and that nature
produces the organs necessary for the functions determined by nature; for
the second, his claim that she is defective and that failings in the fertile
residues produce females). The question is how to reconcile them. In his
account of the determination of sex in the embryo, as we saw in chapter 2,
sections 2.3 and 2.9.5, Aristotle speaks of the female reproductive capacity
as an incapacity and of the female as the first of the “monstrosities”
produced by nature. This is evidence that he understood the production of
the female not as a telos of nature, but as a departure from the telos of the
process of animal generation. At the same time, as I have argued in chapter
2, we can make sense of the claim that the generation of females is good for
a species, and of the fact that Aristotle calls females “natural” even though
they are defective relative to the male, if we see their production as an
instance in which nature is thwarted, not in its effort to generate an animal
with a capacity to produce a fertile residue, but rather, after that goal has
been achieved, although imperfectly realized. This, I suggest, is the way to
reconcile Aristotle’s descriptions of the female as a departure from the male
with his account of her as natural, necessary, and good. We can reconcile
the teleological and the material hypotheses by viewing them as
coordinated: nature achieves a certain telos, the generation of a
reproductively competent individual animal, just so long as that animal
produces a fertile residue. The species soul, which is the telos and final
cause of the generation of an animal, bestows the principle of a capacity for
concoction (the capacity that allows the individual to achieve the
subordinate telos of generation of a fertile residue), but the degree of that
capacity in any given individual, which is responsible for the sex of the
animal, is determined not by the species soul but by material necessity. And
a lower degree of capacity, with which the animal can concoct katamênia
but not semen, is a defect relative to the higher degree of capacity possessed
by the male. At the same time, the structure of sexual difference, the
separation of the moving (male) cause and the material (female) cause of
generation, is a telos of nature distinct from the telos that is the generation
of another animal and can be achieved only through the generation of
individual females as well as individual males. The telos of reproductive
functionality (through the production of a fertile residue) is part of the
species form of an animal, and a telos in the nature of the individual. By
contrast, the telos of the separation of efficient and material cause, realized
through the production of both male and female animals, is a telos not in the
individual, but in the nature of the species as a whole (or in the genos
animal as a whole). Thus, the material hypothesis is compatible with a
broader teleological account of sexual difference.
4.1.4 Refining the question: what exactly is the political deficiency

of women?
In the remaining sections of this chapter I set out the two paths by which we
might explain the deficiency of women’s capacity as a consequence of their
physiological deficiencies; I then interpret the deliberative incapacity of
women at the level of the rational soul as a result of their failure to develop
to perfection the generative faculty. The two paths, in outline, are: (1) a
lower degree of vital heat interferes with sensation, imagination, and
eventually with deliberation (section 4.2); and (2) a lower degree of vital
heat produces a lower degree of thumos, which in turn creates an impaired
capacity for decision-making (section 4.3). Both paths are compatible with
the idea that the female might be imperfect and nonetheless achieve the
same (subordinate) telos as the male, the generation of a fertile residue, the
achievement of which gives her value. In section 4.4 I assess the paths
described in the previous two sections and argue that while Aristotle may
have believed that the capacity to form judgments of good or bad, or of
justice or injustice, is compromised in women, there is better evidence that
he believed that the physiology of women would affect their disposition to
experience thumos and thereby diminish their capacity for rule—and that
ultimately this explanation makes better sense of the claims he makes about
political sexual differences. These conclusions are guarded, because the
evidence for them is suggestive but not conclusive. Both explanations rest
on Aristotle’s account of blood and its properties. The first stems from the
idea that male blood might be hotter initially than female blood, but cooler
once it arrives at the organs of sensation, making it better able to receive
accurate impressions; the second stems from the idea that hotter blood that
is not too fibrous might provide the right degree of thumos for the
combination of courage and intelligence that Aristotle takes to be the
human ideal.
Before analyzing the two ways in which physiology might affect
deliberative function in women, it is useful to recall Aristotle’s claims about
deliberative reason and its virtue, phronêsis. The lack of authority that
characterizes the deliberative reason of women (which we identified in
chapter 3, section 3.4.3, as an incapacity for decision-making in political
affairs) implies, as we have seen, that women will not develop phronêsis.
But Aristotle uses the term phronêsis in more than one way. In a number of
his works, he attributes phronêsis not only to different kinds of people, but
also by analogy to certain animal species.10 In this sense it is a widespread
excellence, often associated in non-human animals with memory, foresight,
and the capacity to care for offspring. Most commentators take phronêsis in
this sense to be a capacity to learn from experience (I will say more about
this later).11 But Aristotle also sometimes formulates a conception of
phronêsis in a narrower sense, as an excellence limited not only to human
beings, but to a single social group: free adult men. At Nicomachean Ethics
6.5, phronêsis is defined as “a disposition accompanied by rational
prescription, true, in the sphere of human goods, relating to action”
(1140b20–22). In this sense, it is the excellence of that part of the rational
faculty that forms opinions about what can be otherwise, the part that he
calls the bouleutikon (EN 6.1 1139a5–15, 6.5 1140b25–29; Pol. 7.14
1333a16–25), that is, the deliberative faculty. As such, it is an excellence
that belongs only to those capable of exercising the deliberative faculty in
every sense. The possession of a rational faculty is a necessary condition for
the development of phronêsis in this narrower sense, but it is not sufficient.
This is not only because phronêsis is an intellectual virtue that involves
having correct desires as well as correct reason, but also because the
operations of the deliberative faculty are not all performed by every rational
being—decision, as we have seen, is not exercised either by slaves or by
women (at least not in every domain), according to Aristotle, even though
they have reason (see chapter 3, section 3.3).
In asking, then, how the physiology of the body could affect the capacity
for phronêsis, we might pose the question in two different ways. We might
ask first whether there is evidence that the lower degree of heat in the
female body impairs an animal’s memory, foresight, or capacity to care for
its young.12 If there is such evidence, then we might conclude that the
female in every species is lacking with respect to phronêsis in the wider
sense. In the case of female human beings, however, the incapacity for
phronêsis must manifest itself in the lack of authority of the deliberative
faculty that Aristotle explicitly attributes to them. To make a convincing
case that there is a physiological basis for the political exclusion of women
in Aristotle’s practical philosophy, we must be able to show not only that
the features of female physiology as he describes it would cause general
intellectual defects, but that they produce a particular deficit: the lack of
authority of the deliberative faculty. So a second question, more pertinent to
political sexual difference in human beings, is how lower vital heat might
make women incapable of decision-making, and thus incapable of acquiring
phronêsis in the narrower, peculiarly human, sense. The question, in other
words, is whether physiological differences between the sexes as described
by Aristotle in the Generation of Animals can account for the differences in
the human capacity for phronêsis as they are described in the Politics.
4.2 The first path: cold, sensation, and rational capacity

4.2.1 Introduction
I begin by constructing a narrative to connect differences in the capacity to
generate vital heat to differences in the capacity to deliberate and decide,
through an account of the effects of heat on the qualities of blood necessary
for sensation. Such an account will proceed through the impact of sensation
on memory and the role of memory in the functions of the deliberative
faculty. I argue that there is evidence to conclude that variations in vital heat
might be sufficient to explain variations in the degree of phronêsis in the
wider sense in which an animal kind possesses phronêsis—variations in
memory and foresight. But the differences in the physiology of the sexes as
Aristotle describes them may not be sufficient to explain the deficiencies of
the deliberative faculty in women as a consequence of impaired sensation.
Recall the role of the heart in the physiology of blooded animals. In
Aristotle’s biology, as we saw in chapter 2, the heart serves three functions:
(1) it is the source of blood, and of vital heat in the blood and in the body;
(2) it is the principle and origin of biological sexual difference; and (3) it is
the central organ of sensation. The first two of these functions are evidently
related: it is because the capacity to bestow vital heat on the blood, and
thereby to concoct it, belongs to the heart, and because that is the capacity
that Aristotle takes to be the fundamental physiological difference between
the sexes, that the heart holds the principle of sexual difference. The role of
the heart as the seat of sensation is linked to these other functions through
blood. The principle of sensation is in the heart because sensation is linked
to blood, and the heart is the “primary blooded part” (PA 3.4 666a34–37).
Aristotle says, “The movements of pleasures, pains and all sensations
generally evidently originate there [in the heart] and proceed to it” (PA 3.4
666a11–12). The reason that the heart is the seat of the common sense is
that it is the organ in which sensory movements from different sense organs
converge and can be compared (on the need for a common sense, see DA
3.1 425a20–29; on the heart as the seat of the common sense, see Juv. 3
469a10 [where he locates “the common sensorium of all the sense organs”
in the heart], Juv. 4 469b3, GA 2.6 743b25, and PA 2.10 646b24).13
It follows that the nature of the blood may influence an animal’s
capacities for sensation. This is clear when Aristotle compares species and
asserts that the quality of blood affects the capacities and dispositions of the
animal kind.
The nature of the blood is the cause of many features of animals with respect to both character
(κατὰ τὸ ἦθος) and perception (κατὰ τὴν αἴσθησιν), as is reasonable, since blood is the matter of
the entire body; for nourishment is matter, and blood is the last stage of nourishment (ἡ ἐσχάτη
τροφή). It therefore makes a great difference whether it is hot or cold, thin or thick (λεπτὸν καὶ
παχὺ), turbid or pure (θολερὸν καὶ καθαρόν). (PA 2.4 651a12–16)
The purity of the blood is the most important determinant of perceptual and
intellectual abilities; Aristotle consistently says that the more intelligent
animal species have the purest blood.14 Blood is pure when it is lacking in
foreign elements, that is, lacking in earthy bits or fibers, as we saw in
chapter 2, section 2.5.2.Although Aristotle seems to think that the blood of
certain species is inherently pure (or purer than that of other species), the
purity of blood (and of the fertile residues) can be produced by concoction:
well-concocted or easily concocted blood will be pure (GA 1.20 728a26–27,
PA 3.9 672a2–6); hence, heating is a mechanism of purification, and blood
that is pure may have been rendered such by heat. Aristotle also indicates
that blood that is pure will be thin or fine in texture (HA 3.19 521a2–5, PA
2.7 652b30–33). In these contexts λεπτόν (thin) and καθαρόν (pure) seem to
be synonyms, so that to describe blood as “thin” is to say that it is pure.
These physical features have an impact on the capacity of blood to receive
accurate impressions and retain them.
4.2.2 Heat and purity in blood

The clearest statement of the association between pure blood and
intelligence is found in Book 2 of Parts of Animals 2.4 650b19–22:
Now, some of these animals [whose blood is watery] also have a more subtle intelligence
(γλαφυρωτέραν ἔχειν τὴν διάνοιαν), not because of the coldness of their blood, but rather
because it is thin (τὴν λεπτότητα) and pure (τὸ καθαρὸν); for what is earthen (τὸ γεῶδες) has
neither of these properties. For those animals with finer and purer moisture have quicker
perception (εὐκινητοτέραν τὴν αἴσθησιν). (PA 2.4 650b19–22)
In this passage Aristotle anticipates the suggestion that colder blood leads to
greater intelligence, but he goes on to reject that idea, insisting that it is the
purity of the blood that is responsible for intelligence. Intelligence in an
animal may be due more precisely to the “finer and purer moisture” of the
animal (which moisture will be found in the blood). And the purity of the
moisture will be a function of the purity of the heat in the heart that is
transmitted to the blood:
In people the brain is more fluid and greater in volume than in any other animal, and the reason
of this, in its turn, is that the heat in the heart is purest in people. The intelligence [of people]
makes clear that they have a good blend [of hot and cold]: of animals people are the most
intelligent. (GA 2.6 744a27–32)15
It is not clear what “pure” heat is. It probably means that the heat of the
heart is unadulterated or unmixed to allow for the full concoction of the
blood, which suggests that the highest degree of heat is the purest. At Parts
of Animals 4.2 677a20–31 Aristotle implies that impurities will be opposed
to whatever is characteristic of the pure substance (e.g., if healthy blood is
sweet, its impurities will be bitter bile), which implies that heat would be
rendered impure by the addition of cold, so that pure heat would be
unmixed with the cold.16 So although the links here are not entirely explicit,
the picture seems to be: the purity of the heat in the heart produces pure
moisture, which produces pure blood, which promotes quicker perception
and then intelligence. (It is not yet clear why pure blood might promote
intelligence, but I will consider the reasons Aristotle offers for that assertion
later.)
Differences in the purity of blood distinguish not only animal species,
but the sexes within a species, as well as certain parts of the individual
body. In each of these cases, purer blood is linked with greater intelligence:
Thicker and hotter blood is more productive of strength, while thinner and cooler blood is more
perceptive and intelligent (αἰσθητικώτερον δὲ καὶ νοερώτερον). And the same difference obtains
among the attributes analogous to blood. . . . But those with hot, thin, and pure blood are best
(ἄριστα δὲ τὰ θερμὸν ἔχοντα καὶ λεπτὸν καὶ καθαρόν); for such animals are at once in a good
state relative to both manliness (πρός τ᾿ ἀνδρείαν) and intelligence (πρὸς φρόνησιν). It is for this
reason too that the upper parts differ in this way compared with the lower parts, and again the
male compared with the female, and the right side of the body with the left. (PA 2.2 648a2–14)17
This seems to mean that hot, thin, pure blood is more often found in the
upper rather than the lower parts of the body, in the right rather than the left
side of the body, and in male rather than female animals.18 The character of
the blood (i.e., its temperature and degree of purity) of an organ or an
animal will make it more or less sensitive to sensation, and more or less
“intelligent” in that sense. It is because the organs in the upper part of the
body and those on the right side of the body are constituted from blood that
is hotter, thinner, and thus more pure that certain animals are said to be “in a
good state” with respect to phronêsis and “manliness” (i.e., courage). Both
practical wisdom and courage are linked to maleness in this passage
through the purity of the blood, suggesting that there is a physiological
basis for the claim that men more than women are disposed to develop the
virtues of both the deliberative faculty and the thumotic faculty. In this
section I focus on the claim that pure blood is conducive to intelligence or
practical wisdom; in the next I consider the suggestion that it is conducive
to courage.
The “upper parts” that Aristotle mentions are the organs of sensation,
including the heart, because, while all bodily organs are made from blood,
the organs of sensation are made from the purest blood, as Aristotle
explains in a discussion of embryological development:
Each of the remaining parts is formed out of the nourishment. The most honourable ones, those
which have a share in the supreme controlling principle (τὰ μὲν τιμιώτατα καὶ μετειληφότα τῆς
κυριωτάτης ἀρχῆς), are formed out of the first of the nourishment, which has been concocted
and is purest; the “necessary” parts (τὰ δ᾿ ἀναγκαῖα μόρια), which exist for the sake of those just
mentioned, are formed out of inferior nourishment, out of the leavings and the residues. (GA 2.6
744b12–16)
The “supreme controlling principle” of this passage is that in the heart, as

we saw in chapter 2, section 2.4.3, for the sake of which the other organs
execute their functions. So the “most honourable [parts], those which have a
share in the supreme controlling principle,” are the heart and the organs of
sensation that are governed by the heart. In a passage at Parts of Animals
2.10 656b3–6, Aristotle says that “it is because of parts with purer blood
that the more accurate of the modes of perception (τὰς ἀκριβεστέρας τῶν
αἰσθήσεων) necessarily become more accurate; for the motion of the heat in
the blood (ἡ τῆς ἐν τῷ αἵματι θερμότητος κίνησις) erases (ἐκκόπτει)
perceptive activity.” He locates those organs and hence the more accurate
modes of sensation (sight in particular) in the head, and associates the
purity of the blood in the head with its coolness (as it is cooled by the
brain), saying that “the motion of the heat in the blood erases perceptive
activity,” with the implication that the cooling of the blood in the head
eliminates the motion in the blood that is due to heat.19
This raises a point that requires clarification. I have been emphasizing
that, on Aristotle’s account, pure blood is best for perception, so if the
males of a species have purer blood, they will be better constituted for
perceptual accuracy. If the purity of blood in male animals is due to their
higher body temperature and the consequent higher degree of concoction in
their bodies, we might suppose that hot blood is best for perception because
it is purest in the sense of least earthy. But this point needs to be qualified,
in two ways. First, not all hot blood is pure in this sense: some species have
blood that is both fibrous and hot (see PA 2.4 650b33–651a5 and GA 3.1
749b30–35, both discussed in section 4.3.2), and concoction does not
render all blood equally pure. In his account of sleep, Aristotle makes clear
that while the source of all blood is the heart (where it is concocted), “the
blood in the head is the rarest and purest, that in the lower parts of the body
is thickest and most turbid,” and the separation of the purest blood from the
thicker blood occurs in the “the middle compartment” of the heart, after
which “the purer part of the blood” is “separated upwards, and the more
turbid downwards” (Somn. 3 458a13–20). So some portion of the blood in a
body will be less pure than another portion. Second, the passage at Parts of
Animals 2.10 656b3–7 suggests that cooler blood is better for perception
because of its calmness. The explanation is that pure blood has to be cooled
so that it is able to retain sense impressions and not “erase” them. And at PA
3.4 667a1–6 Aristotle tells us that the blood in the central chamber of the
heart is moderate in quantity and in heat (μέσον δ’ αἱ μέσαι τῷ πλήθει καὶ
θερμότητι) and is calm (ἠρεμεῖν), and he attributes the calmness of that
blood to its purity and its moderate heat. On this account, the blood best
suited to perception will have been heated, concocted, and thereby purified
(since concoction is one method of separating out the “foreign,” i.e., earthy,
parts in the blood) and subsequently cooled by the brain to the point that it
is calm, because it has been relieved of the motions of heat. Aristotle does
say that that of all animal kinds, the brains of humans, specifically those of
men, are the largest and moistest, which suggests that they are also the
coldest, and hence better able to cool the blood heated in the heart (PA 2.7
653a27–37, GA 2.6 744a28–32, and HA 1.16 494b27–29), and this would
contribute to the notion that human beings, and men in particular, are the
most perceptually sensitive and thus intelligent.
There are then, in effect, two features of purity. Blood is pure (or purer)
when (1) adulterous (earthy or fibrous) elements have been removed, or
separated off, from it and (2) when it is calm, or without movements. Blood
can be rendered purer in the first sense by heating and concoction, but it
must then be cooled in order to subdue the motions that heat imparts to
blood and render it pure in the sense of calm. The sense organs are in the
head precisely because the head contains the purest blood, best suited for
accurate perception. And that is true both because (1) the head contains the
narrowest blood vessels that can only contain the purest (i.e., least earthy)
blood and because (2) the head is the coolest part of the body, because the
brain cools it, so that blood in the head is pure (i.e., calm, undisturbed by
the motions of heat). What emerges clearly, then, is that the best blood for
perception should be both non-fibrous and calm. The next question is how
the purity of the blood (or of the heat or the moisture in the blood) assists or
promotes the functions of the heart and the other sense organs.
4.2.3 Pure blood and sensation

There is some evidence that Aristotle explains the way in which pure blood
assists in perception as a function of the softness and sensitivity of those
organs that have pure blood. He says that the flesh of human beings as a
species is softer than that of any other animal kind, that this softness
provides us with the most sensitive capacity for touch, and that this
accuracy of perception makes us the most intelligent of animals (DA 2.9
421a20–26;20 see also PA 2.16 660a12–15).21 The heart and the other sense
organs are softer than other parts of the body because they are constituted
from especially pure blood; and the softness of these organs makes them
susceptible to receiving accurate impressions from sense objects: “For the
imperceptive animals have a heart that is hard and solid, while the
perceptive ones have a softer heart” (PA 3.4 667a13–15). If body parts
constituted by purer blood are softer, and if male animals are constituted
from blood that is purer than the blood of female animals, then we would
expect male animals to have softer organs, and in particular to have softer
organs of sensation, which would then be more sensitive to sense
impressions. Since Aristotle seems to believe that perceptual accuracy is a
question of alertness to differences in sensible objects, and the ability to
distinguish those differences (as well as a question of the ability to perceive
from a distance) (GA 5.1 780b12–18), sense organs that are more sensitive
to sense impressions would convey more accurate information. So purity of
vital heat leads to purer blood, which produces softer organs of sensation,
which yields more accurate sense perception.22 On this account, then, men
would have blood that is first heated to a higher degree than that to which
the blood of women is heated, so that the “purer” portion is purer than the
“purer” portion in women, producing softer and more sensitive organs of
sensation, and then cooled so that it produces more lasting sense
impressions. This, then, might be the explanation for the higher degree of
perceptual accuracy attributed to male animals. We have yet to explore how
that might lead to the more complete capacity for deliberation that Aristotle
attributes to men.
Before doing that, one question should be addressed: if women have less
accurate perceptions because they have harder sense organs as a result of
having less pure, earthier blood, then why does Aristotle describe them as
“soft”? The answer to that is that Aristotle does not describe the flesh or
sense organs of women as “soft,” although he uses terms that might seem
equivalent.23 A couple of passages in the Physiognomics (which is probably
spurious) do suggest that the flesh of females is softer (Physiog. 2 806b32–
34 and Physiog. 5 809b4–12), and it may have been a popular
contemporary view. But Aristotle’s assertions about female flesh are
somewhat different: “the female is less sinewy (ἀνευρότερον) and less
articulated (ἀναρθρότερον). . . . The female also has wetter flesh
(ὑγροσαρκότερα) than the male” (HA 4.11 538b7–10). These adjectives
suggest that females are less muscular and have less strength than males (at
GA 5.7 787b11 Aristotle says that in all animals strength is in the sinews).24
But they do not indicate that females are “soft” in the sense that their sense
organs are more sensitive to sensation.25 The softness associated with
perceptual acuity is caused by “pure” (non-earthy, non-fibrous) blood, but
Aristotle thinks that the blood of females is “thicker and blacker” than that
of males (HA 2.19 521a21–22), implying that it is more earthy and hence
less pure. This would suggest that Aristotle believes the flesh and sense
organs of females are less, and not more, “soft” than those of males, and
hence that there is no inconsistency in claiming both that women are less
sinewy, less articulated, and wetter-fleshed than men, and that they have
harder flesh and hence a less acute capacity for sensation and lower
intelligence. So Aristotle does not attribute to females a softness of body
that would be inconsistent with the claim that men’s perceptual organs are
softer and more sensitive.26
4.2.4 From sensation to deliberation

Assuming, then, that the sense organs of men are better able to receive
accurate sense perceptions, the question is how that capacity might affect
the deliberative faculty. The link between sensation and deliberation seems
to lie in the faculty of imagination (and in particular in the workings of
memory), since imagination serves as a bridge between the faculty of sense
and the rational faculty. Inaccurate sense impressions might create
inadequate memories, which would then be an obstacle to the derivation of
universal claims from those memories.
Consider Aristotle’s account of memory. He says that an individual
memory is the retention of a sensation (A.Po. 2.19 99b36), suggesting that
the capacity for memory is functionally related to the capacity for
perception; at the very least, sensations are a necessary condition for
memories. Indeed, memory is more closely associated with sensation than
with any activity of the rational faculty, since certain animal species that do
not have “the intellectual faculty” of the soul nonetheless have memories
(Mem. 1 450a14–16). In his most detailed account, however, Aristotle says
that while memory belongs essentially to the faculty of sensation, it belongs
incidentally to the faculty of thought (ὥστε τοῦ διανοουμένου κατὰ
συμβεβηκὸς ἂν εἴη) (Mem. 1 450a13–17, 450a20–25). The point seems to
be that although what is remembered might be a sensation, it might also (in
the case of beings with a rational faculty) be a thought, and so a memory is
a state of affection of a perception or of a thought (ὑπόληψις) (Mem. 1
449b24–25). Memory thus requires sensation but is not restricted to
sensation in every species.
Moreover, no animal will have intelligence without having memory,
because the exercise of intelligence requires memory, as much as memory
requires sensation. Aristotle makes this clear in his description of the
development of science and art (ἐπιστήμη καὶ τέχνη) at Metaphysics 1.1
980a27–b2:
By nature, animals are born with the power of sensation, and from sensation memory (μνήμη)
comes into being in some of them but not in others. Because of this, animals that can remember
are more intelligent (φρονιμώτερα) and more teachable (μαθητικώτερα) than animals that
cannot remember. (Met. 1.1 980a27–b2)
Since no animal species has reason, to say that some animal species are
“more intelligent” than others is to refer to intelligence or phronêsis in the
broader sense, according to which it is an aptitude for some kind of
foresight that depends on a recall of past sensations. Memory is necessary
for intelligence because it allows the animal or person to build experience
(ἐμπειρία) (Met. 1.1 980b25ff.)
We can see this in the same chapter of the Metaphysics, where Aristotle
draws a connection between phantasmata, memories, and experience:
The animals other than man live by appearances (ταῖς φαντασίαις) and memories (ταῖς μνήμαις),
and have but little experience (ἐμπειρίας δὲ μετέχει μικρόν) but people live also by art and
reasoning (τέχνῃ καὶ λογισμοῖς). And from memory experience is produced in people, for many
memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience. Experience
seems to be very similar to science and art, but really science and art come to people through
experience. . . . And art arises, when from many notions gained by experience one universal
judgment (μία καθόλου ὑπόληψις) about similar objects is produced. (Met. 1.1 980b26–981a7)
This passage suggests that while some animal species have memory, they
have no (or little) experience, which is drawn from many memories of the
same thing. Aristotle does not say how experience is drawn from memories,
but his claim that it is a capacity restricted (or largely restricted) to human
beings suggests that it involves a capacity for judgment. This is confirmed
by the claim that experience allows a person to acquire art by drawing “one
universal judgment about similar objects.” Science and art “come to people
through experience” insofar as they are able to draw universal judgments
about similar objects from experience, which itself involves some kind of
comparison and judgment of individual memories. It is possible that some
animal species have something like experience, which seems to be a kind of
generic memory—but only people will formulate universal judgments from
memories and experience.27 In a passage in Posterior Analytics, Aristotle
sums up the path a human being must follow from sensation to science
(ἐπιστήμη):
So from perception there comes memory, as we call it, and from memory (when it occurs often
in connection with the same thing) experience; for memories that are many in number form a
single experience (ἐμπειρία μία). And from experience, or from the whole universal that has
come to rest in the soul (the one apart from the many, whatever is one and the same in all those
things), there comes a principle of skill and of science (τέχνης ἀρχὴ καὶ ἐπιστήμης)—of skill if
it deals with how things come about, of science if it deals with what is the case. (A.Po. 2.19
100a1–10)
This passage elides somewhat the distinction between experience and the
universal judgment drawn from experience, but it indicates again that
experience can be acquired only by a being with intelligence.
If intelligence requires universal judgments drawn from experience and
built on memories, then the accuracy of memories will affect the
intelligence of a person. This is apparent when, in On Memory, Aristotle
describes memory formation with the metaphor of a stamp making an
impression on a surface:
For it is obvious that one must consider the affection which is produced by sensation in the soul,
and in that part of the body which contains the soul—the affection (τὸ πάθος), the lasting state
of which we call memory (μνήμην)—as a kind of picture (οἷον ζωγράφημά τι); for the stimulus
produced impresses a sort of likeness of the percept, just as when men seal with signet rings.
Hence in some people, through disability or age, memory does not occur even under a strong
stimulus, as though the stimulus or seal were applied to running water; while in others owing to
detrition like that of old walls in buildings, or to the hardness of the receiving surface (διὰ
σκληρότητα τοῦ δεχομένου), the impression does not penetrate. . . . For a similar reason neither
the very quick nor the very slow (οἱ βραδεῖς) appear to have good memories; the former are
moister than they should be, and the latter harder (οἱ μὲν γάρ εἰσιν ὑγρότεροι τοῦ δέοντος, οἱ δὲ
σκληρότεροι); with the former the picture (τὸ φάντασμα) does not remain in the soul, with the
latter it makes no impression. (Mem. 1 450a28–b12)
To speak of memories as “impressions,” as Aristotle does here, is to suggest

that there is a surface on which the “percept” is impressed. The claims
about moistness and dryness suggest that this is not a metaphor, and that the
surfaces are physical. As we have seen, both the faculty of imagination (to
which memory belongs essentially—Mem. 1 450a13–17, 450a20–25) and
the faculty of sensation have their seat in the heart. The suggestion in the
passage at On Memory 1 450a28–b12, quoted earlier, is that a surface that is
either too moist or too hard will not sustain the formation of accurate
memories. Hearts are constituted of blood, and blood that is either
insufficiently or excessively concocted will be either too watery or too dry,
producing hearts that are too moist or too hard. That is, if there is not
enough heat, the concoction of the blood will be insufficient, leaving the
blood too watery and producing a heart that is too moist to retain accurate
memories. If, on the other hand, there is too much heat, the concoction of
the blood will be excessive, making the blood insufficiently watery and
producing a heart that is too hard to retain accurate memories. We can
conclude that a person will have inaccurate memories when the heart is
either too moist or too hard as a result of blood that is too wet (watery) or
too dry (earthy) owing to inadequate or excessive concoction.28 If a
person’s intelligence depends on their capacity to draw universal
judgments, and those judgments are drawn from experience, which is based
on memories, then imperfect, imprecise, or inaccurate memories might
impede the intelligence of a person. And if women are more likely to have
imperfect sensations because their hearts are too moist, the likelihood that
their memories, experience, and intelligence might be affected is high.
One might object that Aristotle says (in a passage at History of Animals
9.1 608a19–b18, in which he lists the character traits of females that follow
from their physiology) that females are more retentive of memory
(μνημονικώτερον at 608b13) than men, and hence that he cannot mean to
say that women have imperfect retention of impressions, as suggested by
the analogy with wet walls. But at On Memory 1 449b6–9 he says that “men
who have good memories are not the same as those who are good at
recollecting, in fact generally speaking the slow-witted (οἱ βραδεῖς) have
better memories, but the quick-witted and those who learn easily are better
at recollecting,” which, while it does not directly address the question of
how one might be retentive of memory while having imprecise or
inaccurate impressions, does suggest that women might be retentive of
memory while being “slow-witted” (Mem. 1 449 b6–9, 450b10) and poor at
recollecting, which would suggest that they have some cognitive
impairment associated with memory.29
Aristotle draws a distinction between two kinds of imaginative capacity
that has some bearing on this account of the path from sensation to memory,
experience, and universal judgment, and illuminates the distinction between
a wider and a narrower sense of phronͅêsis and intelligence. In De anima
Aristotle suggests that we may consider imagination as a kind of thinking:
In any case, these two appear to initiate motion: desire (ὄρεξις) and reason (νοῦς)—if one were
to posit imagination as a sort of reasoning (ὡς νόησίν τινα). For many follow imaginings
contrary to knowledge (ἐπιστήμην), and in the other animals there is neither reasoning (νόησις)
nor calculating (λογισμός), though there is imagination. (DA 3.10 433a9–13)
This suggests that animals do have a “sort of reasoning” insofar as they

have imagination. Aristotle goes on to distinguish two kinds of imagination,
rational (λογιστικὴ; also called “calculative”) and perceptual (αἰσθητική;
also called “sensitive”), and to say that the latter belongs to all animals (DA
3.10 433b27–30). If all animals have “a sort of reasoning” by virtue of
having perceptual imagination, then even this more primitive form of
imagination is like a kind of thinking. This may be why Aristotle does not
say that animals are completely without experience, but that they have little
of it. The point is clearer if we look more closely at the distinction: the
perceptual imagination is an ability to represent what is desirable through
sensation alone, while the rational imagination is an ability to represent the
desirable through thought as well as sensation.30 The point is made when
Aristotle discusses the movement of animals. In the De anima he says:
In general, as has been said, insofar as an animal is capable of desire, it is, in virtue of this,
capable of moving itself; but it is not capable of desire without imagination. And all imagination
is either rational (λογιστικὴ) or perceptual (αἰσθητική). And in this latter, then, the other animals
have a share as well. (DA 3.10 433b27–30)31
We know that animals have imagination—some capacity to represent things

to themselves—because they are able to move in response to appetites,
desires for pleasure or to avoid pain, and those appetites are impossible
without some imaginative capacity. Moreover, at De motu animalium 7
701a34–36, Aristotle says that “the proximate reason for movement is
desire, and this comes to be either through sense-perception or through
imagination and thought (νοήσεως).” So some basic forms of appetite may
arise directly from sensation, but others will emerge from imagination
(through the formation of memory and experience) and ultimately the
formulation of universal judgments.
But these universal judgments are peculiar to human beings, who
possess the rational imagination. The difference between animal
intelligence and human intelligence will hinge on the difference between
being able to represent to oneself what is desirable strictly through
sensation—what is pleasant or painful—and being able to represent what is
desirable through thought as well as sensation, which will involve more
complex normative evaluations. That is, animals have no capacity to
understand something as desirable except insofar as it is pleasant, whereas
human beings are able to understand some things as desirable because just,
or advantageous, or beneficial. Further evidence that the capacity to
represent what is desirable in the sense of just is distinctive of people is
found in the Politics 1.2, when Aristotle argues that people are the most
political of animals (allowing that many species will be political) because
they have speech, the function of which is to allow them to express “the
advantageous and the harmful (τὸ συμφέρον καὶ τὸ βλαβερόν), and hence
also the just and the unjust,” unlike other animals, who are able to signal
only “the painful or pleasant” (Pol. 1.2 1253a9–15): “For it is peculiar to
man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception
(αἴσθησιν) of good and bad and just and unjust and the other things of this
sort” (Pol. 1.2 1253a15–19). People do not literally perceive the good and
the bad, the just and the unjust; but they have rational imagination, which
allows them to represent to one another not only what is pleasant and
unpleasant, but also what is just and unjust.
If the deliberative incapacity of women is to be traced back to impaired
sensation because of their cooler blood, then the impact of imperfect
perceptions will have to percolate up through memory and experience to the
universal judgments that are expressions of moral claims. In other words, a
woman’s rational imagination and not just her perceptual imagination will
have to be affected by the imperfect perceptions that are due to her
physiological character. There is still vagueness in some of the transitions
of this account, especially in the impact of perceptual imagination on
rational imagination. If, nonetheless, we suppose that women have an
imperfect capacity to perceive and report the just and the unjust, this will be
the content of the claim that women cannot have phronêsis as men do—and
are less intelligent in that sense.32
4.2.5 Imperfect memory and the lack of deliberative authority

The question is whether this sense of “less intelligent” maps onto the
deficiency of the deliberative faculty in women that Aristotle characterizes
as a lack of authority. The match does not seem to be perfect. If the
deficiency of the perceptual imagination affects the rational imagination, it
should do so by transmitting imprecision to the perceptions of justice and
injustice, and hence to the universal judgments about moral and political
matters. If that imprecision is severe, then it should be an obstacle to
practical deliberation, and not only to decision-making. And if that were the
case, then we would expect women to be poor at deliberation—to be
inadequate not only to decide moral and political questions, but even to
deliberate about them. Yet, as we saw in chapter 3, section 3.4.2, in
claiming that women should be ruled constitutionally as well as
aristocratically, Aristotle has indicated he does not believe women have a
comprehensive defect of the deliberative faculty. If, alternatively, we
suppose that the imprecision from which women’s universal judgments
suffer is not severe, then we might think they are able to deliberate
practically, but not to decide with authority—but it is difficult to see how
the defect could be severe enough to prevent women from making
decisions, without being severe enough to hamper their deliberative
capacity significantly. Understanding the defect that prevents women from
assuming deliberative authority as intellectual also introduces a problem for
Aristotle’s distinction between natural slaves and women. If Aristotle
attributes to women a failure not only of decision-making abilities, but also
of deliberative abilities, then the distinction he draws between women and
natural slaves would seem to be one of degree, rather than one of kind, and
that is not the position he takes, as we have seen, in Politics 1.13. I will
return to the distinction between free women and slaves in section 4.4.
One path, then, through which the physiological features that Aristotle
describes as characteristic of the female might produce the limited capacity
for practical reason that he assigns to women moves from the relative
coldness of women’s blood to its insensibility, from compromised sensation
to imperfect memories, and from there to limited experience and an
incapacity to draw universal judgments. We have seen that this path has
gaps, and that if we were to follow it we would have to attribute to women a
failure of the deliberative faculty that would be more general than the lack
of authority that he in fact cites as the defect of their bouleutikon. So it
seems less than satisfactory as a way of explaining how Aristotle’s
understanding of physiological sexual difference might underpin
differences in political capacity.
4.3 The second path: heat, thumos, and rule

4.3.1 Introduction
A second path to connect the physiological character of women with their
purported political incapacity can be traced from the coldness of their
bodies through a lesser degree of thumos to an impaired capacity for
decision-making. In this section, I explore that path through an analysis of
thumos as a physical, psychological, and political phenomenon. The term
θύμος, transliterated as thumos, has no equivalent in English that is accurate
in every context. It is often translated as “spirit” or “spiritedness” (and so a
person with thumos is “spirited”) sometimes as “anger” (with the adjective
“choleric”) or “vengefulness,” and contrasted with “softness” or
“mildness.” It is also, as we will see, associated with courage. Aristotle
treats it as a non-intellectual character trait with both positive and negative
associations, rooted in physiology but not solely physiological. In what
follows I generally leave thumos untranslated.
In the passage at Parts of Animals 2.2 648a2–14, cited in section 4.2, we
have seen that hotter, thinner, purer blood is associated with the male, and
with greater intelligence. In the same passage Aristotle also makes a claim
about the same qualities of blood and “manliness” or courage: “Those with
hot, thin, and pure blood are best; for such animals are at once in a good
state relative to both manliness (ἀνδρείαν) and intelligence (φρόνησιν)” (PA
2.2 648a9–11). The word ἀνδρείαν, translated here (in its most literal sense)
as “manliness,” also can refer to courage and to physical strength, two traits
associated with men and masculinity. So there is some reason to believe that
Aristotle thinks that the physiology of the human male renders him not only
superior in the intellectual virtue of phronêsis, the excellence of the
deliberative faculty, but also morally superior in that he possesses a stronger
disposition to courage. This is significant when we recall that in chapter 3
we saw that the distinction between the natural ruler and the natural subject
is on Aristotle’s account not simply a difference in expertise or knowledge,
but a moral difference. In this section I explore the relation of heat and
thumos to courage and the capacity for rule as a second way of explaining
how the higher degree of heat in the male body might make men more
politically capable than women on Aristotle’s account. We will see that the
physiology best suited for rule will be hot but not too hot, thumotic but not
too thumotic, with blood that is pure rather than fibrous.
4.3.2 Thumos as physical

To see how Aristotle’s understanding of thumos might explain a
physiological basis for political sexual differences, we need to assess it as a
physical phenomenon. The concept of thumos is not Aristotle’s invention
but can be traced back through Plato to Homer.33 As Aristotle conceives of
it, it is a pathos or affect that is common to body and soul (along with its
opposite, gentleness [πραότης], and fear, pity, courage, joy, loving and
hating, because “at the same time as these, the body is affected in some
way”) (DA 1.1 403a16–19, 403b18). It is not peculiarly human, because it
is shared (along with ἐπιθυμία and ὄρεξις, perception and memory, and
pleasure and pain) by many animals (Sens. 1.436a6–9). Nor is it a
phenomenon restricted to maturity, since children may experience it even
before they can employ reasoning (Pol. 7.15 1334b22).
The distinctive physical feature of thumos is that it produces and
preserves heat. The most pertinent passage is in Book 2 of the Parts of
Animals, in which Aristotle asserts that thumos produces heat and associates
a thumotic nature with blood that has “thick and abundant fibres,” which
serve to preserve the heat that is produced by thumos:
However, those [animals] with excessively fibrous, thick blood are more earthen (γεωδέστερα)
in nature, and both thumotic in character and excitable because of their thumos (θυμώδη τὸ ἦθος
καὶ ἐκστατικὰ διὰ τὸν θυμόν). For thumos is productive of heat, and solids that have been heated
give off more heat than liquids; and the fibres are solid and earthen, so that they become like
sparks in the blood, and produce a boiling in thumotic animals. That is why bulls and boars are
thumotic and excitable; their blood is most fibrous. (PA 2.4 650b33–651a5)34
It is clear, then, that thumos is “productive of heat” and that this heat affects
the blood in particular. Moreover, heat seems to produce or at least to retain
thumos, since animals with fibrous blood that retains heat are more
thumotic. So the second path that might trace the foundation of political
sexual differences to physiological differences, like the first, depends on a
claim about the effect of heat on blood. On this account, thick and abundant
fibers in the blood make it less pure and give the animal an “earthen” nature
and a “thumotic”—that is, choleric—temperament. This is because thumos
produces heat, which warms the blood, and when the fibers in the blood are
particularly thick and abundant, they retain that heat, causing the blood to
boil and sustaining the thumos.35 So although every animal will experience
thumos, the animal species that we identify as choleric in character are
those in which the same degree of thumos and its accompanying heat
produce stronger, more persistent effects, which manifest as a thumotic
temperament. So the difference between more and less thumotic species is
not only in the original quantity or degree of thumos, but also in the bodily
response to that thumos as determined by the physical constitution of the
blood.36 This is confirmed by a passage at Generation of Animals 3.1
749b30–35, where Aristotle says that “low-bred birds are more prolific than
high-bred ones (αἱ ἀγεννεῖς τῶν γενναίων πολυτοκώτερα), because their
bodies are more fluid and more bulky, whereas those of the high-bred are
leaner and drier, this being the kind of body in which a thoroughbred and
high-spirited temper (ὁ γὰρ θυμὸς ὁ γενναῖος) tends rather to make its
appearance.” As we have seen, in other contexts a lean and dry body is
caused by a higher degree of heat. The remark points to a correlation
between a leaner and drier body and a thumotic disposition but does not
make clear which produces the other. Interpreting the claim in light of the
Parts of Animals passage quoted earlier, however, suggests that the leaner
and drier bodies will be either those that produce more heat in the first
instance, or those with more fibrous (thicker, less watery) blood, which will
exaggerate the effects of heat produced by thumos and then—since thumos
itself is retained, produced or increased by heat—will generate further
thumotic outbursts (both explanations might hold). So it is not that the
experience of thumos makes the body leaner or drier or the blood thicker,
but rather that animals with these sorts of bodies will have a propensity to
exaggerate and reproduce the effects of thumos. These passages make clear
that thumos is not unqualifiedly good: it is good, as we have seen, to have
hot, pure, thin blood and a moderate degree of thumos, but certain species,
and certain individuals, have the sort of blood (fibrous and impure) that
increases the effects of thumos, such that the animal becomes choleric or
irascible and impulsive rather than deliberative.
Therefore, because thumos is a bodily phenomenon associated with
higher degrees of heat, and because male bodies are hotter, we should
expect to find that males are more thumotic than females of the same
species. As a general rule, this is the case, as Aristotle says in a passage
mentioned earlier at History of Animals 9.1 608a19–b18 (noting, as
exceptions, that the female bear and leopard are said to be more thumotic
than the male; see also HA 9.1 608a33–34).
This much, then, is clear: thumos produces heat and heat amplifies
thumos, males are hotter and therefore more thumotic than females, and in
species with more fibrous blood the effects of thumos (anger and
impulsiveness) will be magnified. Members of species that are excessively
hot or have fibrous blood will be excessively thumotic, and choleric,
particularly if they are male. Members of species that are excessively cold,
and the female sex generally, will have too little thumos, with the result that
they are querulous and timid. Male human beings, since they have blood
that is hot and pure (in the sense of non-fibrous), will have the best
physiology: their blood will be hot but easily cooled, and thus they will be
by nature spirited but not choleric, courageous but not reckless. Hot blood
will make one thumotic, but hot, fibrous blood will make one overly
thumotic. Men can be more thumotic than women even though women have
more fibrous blood, because the blood of men is hotter; men can be
appropriately and not excessively thumotic because their blood, although
hot, is not fibrous. (This will be true, at least, of Greek men, since the
climate in other regions will, on Aristotle’s account, have an effect on the
blood and hence on the degree of thumos manifested in the population; see
Pol. 7.7 1327b18–38, discussed in section 4.3.4.37)
4.3.3 Thumos as psychological

Because thumos is not only a physiological but also a psychological
phenomenon, the different degrees of thumos corresponding to different
degrees of heat in male and female bodies will result in psychological
sexual differences. And because on Aristotle’s account thumos is first and
foremost a kind of desire, these differences appear in the operations of
desire, or in imagination—the faculty with which we represent to ourselves
what is desirable. The aim of this section is to show how the heat that
thumos transmits to the blood manifests itself ultimately in phenomena that
are psychological rather than physical: desire, affect, virtue and vice, and,
ultimately, rational capacities for decision-making and rule.
4.3.3.1 Thumos is a desire

At De anima 2.3 414b1–2, Aristotle says that “desire (ὄρεξις) is appetite
(ἐπιθυμία), spirit (θυμὸς), and wish (βούλησις).”38 These kinds of desire are
distinguished according to their objects. It is clear that appetite is a desire
for “what is pleasant and what brings pain” (EN 3.2 1111b17), and that wish
is a rational desire for the good or the apparent good (EN 3.4 1113a15–
16).39 It is less clear what the object of thumos is. In a passage at De anima
1.1 403a26–b1, where Aristotle seems to identify thumos with anger (ὀργή),
he defines the latter as a desire for revenge or something similar (ὄρεξιν
ἀντιλυπήσεως ἤ τι τοιοῦτον [403a31–b1]); that is consistent with his usage
elsewhere, but it may be too narrow an understanding of the object of
thumos. Although he often suggests that thumos causes pain, he also says
that its satisfaction may also cause pleasure. Aristotle’s division of things
that produce pleasure into those that are necessary and those that are not
necessary but “desirable in themselves” (at EN 7.4 1147b24–31) identifies
the bodily causes of pleasure as “necessary,” while those that are desirable
in themselves are “winning, honour, wealth, and other such things that are
good and pleasant.” Victory and honor are often represented by Aristotle as
objects of thumotic desire; hence, the objects of thumos are desirable in
themselves (although not perhaps in every instance and degree).40
Aristotle aligns thumos more closely with appetite than with wish, since
it belongs to the non-rational part of the soul. The evidence for this is
manifold. First, non-rational beings have both appetite and thumos. Many
animal species share in thumos; since animals have no rational faculty,
thumos must be attributed to the non-rational part of the soul (EN 3.1
1111b2–4). And children have thumos along with appetite (ἐπιθυμία) from
the moment they are born, although reasoning (λογισμὸς) and intelligence
(νοῦς) emerge in them only as they grow older (Pol. 7.15 1334b22–23).41
Second, Aristotle characterizes thumos together with eros as an irrational
affect (πάθος ἀλόγιστον), remarking that both eros and thumos make one
more daring and willing to endure danger (EE 3.1 1229a21–8). He adds that
thumos “can make you abandon your senses (ἐκστατικὸν γὰρ ὁ θυμός)” (EE
3.1 1229a25), a claim often made about the effect of eros on a person and
associated with the irrational in the sense of madness. The same
phenomenon can be observed in thumotic animals: “That is why wild boars
seem courageous though they are not really so. They are like that when they
abandon their senses (ἐκστῶσι), and in any event are volatile, like the
reckless” (EE 3.1 1229a26–28; see also the passage at PA 2.4 651a1–5,
where Aristotle says that bulls and boars are thumotic and liable to be
“excitable”—ἐκστατικοί). Third, the discussion of the voluntary emphasizes
that thumotic desires are non-rational. At Eudemian Ethics 2.7 1223b5–30
Aristotle says that the voluntary is what is in accord with one’s wishes (i.e.,
one’s rational desires) rather than what is in accord with the non-rational
desires of appetite or thumos: “The fact that we do many things voluntarily
in the absence of anger and appetite is evidence for this (πολλὰ γὰρ
πράττομεν ἑκόντες ἄνευ ὀργῆς καὶ ἐπιθυμίας)” (EE 2.7 1223b28–30).
Finally, and most strikingly, at Politics 3.16 1287a29–34, Aristotle not only
associates thumos with appetite, but seems to fault thumos as much as
appetite for perverting justice and misleading rulers: “One who asks law to
rule, therefore, seems to be asking god and intellect alone to rule, while one
who asks man adds the beast. Appetite is a thing of this sort; and thumos
perverts rulers and the best men. Hence law is intellect without desire.” If
thumos perverts rulers, it is because it is non-rational, leading them in some
instances away from the desire for the collective good.
At the same time, thumos is a desire that is, at least sometimes,
susceptible to reason, and should be subjected to it. In the Nicomachean
Ethics Aristotle says:
One’s thumos in such cases seems to hear what reason says, but to mishear it, like hasty servants
who run out of the room before they have heard everything being said to them and then fail to
carry out the instruction, and as dogs bark just at a sound, before discovering if it’s a friend
who’s there; just so a hot and quick nature means that thumos hears—but does not hear the
order, before rushing to take vengeance. (EN 7.6 1149a24–31)42
The “hot and quick nature” of thumos is the physiological character that we
have seen attributed to it, here associated with desire. So thumos as a desire
should listen to reason but cannot be relied on to do so.43
Are there sexual differences in thumotic desires? We would expect the
different degrees of thumos in male and female to produce differences in
their desires. In the passage at History of Animals 9.1 608a19–b18
(mentioned earlier), in which Aristotle says that males are generally more
thumotic than females, he associates the differences in the degree of thumos
in the sexes with a number of other sexual differences: the female is less
courageous or spirited (ἀθυμότερα), “softer” (μαλακός), and “more
attentive to the feeding of the young,” as well as “more vicious, less simple,
more impetuous” (κακουργότερα καὶ ἧττον ἁπλᾶ καὶ προπετέστερα). In
human beings these sexual differences are “complete” or “perfect”: women
are “more compassionate . . . more given to tears . . . more jealous and
complaining and more apt to scold and fight . . . more dispirited and
despondent . . . more shameless and lying, . . . longer of memory
(μνημονικώτερον) . . . more wakeful, more afraid of action, and in general .
. . less inclined to move than the male”; furthermore, they take “less
nourishment.” Males, by contrast, are not only more thumotic and hence
courageous, but also “wilder [or more savage], simpler, less cunning”
(ἀγριώτερα καὶ ἁπλούστερα καὶ ἧττον ἐπίβουλα). At the same time, the
female is “more receptive of handling, and readier to learn” (προσίεται τὰς
χεῖρας μᾶλλον, καὶ μαθηματικώτερον). The degree of thumos in male and
female bodies may explain some of these attributes. It is likely to explain
the “softness” of women since, if the ordering of these attributes should
guide us, thumos or spiritedness is contrasted here with softness. Softness is
a moral state that resembles akrasia, except that it focuses on painful rather
than pleasurable objects; the akratic person has difficulty maintaining their
decisions because of the appeal of pleasures (typically, bodily pleasures),
while the soft person has difficulty maintaining their decisions because of
the fear of bodily pains (EN 7.7 1150a9–15).
At Nicomachean Ethics 3.7 1116a10–15 Aristotle confirms the contrast
between the thumotic and the soft person, asserting that courage (which is
linked to thumos, as we will see) “endures things” while “it is softness
(μαλακία) to fly from what is troublesome.” And at 7.7 1150a32–b16 he
says that the female is distinguished from the male by softness (μαλακία).
So it would seem that men, because they are more thumotic, are better able
to endure difficult things, and women, because they are less thumotic, are
more inclined to avoid what is difficult. The context of Nicomachean Ethics
7.7 is one in which it is clear that this entails different desires: in particular,
desires to endure or to resist will be characteristic of men, and desires to
flee or to submit will be characteristic of women. Aristotle spells out the
notion of moral softness in terms of one’s susceptibility to pleasure and pain
(EN 7.4 1147b21–23), and he later suggests that women, because of their
soft character, are likely to succumb to what most men can resist (EN 7.7
115032–b16).
This may appear to be a criticism of women’s moral character, and in
particular an accusation of akrasia. In calling women “soft” Aristotle
meant, on one interpretation, that women are less able to govern their
desires to pursue pleasure and avoid pain through rational judgment (this is
how many commentators have construed the claim that women’s
deliberative faculty is less authoritative than men’s, as we saw in chapter 3,
section 3.4.1).44 There was certainly historical precedent for such a view.
As we saw in chapter 1, the idea that women were less well able than men
to control their appetites was a view widely held by Aristotle’s
predecessors. But, as we have seen, at Nicomachean Ethics 7.7 1150a9–15
Aristotle distinguishes softness from akrasia. Moreover, at 7.7 1150a32–
b16 he is not criticizing women for their softness; he is criticizing men who
are softer than they should be as men. A woman who is softer in character
than a man is not to be subjected to moral criticism; she should only be
blamed if she is softer than a virtuous woman should be. Since Aristotle is
clear that women are capable of virtue, although it is different in kind than
the virtue of men, in calling women softer than men he is not saying that
women as a sex are akratic. If they were, they could not be virtuous. My
suggestion is that Aristotle construes the softness of a woman’s character,
her disposition to submit rather than to resist, as part of her virtue. It both
makes her someone who should be ruled over by someone with more
thumos and makes her good at being ruled over.
4.3.3.2 Thumos is affect

Thumos is then both a physiological state and a kind of desire, more
common and stronger in those with warmer bodies and more fibrous blood.
Because men are hotter than women, they are also more thumotic by nature
(HA 9.1 608a33–34). This will mean that men will have stronger desires for
revenge, honor, victory, and wealth, understood as non-rational desires that
should be controlled by rational judgments of the good. It also means that
men and women will differ in their dispositions to certain kinds of affect,
since Aristotle treats thumos as a pathos and associates it most closely with
anger and affection. Thumos is a desire that springs from these emotions.
The association with anger is especially strong. Aristotle describes
thumos as a feeling of pain and anger, and the desire for revenge as an
attempt to soothe that pain and dissipate the anger:
We must also understand mildness (πραότητος) and fierceness (χαλεπότητος) along the same
lines, since we see that the mild-mannered person is related to the pain that arises from
spiritedness, by being disposed to it in a certain way. We outlined, and contrasted with the
irascible (τῷ ὀργίλῳ) and fierce (χαλεπῷ) and savage (ἀγρίῳ) (all of these sorts belong to the
same disposition), the servile and meek (τὸν ἀνδραποδώδη καὶ τὸν ἀνόργητον). These are pretty
much the names given to those who fail to rouse their thumos even against the things that one
ought to, but are easily trampled on and abject in the face of insults. In experiencing the pain
that we call “thumos,” the slow is contrary to the quick, the intense to the slight, and the short-
lived to the long-lived. (EE 3.3 1231b5–16)
Anger is not then simply identical with thumos (although thumos is

sometimes appropriately translated as “anger”). Rather, we can infer that
anger is a certain attitude both to thumos as a desire (since mildness or
gentleness, the contrary of anger, is characterized as such an attitude) and to
what moves one to thumotic desires (since the servile are those who are not
moved to thumos even when they ought to be). A person with a thumotic
disposition is quick to grow angry in the face of insults and demonstrations
of contempt, whereas a less thumotic disposition is less inclined to anger
and to the pursuit of revenge. If thumos is a desire for honor and victory, it
is a desire most likely to arise when honor and victory threaten to be denied,
by insults or slights, and thus it is associated with the feeling of anger and a
positive attitude to the desire for vengeance and self-assertion.
Aristotle claims that this feeling is most easily aroused by friends, by
those to whom we are bound by philia. That is, we are even more likely to
be aroused to thumos and anger should we feel insulted by a friend than by
someone unknown to us (Pol. 7.7 1327b38–1328a16). In this same passage,
however, Aristotle also says that “it is thumos that creates affectionateness;
for this is the capacity of soul by which we feel affection” (Pol. 7.7
1327b38–39). So affection, as well as anger, has its source in thumos,
though neither emotion is simply identical with thumos.45 We are more
likely to feel both affection and anger toward our friends. This point should
be interpreted in light of Aristotle’s account of friendship and of political
communities as koinôniai. If virtuous people consider their friends to be
other selves, and virtuous citizens consider one another to be equals, then
insults offered to or by our friends and our fellow citizens will be felt more
acutely than insults offered by—or to—those outside our affections. A
desire for honor or victory is felt not only as an individual but also within a
set of friends, and a political community. Military training will also
contribute to encouraging and shaping thumotic desires in men, by
cultivating esprit du corps and at the same time desires for revenge. The
political status of someone, their standing as a citizen and a participant in
public affairs, will also then affect their degree of thumos. Women, as
citizens who lack the right to hold office or lead a public life and who are
by nature confined to the household, would not develop the same bonds of
affection with other citizens.
There are then two reasons that men are more thumotic than women.
The first is that men’s bodies are hotter, which suggests that their (more
frequent, stronger) thumotic desires make their blood hotter. Because the
blood of men is pure, and not earthy, the effects of thumos are not
exaggerated, and human beings as a species have an appropriate but not
excessive degree of thumos (unlike those species with thick and abundant
fibers in the blood, who suffer from excessive thumos). Women, because
they are colder by nature, are also less thumotic, and in fact are
inadequately thumotic—tending toward the servile or slavish.46 But it is
also true that the political circumstances in which men lead their lives, in
public, forging friendships with fellow citizens, give rise to occasions for
thumotic desires, both affectionate and angry. Because thumos is a desire
for honor and victory, and manifests itself in anger and affection, it is a
social phenomenon. So both the physiology of men and their political
activities lead them to be more thumotic than women.
4.3.3.3 Thumos and virtue

As we have seen, it is possible for a species, a people, or an individual to be
either excessively or insufficiently thumotic. Aristotle’s emphasis on
thumos as a non-rational desire, and on the importance of subjecting
thumotic impulses to rational control, makes clear that thumos is not a good
without qualification or measure. The degree of thumos will be affected by
physiological and climatic factors: blood that is too thin and cold may yield
an insufficient degree, while blood that is too fibrous and hot may yield
uncontrolled or excessive thumos. But thumos is also affected by moral
factors: it may, in the virtuous person, be put to good purpose, but in a
person without virtue it may overcome reason and divert one from correct
decision. Of all blooded animals, human Greek males have by nature the
optimal degree of thumos, and men are best when they have that thumos
under the control of reason. We might ask why it is better to have the degree
of thumos that is characteristic of men, rather than the lower degree
attributed to women. The short answer is that the optimal degree of thumos
will be one that allows a person fully to develop the human virtues, and that
is the degree of thumos that men have. As we will see, thumos is closely
associated with a number of virtues, although the relation between thumos
and virtue is complex.
Aristotle’s treatment of temperance and intemperance, continence and
incontinence, reveals his ambivalence toward the moral value of thumos. At
Nicomachean Ethics 7.5 1149a2–5 and 7.6 1149b14–26, he considers the
question of whether we should speak of incontinence with respect to
thumos. He acknowledges that it is a widely held view that one might lack
self-control with respect to thumos (as at EN 7.1 1145b19–20), and that this
would resemble a vice. While his conclusion is that incontinence in the
unqualified sense is a condition concerned only with appetites, he
acknowledges that one might be said to be incontinent with the qualification
“in regard to thumos, honour, and profit as well (ἔτι ἀκρατεῖς λέγονται καὶ
θυμοῦ καὶ τιμῆς καὶ κέρδους)” (EN 7.1 1145b19–20). So thumos, when
excessive, might resist the control of reason and should then be subdued.
This ambivalence also appears in Aristotle’s discussion of the distinction
between thumos as a desire and appetitive desires. The implication of the
passage at Nicomachean Ethics 7.4 1148b2–13 is that thumos is more
natural and more friendly to reason than the appetites, because it is a desire
for honor which is “naturally desirable” whereas appetites for excessive
physical pleasure are not worthy of choice. This view is reiterated in the
Nicomachean Ethics, in a passage I cited earlier:
Appetite (ἡ ἐπιθυμία) only needs reason or perception to say “pleasant” for it to rush off to
enjoy it. So thumos follows reason in a way (ἀκολουθεῖ τῷ λόγῳ πως), but appetite does not. In
that case not being able to control it is the more shameful, in so far as the person behaving
uncontrolledly with regard to thumos is in a way giving in to appetite and not to reason. Again,
there is more sympathy for people who follow the natural desires, since there is, too, in the case
of the sorts of appetites that are common to everyone, and to the extent that they are so; and
thumos or irascibility is more natural than appetites for excess and appetites for unnecessary
things. (EN 7.6 1149a34–b8)
Aristotle, as we have seen, aligns thumos with appetite in that it is an

irrational desire; but in this passage he contrasts thumos with appetite,
claiming (1) that thumos is more natural in the sense that it is common to
“everyone,” unlike excessive appetites, and (2) that the man who acts on a
desire for honor or victory is “in a way giving in to reason,” unlike the man
who acts on a desire for bodily pleasure (EN 7.6 1149b1–4). Thumos is “in
a way” obedient to reason because when a person seems to exhibit a lack of
self-control with respect to thumos, it is because “reason, or sensory
appearances, indicate ‘unprovoked aggression’ or ‘insult,’ and thumos, as if
having reasoned it out (ὣσπερ συλλογισάμενος) that this sort of thing is
cause for going to war, moves into angry mode at once” (EN 7.6 1149a32–
34). The point is that thumos, unlike appetite, must interpret the information
provided by reason or imagination, although it is not always careful and so
is prone to misunderstanding the commands of reason.47 This is why it is a
more honorable impulse than the desire for pleasure, which arises directly
when reason or perception indicate that something is pleasant, without a
process of interpretation. Nonetheless, thumos may escape the constraint of
reason, and may be excessive or misdirected, just as it may be insufficient.
There is, however, a mean between excessive and insufficient thumos
that will dispose one to virtuous action. This is clear at Eudemian Ethics 2.5
1222a41–b4, where Aristotle speaks of an excess either of mildness (or
gentleness) or of anger as extremes between which the mean will lie. These
extremes he later characterizes as the fierce and the servile, where the mean
is mildness, a state in which one “neither [gets] angry with those with
whom one ought not to, nor [fails] to get angry with those with whom one
ought” (EE 3.3 1231b24–25); he says that “the mild-mannered person is
related to the pain that arises from spiritedness, by being disposed to it in a
certain way” (EE 3.3 1231b6–7). The virtue of “mildness,” then, is a
disposition to adopt the correct attitude toward the pain associated with
thumos and anger. Two other virtues are associated with an appropriate
degree of thumos, and, because they are among the virtues that Aristotle
believes are important in the public life of the polis, they are especially
masculine virtues. The first is courage, which, as we have seen, Aristotle
attributes to men more than women:
In all kinds in which there are the female and the male, nature has established much the same
difference in the character of the females as compared with that of the males. But it is most
evident in the case of humans. . . . All females are less spirited than the males. . . . The male . . .
as we have said, is a readier ally (βοηθητικώτερον) and is more courageous (ἀνδρειότερον) than
the female. (HA 9.1 608a33–b18)
Aristotle here correlates being spirited with being courageous: the female of
a species is generally less spirited than the male, and the male is “more
courageous,” as he had said earlier, that is, when males were identified as
more spirited. Aristotle acknowledges that the expression of thumos often
resembles courage, and indeed is taken to be courage: “People also count
thumos as courage (τὸν θυμὸν δ᾿ ἐπὶ τὴν ἀνδρείαν ἀναφέρουσιν); for the
courageous are thought also to include people who act through thumos . . .
because courageous people are too thumotic; for thumos especially strains
to go out and meet dangers” (EN 3.8 1116b24–27).
The resemblance between thumotic and courageous actions is close
enough that Aristotle makes some effort to distinguish them. The
fundamental points of distinction concern the sources and the aims of these
actions: courageous actions emanate from a process of deliberation and aim
at the good, whereas thumotic actions are impulsive and aim not at the good
as such, but at something like honor. At the same time, courageous actions
have their origin in thumos. Courageous people are aided by thumos,
although it is not their sole or even primary source of motivation, so
Aristotle concedes that “the ‘courage’ that comes about through thumos
does seem . . . to be courage once the factors of decision and the end for the
sake of which have been added” (EN 3.8 1117a4–8). “Decision” here
implies deliberation, and the aim in question is the good. In other words, an
action that is motivated by a desire for honor or victory may be a
courageous action, but only if it is undertaken after reasoned deliberation
and decision (rather than on thumotic impulse alone), and with the aim of
achieving honor or victory, because they are the good. By contrast, an
action that is strictly thumotic is not the result of deliberation (EN 5.8
1135b26–27), and is undertaken with the sole aim of preserving the honor
of the agent, whether or not that aim is coincident with the good. Such
actions might well resemble courageous actions, but are to be distinguished
since courageous actions will be “because of the fine” even if aided by
thumotic impulse, rather than undertaken because of “distress and temper”
(EN 3.8 1116b29–34). Although thumos is not, then, identical with courage,
Aristotle does emphasize the importance of thumos for courage and more
generally for the development of human excellence. At Politics 7.7
1327b36–39 he says that “those who are to be readily guided to virtue by
the legislator should be both endowed with thought [διανοητικούς] and
spirited [θυμοειδεῖς] in their nature.” All of this suggests that thumos is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for courage. Men, who have the
appropriate degree of thumos, will be better disposed to acquire the virtue
of courage, whereas women, with an insufficient degree, will be unable to
develop (masculine) courage.
The second virtue associated with thumos is justice. The connection is
more oblique than in the case of courage, stemming from the notion of
thumos as a desire for revenge in response to some insult or wrong, with the
accompanying expression of anger or outrage. Aristotle distinguishes
uncontrolled thumos from uncontrolled appetite on the ground that
impulsive thumos is guileless and open, whereas uncontrolled appetite is
stealthy and deceptive (EN 7.6 1149b13–26). He concludes that when we
fail to check our thumos we are less unjust than when we fail to control our
appetites. This is presumably because challenging insults or wrongdoing, as
thumos does, is more honorable than pursuing pleasure, as appetite does,
and while a thumotic impulse may be hasty or mistaken, it moves us to act
in principle in pursuit of justice. Aristotle thinks that this is evidence of the
lack of guile in the case of thumotic acts in that they are an unstudied
response to acts of injustice. Moreover, he takes the responsibility for
uncontrolled thumos to lie with the person who provokes thumos in another
(by acting unjustly in some way, at least apparently), and not with the
person who suffers from thumos (EN 5.8 1135b26)—whereas he does not
assign the responsibility for appetite to the object that arouses appetite. That
is, he seems to blame not the person who experiences excessive thumos so
much as the person whose words or actions instigate it, suggesting that it is
not absolutely wrong to suffer from excessive or mistaken thumos, although
it would be to suffer from excessive or mistaken appetites.
Because of the close alignment of justice with friendship, this
association of thumos with justice suggests again a link between thumos and
friendship. As we saw in the passage at History of Animals 9.1 608a33–b18,
men are not only more courageous than women, but also more
“sympathetic,” because they are more thumotic. An appropriately thumotic
character will have certain affective dispositions: it will not only be
disposed to the correct degree of anger appropriate to the circumstance, but
will also be inclined to affection and the desire to help that founds
friendships. Aristotle compares justice with friendship and comes close to
identifying them when he says that if one has friendship one does not need
justice in addition (EN 8.1 1155a27–29). As we have seen, he also asserts
that thumos is the foundation of friendship (Pol. 7.7 1327b36-1328a16),
insofar as it is the source of feelings of affection as well as feelings of
anger. If thumos is the source of affection, and affection is the bond of
friendship, and if friendship is a form of justice, then we can draw certain
parallels between the affective character of thumos and its justice-seeking
impulse. Although, then, thumos is not good without qualification, as the
source of affection and courage and as an impulse to honor and justice, it
has moral value.
4.3.4 Thumos and rule

So far I have considered the relation between thumos and the moral virtues,
but there is some reason to believe that thumos is also beneficial in
developing the intellectual virtues associated with practical reason and
political rule in particular. All of the virtues (mildness, justice, and
friendship) with which thumos is associated have a political significance,
and the ambivalence Aristotle expresses about thumos in its relation to
virtue is evident also in the political context. In a passage we have already
considered, at Politics 7.7 1327b36-1328a16, Aristotle suggests that those
who are thumotic in temperament (but not excessively thumotic) are best
suited for political rule. The benefits of thumos for political rule are
apparent from its effects: it is the source both of affection (associated with
justice, friendship, and political unity) and of anger (associated with
courage and civic defense). The thumotic person will thus be likely to form
strong bonds of affection with his fellow citizens, bonds that are vital if
faction is to be avoided, and he will be capable of ferocity “toward those
behaving unjustly” and so prepared to defend his city (Pol. 7.7 1328a8–9)
against both internal conflict and attack from external forces.
Aristotle mentions an additional effect of the thumotic temperament that
benefits political life:
Both the element of ruling [τὸ ἄρχον] and the element of freedom [τὸ ἐλεύθερον] stem from this
capacity [i.e., thumos] for everyone: spiritedness [θύμος] is a thing expert at ruling [ἀρχικὸν]
and indomitable [ἀήττητον]. (Pol. 7.7 1328a5–7)
This is a fundamental passage for understanding the difference between the

sexes with respect to thumos as politically significant. Thumos is the source
not only of feelings of affection and of courage, but also of a capacity for
rule, which Aristotle associates here with freedom. This is because to have
a capacity for rule, as we saw earlier, is to be capable of decision, to set the
ends of action for oneself and others, and in that sense to be the source or
origin of an action (see chapter 3, section 3.2.1). If thumos makes one
capable of decision, then it is necessary both for self-governance and for
rule over others. It is thus a condition of freedom and a requirement for
political office. This is why the thumotic person is contrasted with the
servile person, a contrast we saw also in the passage at Eudemian Ethics 3.3
1231b5–26, where Aristotle opposes “the thumotic, fierce, and savage”
with “the servile and meek.” In that passage both the thumotic and the
servile are extremes between which virtue lies, but it is clear that it is worse
to be servile than to be thumotic, so that those who are overly sensitive to
slights or contempt are better than those who “fail to rouse their spirit even
against the things that one ought to, but are easily trampled on and abject in
the face of insults” (EE 3.3 1231b11–13). To be servile is to abnegate self-
governance and accept the determinations or decisions of others for oneself.
This stems from Aristotle’s conception of the natural slave as one who is
altogether deprived of a deliberative faculty, and thus who is naturally
unfree because he or she is incapable of self-governance. As we saw in
chapter 3, section 3.3.2, this is consistent with claim that slaves are capable
of human virtue, but only insofar as they are able to borrow or make use of
the deliberative capacity of a free adult male.
Thumos as a source of the capacity to rule thus has some association
with a capacity for deliberation and decision, but the emphasis is more on
decision than on deliberation, and this helps to explain Aristotle’s
ambivalence toward thumos. In describing the character of people suited to
be citizens of the best city at Politics 7.7 1327b18–38, Aristotle claims that
the cold climate in Europe produces people who have spirit (θύμος) but lack
intelligence (διανοία) and skill (τέχνη); such people are free but deficient in
political organization (they are ἀπολίτευτα) and therefore are incapable of
rule over others. The hotter climate of Asia, by contrast, produces people
who lack thumos and tend to be subjected and enslaved. This is true despite
their intelligence (διανοητικὰ) and inventiveness (τεχνικὰ). People in
Greece, situated as it is between Europe and Asia, are “well blended” (εὖ
κέκραται) in character: both high-spirited and intelligent, and therefore free,
well governed, and capable of rule.48 In this passage “intelligence”
correlates with political organization and the capacity to rule over others,
and “spiritedness” correlates with freedom and a capacity for self-
governance (or freedom from imposed rule). The ethnographic point is that
“those who are to be readily guided to virtue by the legislator should be
both endowed with thought and spirited in their nature,” and so the
inhabitants of Greece are most suited to be the citizens of the best state.
Aristotle is clearly not suggesting that a people might have too much
intelligence, although they might have too little. The failing of the people of
Asia is not that they are too intelligent, but that they have too little thumos.
Nor is the failing of the Europeans that they have too much thumos as such,
but rather that their thumos is unconstrained by intelligence. So Aristotle
conceives of thumos as an impulse that might lead one astray at the same
time that it is fundamental to self-governance and rule over others. For
example, at Politics 3.16 1287a29–34, in the well-known passage
characterizing the law, Aristotle seems to fault thumos as well as appetite
for perverting justice and misleading rulers: “One who asks law to rule,
therefore, is held to be asking god and intellect alone to rule, while one who
asks man adds the beast. Appetite is a thing of this sort; and thumos perverts
(διαστρέφει) rulers and the best men.” So thumos is both characteristic of
the best character for a citizen, and yet a feature that may pervert even the
best men.
In the passage at Politics 7.7 1327b19–38 it is not so much the absence
of intelligence, as the absence of thumos, that makes one “slavish” or
subject (δουλεύοντος), but it is notable that an absence or low degree of
either thumos or intelligence will make one incapable of rule, whether over
oneself or over others. Aristotle believes that thumos is a necessary
condition for rule, but he insists that thumos alone is insufficient for rule, as
at Politics 3.16 1287a29–32 (cited earlier), where the point is not only that
thumos is distinct from intellect (νούς), but also that it has the power to
pervert the decisions of those who rule. We have seen that thumos is
intrinsically a desire for honor or victory, and that as such it reacts against
what appears unjust; but reason or intellect is crucial for allowing one to
determine correctly what is unjust or just, and thumos does not always listen
carefully to reason before moving one to act. Thumos is necessary for rule
because it makes one decisive and action-oriented, but when it fails to
attend to reason the decisions it takes and the actions that follow from them
will be mistaken. This is how thumos is capable of perverting rule. Thumos
is necessary to the citizen and to the political ruler because it gives rise to a
love of honor and a desire to defend that honor (understood both
individually and collectively), and also a capacity for action—both of which
are vital to political life. But if that love of honor, with its accompanying
affects, is allowed to govern without attending fully to deliberative reason,
then it is corrupting and will yield not decisions (in the strict sense in which
a decision is a choice that emerges from the process of deliberative reason),
but mere unthinking or half-thought-through impulses toward perceived
honor or victory. Although, then, the pursuit of honor is better than the
pursuit of wealth or pleasure, it is not simply equivalent to the pursuit of
virtue.
4.3.5 Thumos as the source of political sexual difference

It is possible, then, to trace a path from a higher degree of heat in the body
to a higher degree of thumos, and from there to certain psychological and
political differences between the sexes. As a species, human beings have a
high but not excessive degree of thumos (by contrast with those animal
kinds that have thick and abundant fibers in the blood and suffer from
excessive thumos), but there are also variations among peoples in different
regions, as we have seen. Women, because they are colder by nature, are
less thumotic, and in fact inadequately thumotic—tending toward the
servile. So while Greeks as a people are “well blended” with respect to
thumos and intelligence, and hence neither overly nor insufficiently
thumotic, free male Greeks will have the optimal blood for ensuring that
there is a high degree of thumos combined with a deliberative intelligence
capable of controlling thumotic impulses: they will be spirited but not
choleric, courageous but not reckless. Thumos, as we have seen, is not
responsible for greater intelligence—and is, in fact, sometimes in tension
with deliberative intelligence—but it is the source of a capacity to make
decisions and take action that Aristotle believes to be an important
qualification for political rule. Since, as we saw in chapter 3, Aristotle
attributes to women a deliberative faculty and seems to understand their
political incapacity to be restricted to an incapacity for decision-making,
and since thumos is one source of the capacity to rule, where that is a
capacity to determine the ends for oneself and others, the lower degree of
thumos he attributes to women might be responsible for the incapacity of
women to exercise deliberative authority.
One reason that Aristotle has to think that women should not rule is that
their physiology will not support the degree of thumos that is necessary for
courage and justice, as we have seen. But he has a second reason. The
political circumstances in which men lead their lives, in public, forging
friendships with fellow citizens, engaging in martial activities, give rise to
occasions for thumotic desires, both affectionate and angry, as we saw in
section 4.3.3.2. The point is not about convention. On Aristotle’s account, it
is not that women as a matter of fact do not participate in public life, but
rather that by nature they find their place within the household, as we saw
in chapter 3. Women then will not have the opportunity to establish the
bonds of affection with other citizens that are fundamental to political
participation. So both the physiology of men and their political activities as
people who by nature have a public role allow them to experience and to
manifest thumotic desires in ways that are integral to the activities of ruling.
The most important passage for understanding the role thumos plays in
excluding women from rule is one we have already seen in the Politics:
Both the element of ruling [τὸ ἄρχον] and the element of freedom [τὸ ἐλεύθερον] stem from this
capacity [i.e., thumos] for everyone: spiritedness is a thing expert at ruling [ἀρχικὸν] and
indomitable [ἀήττητον]. (Pol. 7.7 1328a5–7)
We have seen that both an appropriate degree of thumos and a deliberative
intelligence will be necessary for the command of oneself and others. These
attributes are characteristic not only of the Greeks as a people, but in
particular of free adult men. So the requisites for command and rule are best
met by free Greek men.
We saw in chapter 3, section 3.4.3, that when Aristotle asserts that the
deliberative faculty in women “lacks authority” he means that while women
(unlike slaves) can engage in deliberation, they are not able to make
decisions on questions of living well. The political incapacity Aristotle
assigns to women is then precisely an incapacity for decision-making. Since
thumos is the source of the capacity to rule, which is to say, to determine the
ends for oneself or another, the lower degree of thumos he attributes to
women might be responsible for the incapacity of women. On this
interpretation, women do not suffer so much from an intellectual deficit as
from a deficit of decisiveness or forcefulness.49 They will be capable of
considering practical questions, including moral and political questions, and
of formulating useful opinions about those questions, but less capable of—
and less disposed to—decision and action. As we saw in chapter 3, section
3.4.3, this does not mean that women are akratic, nor is this lack of
decisiveness a moral failing in a woman. On the contrary, it is good that a
natural subject should be inclined to submit to the rule, and hence to the
decisions, of the natural ruler. So although the lack of authority in the
deliberative faculty of women is a moral defect relative to men, that is just
to say that women are not capable of the full range of human virtues—but
neither would it be good, on Aristotle’s account—if they were so capable.
4.4 The better path

I have traced two ways in which Aristotle might have explained the
political limitations he ascribed to women as a result of their physiological
character; my aim has been to test the evidence for each of these paths.
Because Aristotle took the source of the distinctions between male and
female to be a difference in the degree of vital heat in their bodies, we have
been considering explanations of the lack of deliberative authority in
women that might be traced back to the colder temperature of women’s
bodies. Heat and cold per se are not what is significant: in the biology, what
matters is the effect of the relative coolness of the female body—that it
produces the incapacity that is characteristic of the female: the incapacity to
fully concoct the residual blood into a sperma capable of initiating
generation. And so. in constructing possible explanations of the lack of
deliberative authority that constitutes the defect that relegates women to a
lower political status, the question has been how a deficiency of heat might
produce that defect. The first path considered the effects of the fibrous
quality of women’s blood and the degree of moisture in their sense organs,
and it traced defects in the precision of memory and sensation to those
qualities. We have seen that Aristotle may have associated a slower intellect
or a lower degree of intelligence in animals with such characteristics. The
second path, by contrast, considered the effects of the lower degree of cold
and the correlative lower degree of thumos in the female body, and the ways
in which that would influence women’s desires, affective experience,
capacity for virtue, and ability to rule themselves and others.
In assessing these paths, the first question is to what extent they are able
to explain what needs explaining: the lack of authority of women’s
deliberative faculty. The second path, through thumos, offers an explanation
that is more precise in two ways: first, it better explains the defect that is a
lack of authority, and second, it accounts for the psychological defect as one
that limits women in particular, rather than female animals more generally.
Moreover, the path through thumos has two further advantages: it better
accounts for Aristotle’s claim that women should be subject to the rule of
men by suggesting a reason that he might have thought women incapable of
rule, and it offers an explanation of the distinction between women and
slaves that Aristotle upholds. In sections 4.4.1–4.4.3 I elaborate on these
points in order.
4.4.1 The argument from precision

The first path allows us to attribute to women a certain diminished
intelligence. The evidence for this explanation is drawn largely from claims
made about variations in animal species, or in the age of persons, where the
notion of “intelligence” is left indeterminate. Aristotle may have believed
that women’s lack of deliberative authority is due to the diminished
intelligence produced by the fibrous blood and overly moist sense organs
characteristic of female animals, but that path is not able to characterize the
deficit in intelligence with enough precision to explain why women should
be, on Aristotle’s view, ruled “constitutionally” as well as aristocratically.
That is, if Aristotle believed that women suffered from diminished
intelligence, he would be unlikely to think that the rule of a free man over
women should take a form that recognizes some aspect of equality between
the sexes. The first path, through impaired sensation to an incapacity to
draw universal judgments, might explain a general intellectual deficit, but it
cannot adequately explain the particular claim that women have a
deliberative faculty “without authority.”
The second path seems to account better for the psychological deficit of
women relative to men as Aristotle describes it in the Politics. To say that
women are deficient in thumos is to explain their inability to make
decisions—to govern themselves or others—and hence to explain the lack
of authority that he thinks is peculiar to the deliberative capacity of free
women, without suggesting that they have no deliberative capacity. If
women are ruled by men both aristocratically and constitutionally, then
women must both be inferior in some way and yet capable in some respect.
Women, on Aristotle’s account, are psychologically “soft,” lacking in
courage, little disposed to resist the determinations of those who govern
them. In a man, these might be moral failings, but on Aristotle’s view of the
relations of rule in the household, in a woman they are not, since they
contribute to making her compliant with the decisions of the free man who
exercises natural rule over her.
A second way in which the explanation through thumos is more precise
is that it allows us to understand how the physiology of the female animal
might have a peculiar impact on the social and political capacities of
women, and not just an effect on female animals in general. The first path
might be persuasive if we were interested in understanding why Aristotle
took the female of a species to be (usually although not always) less
intelligent than the male, but it is not as illuminating of his views of women
in particular. If he attributed to women as well as female animals a general
lack of practical intelligence, we would not expect him to allow that women
might deliberate, to claim that they should be ruled constitutionally as well
as aristocratically, or to insist that free women are to be distinguished from
slaves on the basis of their deliberative capacity (I elaborate on this last
point in section 4.4.3). But he does evidence belief in all of these things.
The second path, with its focus on thumos, permits us to see why women
are especially affected by a feature of the female body that obtains in
(almost) every species. On Aristotle’s account, only human beings engage
in deliberation and decision, and since rule is a matter of taking decisions
for others, only people have a capacity to rule. Other animals might impose
their will on others, but they will not, properly speaking, rule over others.
Although most female animals will be less thumotic than the males of their
species, in most species the effect of this will be to make the female more
timid or less resistant to pain. But the lower degree of thumos that is
characteristic of the female body has a particular impact on a woman: it
makes her less able, and less inclined, to rule. If the lack of authority of
women’s deliberative faculty is traced to the lower degree of thumos in the
female body, we can better account for the peculiarly human manifestation
in women of a psychological deficit that affects the character of most
female animals.
4.4.2 The argument from rule

There is a second question that is important for the purposes of assessing
the two paths to explaining a physiological basis for women’s political
status: which of these paths is better suited to accounting for Aristotle’s
commitment to the view that rule is not simply a question of expertise
(chapter 3, section 3.2). It is clear that he believes that intelligence is a
qualification for rule, but also that he thinks it is insufficient to make one a
good ruler. Both when he disagrees with Plato that someone who can rule in
one context can rule in any context, and when he says that those best suited
for rule are intelligent as well as thumotic, he suggests that certain qualities
other than knowledge are required for rule, and hence in their absence one
should be subjected to rule rather than entitled to self-rule, and certainly
excluded from ruling over others.
The second path captures better this extra-intellectual dimension of the
qualification for rule. On the one hand, an incapacity of the deliberative
faculty will always be an intellectual defect. On the other, the defect
Aristotle ascribes to women seems to be not merely intellectual, but also
moral, as one might expect of a defect in practical reason. Lack of authority
of the deliberative faculty is more plausibly a failure of decisiveness or
command, rather than a failure to grasp or comprehend what is good or just.
Women can grasp what is good or just on their own, whereas natural slaves
cannot; thus, women are capable of deliberation about such matters, and
natural slaves are not.
4.4.3 The argument from the contrast of women with slaves

In considering the persuasiveness of these attempts to base a causal
explanation of women’s deliberative incapacity on their physiology, the
case of slaves in Aristotle’s political theory is instructive. As we saw in
chapter 3, Aristotle treats of women and slaves (as well as children) in the
same passage in Politics 1.13, trying to make explicit why it is justifiable to
exclude them from political power: “He is a slave by nature who is capable
of belonging to another—which is also why he belongs to another—and
who participates in reason only to the extent of perceiving it, but does not
have it” (Pol. 1.5 1254b21–3). There seem to be two distinguishing features
of the slave: that he is capable of belonging to another, and that he does not
have reason but can perceive it (this, presumably, is what Aristotle means
when he says that “the slave is wholly lacking the deliberative element”
[Pol. 1.13 1260a12]). The first probably follows from the second; that is,
the slave is capable of belonging to another precisely because he lacks a
deliberative faculty.
There is both a commonality, then, in the conceptions of natural slave
and woman, and an important distinguishing feature. The lower political
status of both is justified by a claim that there is some issue with their
deliberative capacity. That of the slave is more severe, since he does not
have a bouleutikon (the faculty of deliberative reason), while a woman has
the capacity (although it lacks authority), and so Aristotle argues that she
should not be treated as a slave. At the same time, Aristotle insists, as we
saw in chapter 3, that natural slaves, like women, do have reason, and so
even the relatively severe impairment of the slave is not to be construed as a
complete absence of rational capacity.50
Because slaves have a deliberative incapacity that is more severe than
that of women, we might ask whether it is due to some sort of physiological
impairment, in a way parallel to the case of women. Aristotle does say that
the ergon or task of the natural slave is to use their body (ἐστὶν ἔργον ἡ τοῦ
σώματος χρῆσις), which might suggest that a certain kind of body produces
the condition of natural slavery. But he also allows that bodies suited to the
life of a slave do not always match up with a soul lacking a bouleutikon:
Nature indeed wishes to make the bodies of free persons and slaves different as well [as their
souls]—those of the latter strong with a view to necessary needs, those of the former straight
and useless for such tasks, but useful with a view to a political way of life (which is itself
divided between the needs of war and those of peace); yet the opposite often results, some
having the bodies of free persons while others have the souls. (Pol. 1.5 1254b27–32)
Here is a case, then, in which nature regularly fails to attach to a soul the
body that would best serve the capacities of that soul. This suggests that
there is no causal relation between the innate capacities of a person’s body
and the possession of a deliberative capacity, and hence that we cannot give
a physiological explanation for the deliberative defect of the natural slave.
We might conclude that one is not fated to be a natural slave by a
morphological or physiological defect of the body; and that the lack of a
deliberative faculty is not itself caused by a bodily defect, since Aristotle
allows that a body that is “straight” and useless for the necessary tasks—a
“free” body—might belong to a natural slave.
Perhaps, however, climate might exert enough influence over physiology
—by heating or cooling—to produce natural slaves of a population in a
particular region.51 Aristotle certainly suggests in the passage at Politics 7.7
1327b18–38 (discussed in section 4.3) that Asia will produce “slavish”
people who have too little thumos, and he links the incidence of slavishness
with climatic conditions: Asians have colder blood, perhaps to compensate
for their region’s hot climate. They seem to be slavish because they are
athumotic, or low in thumos. But at Politics 3.14 1285b19–20 Aristotle
indicates that Europeans, who live in a very different, much colder climate,
will also be slavish, although less so than Asians. And he suggests more
generally that all barbarians will have a propensity to be natural slaves:
The barbarians, though, have the same arrangement for female and slave. The reason for this is
that they have no naturally ruling element; with them, the community of man and woman is that
of female slave and male slave. This is why the poets say “it is fitting for Greeks to rule
barbarians.” (Pol. 1.2 1252b5–9)
On the other hand, a little further on Aristotle suggests that climate may not
entirely explain the condition of natural slavery:
Accordingly, they [people who support slavery from war] do not want to speak of these as
slaves, but rather barbarians. When they say this, however, they are in search of nothing other
than the slave by nature of which we spoke at the beginning; for they must necessarily assert
that there are some persons who are everywhere slaves, and others who are so nowhere. (Pol.
1.6 1255a27–30)
The context of this passage is a discussion of the justice of slavery. Aristotle
has distinguished the slave by nature from the legal slave (who has been
enslaved by force in war rather than by nature). He is discussing the
position of those who claim that forcing captives into slavery in war is just
and arguing that they nonetheless imply that there are circumstances in
which it is not just—for example, when the war began in injustice, or when
the person does not deserve to be enslaved. Aristotle’s point is that to speak
of slaves as “barbarians” rather than as “slaves” is implicitly to
acknowledge that they are not natural slaves. And so he thinks those
attempting to justify the enslavement of captives are forced to accept a
point that Aristotle takes to be true: that some persons will not be slaves by
nature no matter what place they inhabit; this is what it means to say that
some people do not deserve to be enslaved.
So, while climate may contribute to slavishness, it does not seem to
produce slavishness in every case. And it certainly does not produce
slavishness in every case by making a person less thumotic; the case of
Europeans makes that clear. They are in fact highly thumotic and
inadequately intelligent on Aristotle’s account. So, while he associates a
lack of thumos with a “slavish” or servile character (EE 2.5 1222a41–b4;
EE 3.3 1231b5–26) (which, if nothing else, suggests that the degree of
thumos in a body will have some impact on the deliberative capacity), he
also associates low intelligence with slavishness. At Eudemian Ethics 3.3
1231b10 he says that those who accept insults are called “servile and meek”
(τὸν ἀνδραποδώδη καὶ τὸν ἀνόργητον). It seems, then, that while climate
may induce either a low degree of thumos or of intelligence, it is unlikely to
produce both at once. If the natural slave is deficient not only in thumos but
also in intelligence (or intelligence of a certain sort), which the lack of a
bouleutikon suggests, then while either deficiency is sufficient to make one
“slavish” it is not sufficient to make one a natural slave. So while barbarians
are, on Aristotle’s account, more likely to be natural slaves than Greeks,
they will not all be natural slaves—or if they are, it will not be because of
the climate of the regions in which they live.52
There is, moreover, a further problem with the proposal that climate
might explain the occurrence of natural slaves, a problem that is pertinent to
the question of women and sexual difference: how are we to distinguish the
effect of a lower degree of thumos that is climatic and affects an entire
population from the lower degree of thumos that is characteristic of the
female, and hence will distinguish one sex from the other in any region?
More precisely—since we might think the difference between slave and
woman is the difference between vital and climatic heat—why does one
kind of lower heat produce the limited but significant impairment suffered
by the natural slave, while the other produces the even more limited, but
still significant, impairment suffered by women?
It is not clear that Aristotle has an answer to this question, although, as
we have seen, he insists that there is a difference between natural slave and
free woman, and it seems likely to be a difference that cannot be reduced to
one of degree (“the female is distinguished by nature from the slave” [Pol.
1.2 1252a35]). My suggestion is that in calling the people of certain regions
“slavish” (Pol. 3.14 1285a18–20), he does not mean to say that they are
natural slaves (although they may be), but rather that they resemble natural
slaves in having some impaired capacity for deliberation. This is consistent
with Aristotle’s use of the word elsewhere: there are a number of passages
in which he refers to someone’s tastes, behavior, or character as “slavish” or
“servile” without meaning that they are natural slaves (EN 1.5 1095b18–20,
3.11 1118b20–21, 4.4 1124b31–1125a2, 4.5 1126a7–8, 4.8 1128a20–22; EE
1.5 1215b34–1216a1, 3.3 1231b9–20; Pol. 3.11 1282a16–17, 5.11 1313b9,
7.17 1336b11–12; Vir. 7 1251b11–12; Rhet. 2.9 1387b15–17). I am
claiming, then, that there is insufficient evidence to suggest that Aristotle
believed that natural slavery is caused by some condition of the body,
whether innate or environmentally induced. On this interpretation, Aristotle
does not offer a physiological explanation for the occurrence of natural
slaves, the souls of whom he seems to believe have been compromised in a
way unmediated by their bodies.
If this is correct, there is an important divergence in the ways Aristotle
explains the existence of women and that of natural slaves: there is, as we
have seen, a case to be made for the physiological basis of the deliberative
incapacity Aristotle attributes to women, whereas there does not seem to be
a parallel case to be made for the deliberative incapacity he attributes to
natural slaves. This supports his claim that women and natural slaves are
different in kind, since not only is the nature of their incapacity different,
but the causal origins of those incapacities are different. Moreover, because
to be a natural slave it would seem to be necessary to be lacking in
intelligence as well as thumos, we have some reason to suppose that women
are not less intelligent than men: if they were, given their low degree of
thumos, they would have to be natural slaves. Since Aristotle explicitly
denies, as we have seen, that women are no more than natural slaves, this
suggests that the best physiological explanation for women’s lack of
deliberative authority is that which traces its causes through lower degrees
of thumos to an incapacity for decision-making and command.
Although the two explanations I explored in sections 4.2. and 4.3 are in
principle compatible with one another, there is better evidence for the
explanation through thumos. Since my two explanations cannot both be true
without compromising Aristotle’s distinction between natural slaves and
women, we should adopt the explanation through thumos.
4.4.4 The better path is through thumos

On balance, then, my suggestion is that the second path explains more of
what needs to be explained than the first. There is no incompatibility in
principle between the two paths, and we might think that Aristotle believed
that each can explain something of the political incapacity of women. That
is, the lack of authority that women on Aristotle’s account exhibit with
respect to their deliberative capacity might be a combination of a general
lack of intelligence (brought about by their fibrous blood and moister sense
organs, leading to imperfect sensations and memories and ultimately to
unreliable judgments) and a mildness (due to their low degree of thumos)
that makes them unable to take decisions or to govern themselves and
command others. But three reasons militate against that.
First, as we saw in 4.4.3, if the coolness of women’s bodies rendered
them both less intelligent and less thumotic than men, then we should
expect them all to be natural slaves, and yet Aristotle insists that there is a
distinction between women and natural slaves. Second, we should be
cautious not to exaggerate the political incapacity that Aristotle attributes to
women, bearing in mind that he urges men to consign certain matters to the
women in their households, and that he says women should be ruled
constitutionally (with the word’s implications of equality) as well as
aristocratically. Third, since Aristotle thinks that women are natural subjects
and men natural rulers, and hence that the submission of women to men is
good for the household and the polis, the ways in which women are
defective relative to men should also be ways in which, as women, they are
good. A capacity to be ruled and a disposition to submit to rule, are such
features; but it would be more difficult to construe a lack of intelligence as a
positive feature in women. For these reasons, I suggest that the second path,
with its clearer bearing on the authority of the deliberative faculty and its
relatively precise and circumscribed conception of the defect to be
accounted for, is more likely to be how Aristotle envisioned the link
between the inferior physiology of women and their lower political status.
I have been arguing that the second path, the path through thumos to an
impairment of decision-making, indicates that women should be subject to
rule not because they have a general intellectual impairment or a more
limited capacity to deliberate in light of a “stable architectonic conception
of the good life,” in Heath’s terms (as is the case of the natural slave), but
rather because they have an incapacity of command. If that is right, it
explains why slaves and women are different in kind: despite having some
impairment of the deliberative faculty, they have very different
impairments. If the same physiological explanation could be constructed to
account for the occurrence of both women and natural slaves, the
impairments that characterize each would be different in degree rather than
in kind. Moreover, this account explains why women are in fact to be given
certain domains of authority: they cannot command free men, but they can
deliberate, and even deliberate guided by an architectonic conception of the
good life, and they can make decisions for natural slaves and children—but
only when guided by, and subject to the authority of, a free man.
4.5 Conclusion
In this chapter I have been exploring the ways in which political sexual
differences might be caused by physiological sexual differences, primarily
differences in temperature and their effects on the blood. It is possible that
Aristotle did not believe that the political inferiority of women stemmed
from any physiological difference characteristic of females, but that it was
an independent political phenomenon, emerging from the structure and
requirements of the household and the polis and the natural roles of men
and women in those structures. That is, Aristotle may not have intended to
suggest that the physiology of the female somehow determined the political
incapacity of women as he describes it. But two points make it likely that he
did believe there was a link between physiological and political sexual
differences. First, although Aristotle never says in the discussions of women
in the Politics that their subjection to men stems from the character of their
bodies, there is a priori evidence for a link between the claims he makes
about women in the biology and in the Politics in the parallel assertions of
biological and political inferiority. Second, the description in the
Metaphysics of sex as a difference in the matter of the genus (see chapter 2,
section 2.2), and the parallels between the account of the value and
inferiority of the female in the biology and of the worth and inferiority of
women in the polis, suggest that Aristotle believed there to be some link
between the physiology of the female and the political status of women.
That link is found in the lower degree of thumos in the female’s bodily
constitution, which affects her practical reason in a particular way, making
it less suited to decision and command, and lacking in authority in that
sense.
Conclusion
The Value of Females and Women
In chapter 1 we saw two predominant themes in discussions of sexual

difference before Aristotle. The first was a negative assessment of sexual
difference and reproduction as features of human life. A number of
Aristotle’s predecessors viewed the differentiation of the sexes as either
precipitating or resulting from a distance between human and divine
existence, and sexual reproduction as a degenerate form that progressively
increases the corporeal nature of human beings. The second was a negative
assessment of the nature of women. Many of these same authors attributed
to the female sex a range of flaws, metaphysical, physical, and moral, and
treated the existence of women as an affliction imposed on men. We saw
that an exception to this assessment of women and their worth might seem
to be found in the proposals of Socrates in Republic 5 to educate and
employ women of the guardian class as the equals of men (although Plato
was also one of the authors who suggested that sexual difference and
reproduction are misfortunes visited on human beings). Aristotle, I have
argued, considered both the wholly negative assessment of women and the
suggestion that differences between women and men might be minimized or
even eliminated to be aspects of a view according to which sexual
difference is something to be resisted or mitigated. His objection to that
view is the foundation of his attempt to develop an account of sexual
difference in metaphysical, physical, and political terms that makes evident
the value of sexual difference as a structural feature of some species, and
the value of the female as one embodiment of species forms.
In chapters 2 and 3 we have seen that Aristotle does not dispute the
inferiority of females to males. But he does object to the idea that the
inferiority of one sex is an unqualified failing. The physiological
imperfection of the female on his account is a deficiency in heat, which
makes the sperma produced by the female incapable of initiating
conception. This certainly makes it inferior to male sperma (which does
have the power to initiate conception), but the capacities and incapacities of
the katamênia are nonetheless valuable on his account. The fertile residues
of both male and female are good because each is necessary for the success
of the generation of another like themselves; and their separation is good
because it amounts to the separation of the formal cause from the material
cause. So male is better than female, but the female as well as the male is
both necessary and good. Both sexes achieve the first telos of the generative
faculty—the production of a fertile residue—and each is equally necessary
to the other in the achievement of the ultimate telos of the generative
faculty—the production of another animal like themselves. In that sense
they are both adequate manifestations of the species form. Because male
and female instantiations of the species form are the same and male and
female individuals differ only in their embodiment, Aristotle can maintain
two claims: (1) that male and female are the same in kind and (2) that the
male is physiologically superior to the female, with the result that the fertile
residue produced by the male is better than that produced by the female in
that it has certain active powers corresponding to the passive powers of her
fertile residue. The female’s incapacity to produce sperma with active
powers constitutes her deficiency, even as it constitutes her capacity to
produce sperma with passive powers, and thus bestows her with value.
Aristotle makes an argument for the value of women in the political
realm that is parallel in structure to his biological argument. What
constitutes the incapacity of women at the same time constitutes their value:
that they are incapable of command, on Aristotle’s view, makes them unfit
for political rule, but well suited to be ruled. Just as he conceives of
generation as an activity that cannot be exercised by male or female alone
and hence requires cooperation between them, so too he conceives of the
life of the household as integral to a human life, and it is one that cannot be
led by a single individual. Both women and men are necessary for an oikos
to function, but the role of men in the oikos is better than that of women, in
the same sense that the role of the male sperma is better than that of the
female: just as female sperma is for the sake of male sperma, so too women
are for the sake of men. This does mean that women are inferior to men, but
more important, for Aristotle, it means that there is a structure that is
integral to human life—the household—that requires both women and men.
So sexual difference is on Aristotle’s account not only good in that it allows
for sexual reproduction and the separation of form from matter; it also
proves to be both necessary and good in a particular way for a properly
human life.
As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, Aristotle identifies certain features of
bodies and souls as characteristic of the sexes and argues that the presence
of these features is good. Since the political defect he attributes to women is
a defect in the deliberative faculty, which is part of the rational faculty that
is distinctive of the souls of human beings, we might think that he is
conceding that men and women are different in kind. That is, we might
think that on his view it is not only that the bodies of men and women are
different, but also that their forms are different. I have argued in chapter 4
that Aristotle is likely to have attributed these differences in the deliberative
faculties of men and women to their bodies, and to have traced them to the
same cause that is responsible for the differences in their reproductive
capacities (and hence their nutritive souls): different degrees of vital heat.
On this account the differences in deliberative capacities that characterize
the sexes do not amount to essential differences that distinguish the sexes as
kinds; they are the effects of differences in the matter, effects that do not
constitute formal differences.
In chapter 4 I examined the most plausible ways in which Aristotle
might have understood the psychological differences between the sexes to
have emerged from the physiological. Degrees of heat and deliberative
authority are what distinguish the sexes most fundamentally, on his account.
We have seen that although there is some evidence to suggest that Aristotle
believed the colder temperature of the female body might compromise a
woman’s capacity for sensation so that ultimately she would have lower
intelligence, there is better evidence that he thought the colder temperature
would make a woman so athumotic that she would be incapable of the kind
of decision-making required by command. This would account for the claim
that a woman’s bouleutikon is without authority, without making
unintelligible Aristotle’s claim that a man should rule over a woman
constitutionally—that is, as his equal. And the athumotic character of
women would constitute a moral impairment more than a cognitive one,
making better sense of Aristotle’s claim that the qualification for rule is not
so much a kind of expertise as it is a kind of moral authority.
The ambivalence Aristotle displays in the discussions of sexual
difference is evident. He believes and assumes that females and women are
inferior to males and men, but his arguments are directed at demonstrating
that the female sex is valuable to an animal species, and that women are
valuable to the household and to the political community. Those arguments
depend on his understanding of the structures in which sexual difference
occurs: the male-female couple, in biological contexts, and the household,
in political contexts. The sexes, and the differences between the sexes, are
good ultimately because they are necessary for these structures, which are
themselves good. In representing sexual difference as a positive feature,
both in the context of reproduction and in the context of political life,
Aristotle is disputing the largely negative assessment of it in the works of
his predecessors. And in arguing for the benefit of females and women to
animal species and to political communities, Aristotle distinguishes his
position on the sexes, and on women in particular, from that of more
simpleminded misogynists in the history of philosophy. Those features of
females and women that constitute their deficiencies relative to males and
men are also positive qualities, on Aristotle’s account, and that is evident
once we consider females in the context of the generative couple, and
women in the context of the household as a natural structure.
Aristotle’s views have been so influential in the history of debates about
sexual difference in large part because he was able to make the case for its
value, and for the value of women, without disputing the higher status of
males and of men. He has been, and continues to be, an important source
for misogynist arguments. But because he maintained the identity of species
soul in the sexes and refused to allow that sexual difference was a
difference in form, he also provided authoritative support for many feminist
arguments in the history of philosophy, beginning in the Renaissance. That
is another story.
Notes
Introduction
1. For a general account of Aristotle’s teleology, see Monte R. Johnson, Aristotle on Teleology
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); for accounts of Aristotle’s teleology in the context of animal
generation and activity, see Allan Gotthelf, “Aristotle’s Conception of Final Causality,” in
Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology, ed. Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 204–42; Charlotte Witt, “Teleology in
Aristotelian Science and Metaphysics,” in Method in Ancient Philosophy, ed. Jyl Gentzler
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 253–69; and Mariska Leunissen, Explanation and Teleology
in Aristotle’s Science of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
2. For this categorization, see Leunissen, Explanation and Teleology, 12–13.
3. This can be found especially in the seventeenth century, where pro-woman writers accused
Aristotle of making his claims out of cruelty or anger at women for rejecting him (see, e.g.,
Lucrezia Marinella, La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne (Venice: Giolito, 1601), 108–9.
4. For defenses of Aristotle see Robert Mayhew, The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason or
Rationalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Darrell Dobbs, “Family
Matters: Aristotle’s Appreciation of Women and the Plural Structure of Society,” American
Political Science Review 90, no. 1 (1996): 74–89.
5. See, e.g., Maryanne Cline Horowitz, “Aristotle and Woman,” Journal of the History of
Biology 9, no. 2 (1976): 183–213.
6. Nielsen makes this point (Karen Margrethe Nielsen, “The Constitution of the Soul: Aristotle
on Lack of Deliberative Authority,” Classical Quarterly 65, no. 2 [2015]: 574). For a
comprehensive and sensitive assessment of recent attacks on and defenses of Aristotle with
respect to sexism, see Sophia M. Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016).
7. The question of Aristotle’s motivations is often posed in terms of ideology; my point is that
while ideological concerns partly explain Aristotle’s view on females and women, there is
considerable evidence that his views were formulated in response to philosophical questions
and commitments. In this I agree with Connell (Aristotle on Female Animals, 45). For the
opposing argument—that Aristotle’s views on the deficiencies of women and natural slaves
are nothing but ideological affirmations and therefore pseudo-scientific—see Claudio William
Veloso, “Aristote, ses commentateurs et les déficiences délibératives de l’esclave et de la
femme,” Les études philosophiques 107 (2013–14): 513–34.
Chapter 1
1. For an argument that Aristotle sees value in the female, see Connell, Aristotle on Female
Animals.
2. By “non-sexual forms of reproduction” I mean those that do not require sexual differentiation,
in the sense that a male principle and a female principle are isolated in separate individuals.
Aristotle’s predecessors commonly believed that non-sexual forms of reproduction included
spontaneous generation from the earth and myths about an autochthonous origin of the human
species (see Nicole Loraux, The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the
Division between the Sexes, trans. Caroline Levine [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993], 37–71).
3. There are exceptions to this, cases in which an author argues that the sexes effectively perform
the same function, but in such cases the author is likely to make explicit that the sexes share a
function (e.g., in the accounts of Empedocles and Democritus, as reported by Aristotle, both
sexes contribute body parts to the embryo). See GA 4.1 764b10–21.
4. This and other translations from Hesiod are from Hesiod, Theogony; Works and Days;
Testimonia, trans. and ed. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
5. Sedley points out that one significant difference between the story of Pandora in the Theogony
and the one in Works and Days is that in the latter women are merely the conduit of evil into
the world, whereas in the former women are themselves the embodiment of evil (David
Sedley, “Hesiod’s Theogony and Plato’s Timaeus,” in Plato and Hesiod, ed. G. R. Boys-Stones
and J. H. Haubold [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 256).
6. He also uses the term “tribe” (φῦλα) to describe people but not men in particular; see
Theogony 556, Works and Days 90. Loraux writes: “There are no phyl’andrôn, nor is there a
genos andrôn—only a genos anthrôpôn alongside a genos gynaikôn,” citing Theogony 50
(Loraux, The Children of Athena, 87).
7. Mark Morford, Robert J. Lenardon, and Michael Sham, Classical Mythology, 10th ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 97.
8. Texts and translations of Semonides are from Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Females of the Species:
Semonides on Women (London: Duckworth, 1975). Loraux remarks that Semonides
“deliberately ignores the unity of the genos in order to describe the varied plurality of the
phyla” and suggests that the poem can be seen as a reading of Hesiod’s story of the origin of
women, mixing elements of both the Theogony and the Works and Days (Loraux, The
Children of Athena, 90).
9. In discussing Empedocles I am primarily following two attempts at the reconstruction and
interpretation of the poem that followed on the identification of a papyrus fragment as part of
Empedocles’ poem in 1994: David Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008); Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi,
L’Empédocle de Strasbourg (P. Strasb. gr. Inv. 1665–1666): Introduction, édition et
commentaire (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999). For other interpretations of Empedocles, see
W. K. C. Guthrie, “III. Empedocles,” in A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 2 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1965), 122–265; Denis O’Brien, Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle: A
Reconstruction from the Fragments and Secondary Sources (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969); M. R. Wright, Empedocles: The Extant Fragments (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1981); Daniel W. Graham, “Symmetry in the Empedoclean Cycle,”
Classical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (1988): 297–312; Richard D. McKirahan, Philosophy before
Socrates (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994); Simon Trépanier, “Empedocles on the Ultimate
Symmetry of the World,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 24 (2003): 1–57.
10. Translations of Empedocles are from Brad Inwood, The Poem of Empedocles, 2nd ed.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), unless otherwise noted. Of the four stages
Sedley says: “Like many supporters of the double-zoogony interpretation, I assume that the
first two stages (disjointed limbs, followed by joined-up hybrids) are the zoogony under Love,
the third and fourth (whole-natured beings, and finally the practitioners and products of sexual
intercourse) the zoogony under Strife” (Sedley, Creationism, 41).
11. The line numbers of the new fragments are from Martin and Primavesi, L’Empédocle de
Strasbourg. For discussions of the ordering of the fragments, see Bignone, who refers back to
Stein and Diels (Ettore Bignone, “Appendice VI: La struttura del poema fisico e l’ordine dei
frammenti,” in Empedocle: Studio critico, traduzione e commento delle testimonianze e dei
frammenti [Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1963], 651–76). For a more recent discussion, see
Inwood, who refers back to O’Brien and Osborne (Inwood, The Poem of Empedocles, 8–21).
Hermann Diels, “Studia Empedoclea,” Hermes 15, no. 2 (1880): 161–79, and Doxographi
Graeci (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1879). Heinrich Stein, Empedocles Agrigentinus
Fragmenta (Bonn: Marcus, 1852). O’Brien, Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle; Catherine Osborne,
“Empedocles Recycled,” Classical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1987): 24–50.
12. Sedley sees Strife’s division of the sexes as a development of Hesiod’s Pandora myth, where
women are introduced as an act of divine spite. “It seems possible that in Empedocles both
stages of Strife’s zoogony originated as an allegorical reading of the Hesiodic myth” (Sedley,
Creationism, 47). That is, in the first stage there is a release of underground fire that generates
unisex creatures, and in the second women are separated from men.
13. For other versions of this myth, see Diodorus Siculus I 7.3–6, 10.1–7; Ovid, Metamorphoses I
416–37; Aristotle, GA 3.11 762b28–30; and Philo, Aet. mundi 57. For more on these see
Gordon Campbell, Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Commentary on “De Rerum
Natura” 5.722–1104 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 61–63, 330–33.
14. “τὰ δ’ ἔμπαλιν ἐξανατέλλειν ἀνδροφυῆ βούκρανα, μεμειγμένα τῇ μὲν ἀπ’ ἀνδρῶν τῇ δὲ
γυναικοφυῆ, σκιεροῖς ἠσκημένα γυίοις” (DK 31B61).
15. “L’expression, fidèlement rendue par Lucrèce 2, 1082, à l’aide de sic hominum geminam
prolem, désigne le genre humain, considéré du double point de vue des hommes et des
femmes” (Martin and Primavesi, L’Empédocle de Strasbourg, 234).
16. Sedley, Creationism, 50. Nonetheless, Sedley suggests an alternative: that the double birth is a
reference to a distinction between the race of daimons, subject to reincarnation, and a race of
perishable humans who can achieve immortality only through sexual reproduction
(Creationism, 50–52). Sedley does not doubt that there are both men and women among the
daimons created by Love.
17. Sedley suggests that Empedocles’ account of this process anticipates the division of the round
creatures of Aristophanes’ story in Plato’s Symposium (Creationism, 46). I discuss the myth
recounted by Plato’s Aristophanes in this chapter (section 2.2.2.3).
18. “τὰς δὲ τετάρτας οὐκέτι ἐκ τῶν ὁμοίων οἷον ἐκ γῆς καὶ ὕδατος, ἀλλὰ δι᾽ ἀλλήλων ἤδη, τοῖς
μὲν πυκνωθείσης [τοῖς δὲ καὶ] τοῖς ζῴοις τῆς τροφῆς, τοῖς δὲ καὶ τῆς εὐμορφίας τῶν γυναικῶν
ἐπερεθισμὸν τοῦ σπερματικοῦ κινήματος ἐμποιησάσης” (Aetius V 19.5). Text and translation
Sedley, Creationism, 40–41.
19. Empedocles may not intend to suggest that other animals do not experience sexual desire, nor
that women do not experience it, nor that women are the exclusive objects of desire, but his
emphasis here is on the desire of men for women. If Plato were familiar with this, it might
explain why he writes in the Symposium (208e3–209e5) as though it were only men who
experience sexual desire, although there he plainly does not see women as the only possible
objects of that desire. We should note, however that at Timaeus 91c1–4 he attributes to the
bodies of women “the desire to conceive,” which may be a form of sexual desire.
20. In refuting pangenesis, at GA 1.18 722b 25–28, when Aristotle says “just as it was in the
beginning in the earth in the Reign of Love, so it is, according to them, in the living body,” he
is not suggesting that Empedocles believed that spontaneous generation continued to occur
after sexual generation was introduced under the rule of Strife; rather, his point is that a
pangenetic account of sexual generation cannot account for how the parts of the body in the
embryo come together in an organized way.
21. My brief summary of the myth here assumes that there are two alternating eras; this
interpretation is adopted by many commentators (including Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Plato’s
Myth of the Statesman, the Ambiguities of the Golden Age and of History,” Journal of
Hellenic Studies 98 (November 1978), 132–41; Dimitri El Murr, “Hesiod, Plato, and the
Golden Age: Hesiodic Motifs in the Myth of the Politicus 1,” in Plato and Hesiod, ed. G. R.
Boys-Stones and J. H. Haubold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 276–97; Francis
MacDonald Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1997), 206–8, but disputed by some (Luc Brisson, Lectures de Platon [Paris: Librairie
philosophique J. Vrin, 2000]); Gabriela R. Carone, “Reversing the Myth of the Politicus,”
Classical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2004): 88–108; Plato, Statesman, ed. and trans. Christopher J.
Rowe (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1995), 189–93.
22. “ἀπομιμούμενα καὶ ξυνακολουθοῦντα τῷ τοῦ παντὸς παθήματι, καὶ δὴ καὶ τὸ τῆς κυήσεως καὶ
γεννήσεως καὶ τροφῆς μίμημα συνείπετο τοῖς πᾶσιν ὑπ᾿ ἀνάγκης· οὐ γὰρ ἐξῆν ἔτ᾿ ἐν γῇ δι᾿
ἑτέρων συνιστάντων φύεσθαι ζῷον” (Polit. 274a2–5).
23. There are evident similarities between the era of Kronos and “our time”, on the one hand, and
the two cycles of creation, under the rule of Love and that of Strife, as described by
Empedocles. For an analysis of these similarities see Charles Kahn, “The Myth of the
Statesman,” in Plato’s Myths, ed. Catalin Partenie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 149–50.
24. The symbolism of the autochthonous origins of men is important; as Loraux points out, having
their origins in the soil of a place gives men a special claim to citizenship and hence to
political authority (see Loraux, The Children of Athena, 37–38, 121–22).
25. “Τῶν γενομένων ἀνδρῶν ὅσοι δειλοὶ καὶ τὸν βίον ἀδίκως διῆλθον, κατὰ λόγον τὸν εἰκότα
γυναῖκες μετεφύοντο ἐν τῇ δευτέρᾳ γενέσει. καὶ κατ᾿ ἐκεῖνον δὴ τὸν χρόνον διὰ ταῦτα θεοὶ
τὸν τῆς ξυνουσίας ἔρωτα ἐτεκτήναντο, ζῶον τὸ μὲν ἐν ἡμῖν, τὸ δ᾿ ἐν ταῖς γυναιξὶ συστήσαντες
ἔμψυχον” (Ti. 90e6–91a5).
26. There is some uncertainty as to what the ensouled living thing in men comprises. The passage
at Timaeus 91a5–c1 describes how the sexual parts of the male are made. The “marrow” that
Plato also calls “seed” has soul in it and “instilled a life-giving desire for emission right at the
place of venting. . . . This is why . . . the male genitals are unruly and self-willed, like an
animal. . . . The very same causes operate in women. A woman’s womb or uterus . . . is a
living thing within her with a desire for childbearing” (91a5–c4). This makes clear that the
ensouled living thing in women is the uterus, but leaves open the possibility that in men it is
the genitals (described here as “like an animal”) together with the marrow or seed that has soul
in it.
27. In the description of the era of Kronos we learn that there was no taking of women and
children as possessions. We know that children in that era were not born, but rather developed
from the mature human beings first produced from the earth, and did not resemble the children
of “our time,” since they were gray-haired babies at the end of a life, not at the beginning. It
seems likely, then, that they were not women either, at least not women as we know them in
“our time.” Moreover, there is no mention in the myth of the gods regulating sexual activity
between the sexes in the time of Kronos, which we might have expected if there were both
women and men and sexual activity. Certainly the myth suggests that intercourse between the
sexes is an important focus of human governance, a focus that is necessary because the change
from divine to human governance corresponds with the introduction of sexual reproduction.
28. We should note that in the Statesman it is not clear that women are the cause of misery, as they
certainly are in Hesiod’s works. At the same time, the introduction of women certainly
coincides with misery in the myth of the Statesman and the Timaeus.
29. For an argument that despite the resemblances between Plato’s and Hesiod’s description of the
era of Kronos, there are significant differences, see El Murr, “Hesiod, Plato, and the Golden
Age.” For the claim that Hesiod and Plato differ on the nature of the unhappiness experienced
by human beings in the unhappy era, see Sedley, “Hesiod’s Theogony and Plato’s Timaeus,”
256–57.
30. See Catherine Osborne, Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and the
Presocratics (London: Duckworth, 1987), 322–23, for text and translation of this passage. See
also Sedley, Creationism, 47.
31. Sedley argues that there was no sexual reproduction under the rule of Love: “I suggest that
Love’s original ‘human’ creations were solely the blissful gods or daimons, so that their resort
to sexual reproduction occurred only after their fall (engineered by Strife according to B
115.14), when they were condemned to the familiar relatively short human life span”
(Creationism, 51 n. 63).
32. See section 1.3 for more on the association of the receptacle with the female.
33. Sedley writes: “The close parallelism between Hesiod and Plato now begins to reassert itself.
In both writers it is with the addition of women to the scala naturae that the degeneration sets
in and unhappiness unmistakably enters the world” (Sedley, “Hesiod’s Theogony and Plato’s
Timaeus,” 257). In the case of Plato, however, it is not so much women per se who are evil as
what women represent: otherness and the dyad.
34. Scodel sees this hesitation as key to the interpretation of the myth, which he reads as
“profoundly pessimistic,” presenting “a picture of man as chattel to the gods” and serving as a
counter-model to the era of our time (Harvey Ronald Scodel, Diaeresis and Myth in Plato’s
Statesman [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987], 85). If this were right, we would
expect to find sexual reproduction represented as superior to non-sexual reproduction, but it is
not. For a more nuanced account of the myth, see El Murr, who suggests that the myth is not
an unqualifiedly glowing account (“Hesiod, Plato, and the Golden Age”).
35. There is a third conclusion to be drawn here, which I will take up later in section 1.5 of this
chapter. The Symposium suggests a reason that the ruler who is human and not divine, the sort
of statesman who is the object of the search in the Statesman, must concern himself with the
regulation of sexual reproduction. The reason is that an excessive indulgence in sexual
intercourse that leads to sexual reproduction will increase the bodily, and diminish the element
of the divine, in the political community as a whole. So the ruler with an eye to the moral
development of the population, and a desire to make the members of the political community
as divine as possible, will strictly regulate the sexual reproduction of children—and this is just
what we find in the Republic (and the Laws, where a variety of sexual controls are introduced,
including controls over pregnancy [ 6 772d6–773e5, 775b7–e6, 783d7–785a4; 7 788c6–
790c3, 792e2–8; 8 838a4–842a2]).
36. For an overview of the Pythagorean opposites in terms of their characterization of women, and
in particular the influence of this on ancient medicine, see Parker Holt, “Women and
Medicine,” in A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, ed. Sharon James and Sheila
Dillon (Chichester: Blackwell, 2012).
37. “τὰς ἀρχὰς δέκα λέγουσιν εἶναι τὰς κατὰ συστοιχίαν λεγομένας, πέρας ἄπειρον, περιττὸν
ἄρτιον, ἓν πλῆθος, δεξιὸν ἀριστερόν, ἄρρεν θῆλυ, ἠρεμοῦν κινούμενον, εὐθὺ καμπύλον, φῶς
σκότος, ἀγαθὸν κακόν, τετράγωνον ἑτερόμηκες” (Met. 1.5 986a23–28). There are other
Pythagoreans who “consider that number is the principle both as matter for things and as
forming the modifications and states” of those things (Met. 1.5 986a15–17). The elements of
number are even (which is unlimited, ἄπειρον) and odd (which is limited, πέρας).
38. G. E. R. Lloyd, “Right and Left in Greek Philosophy,” in Right and Left: Essays on Dual
Symbolic Classification, ed. Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973),
171.For the origins of Aristotle’s account of Pythagoreanism, see James A. Philip, “Aristotle’s
Sources for Pythagorean Doctrine,” Phoenix 17, no. 4 (1963), 251–65. Goldin says that “it
goes without saying that Aristotle had access to [Pythagorean] texts and testimony lost to us”
and so his account “is to be rejected only if . . . his account is inconsistent with other reliable
evidence” (Owen Goldin, “The Pythagorean Table of Opposites, Symbolic Classification, and
Aristotle,” Science in Context 28, no. 2 [2015]: 173.
39. Aristotle’s inclusion of good/bad in his list may indicate that he was not referring solely to the
list of Philolaus (Philolaus fr. 1, Diogenes Laertius 8.85), since that list does not include
good/bad, but in other respects Aristotle’s account of the columns of opposites is similar. See
Carl A. Huffman, Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean and Presocratic (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 28–92; Malcolm Schofield, “Pythagoreanism: Emerging from the
Presocratic Fog (Metaphysics A 5),” in Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” Alpha: Symposium
Aristotelicum, ed. Carlos Steel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 147; Oliver
Primavesi, “Second Thoughts on Some Presocratics (Metaphysics A 8, 989a18–990a32),” in
Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” Alpha, ed. Steel (2012), 254–56, for discussion.
40. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, revised ed., trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1966), 151 n. 26. Sabina Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of Gender: Plato and the Pythagorean
Table,” in Women in Ancient Societies: An Illusion of the Night, ed. Léonie J. Archer, Susan
Fischler, and Maria Wyke (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994). Anne Carson, “Putting Her in
Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire,” in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic
Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I.
Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 135–69.
41. Simplicius, On Aristotle’s “Physics 3,” trans. J. O. Urmson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2002), 74.
42. See also Met. 1.5 985b23–986a12 for Aristotle’s discussion of the claim that to the
Pythagoreans “all other things seemed in their whole nature to be modelled after numbers.”
For more on spatialization, see Charles H. Kahn, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: A Brief
History (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), 30–33.
43. “ταῖς γὰρ εἰς ἴσα τομαῖς τῶν ἀριθμῶν, ὁ μὲν ἄρτιος πάντῃ διιστάμενος ὑπολείπει τινὰ
δεκτικὴν ἀρχὴν οἷον ἐν ἑαυτῷ καὶ χώραν, ἐν δὲ τῷ περιττῷ τὸ αὐτὸ παθόντι μέσον ἀεὶ
περίεστι τῆς νεμήσεως γόνιμον· ᾗ γονιμώτερός ἐστι τοῦ ἑτέρου, καὶ μειγνύμενος ἀεὶ κρατεῖ,
κρατεῖται δ᾿ οὐδέποτε” (De E. 8 388a–b). Plutarch suggests (Quaestiones Romanae 2 264a)
that maleness and femaleness appear in the list only as an afterthought, but two other passages
in Plutarch’s Moralia, cited in Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. Ross, 150 n. 24, “seem
in fact to cast doubt on his own suggestion”: Quaestiones Romanae 102.288c–e and De E.
8.388a–c (Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of Gender,” 89). Translations of Plutarch are from
Plutarch, Moralia, Volume V, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1936).
44. Primavesi seems to follow Plutarch’s suggestion, referring to Met. 1.5 986a1–2, and
Aristotle’s remarks on odd and even as the “elements of number.” He writes: “The ascription
of female and male gender to even and odd numbers makes more sense than one would think:
when numbers set out as patterns of pebbles (ψῆφοι) are divided into two, in even numbers an
empty middle space seems to open up ready to conceive, whereas in odd numbers a
procreative middle part seems to remain. In a sense, then, even the ascription of gender to
numbers expresses a structural feature, a pathos; accordingly, the arithmological interpretation
of the number 5, too, can be set out in a way closely corresponding to the model described in
Metaph. A. 5” (Oliver Primavesi, “Aristotle on the ‘So-Called Pythagoreans’: From Lore to
Principles,” in A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A. Huffman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), 243–44). To describe a space as “ready to conceive” and a pebble as a
“procreative middle part” seems to rely on a prior decision to understand female and male
genitals in a certain way.
45. We need not be convinced by this, as Lovibond points out. The comparison between the
relation of odd and even numbers to the relation of male and female in generation is
unsatisfactory because “not all children are male”—i.e., not all are “odd,” as we should expect
when adding odd to even. Moreover, “you might just as well say that the odd numbers are
reproductively incompetent because they cannot produce another one of their own kind”
(Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of Gender,” 91). Plutarch’s explanation of the association
between the female and the even may be unconvincing, but it seems to be all we have.
46. Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of Gender,” 91–92.
47. Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place,” 153–54. The receptacle is one of three fundamental
constituents of reality described at Timaeus 49–51: the intelligible and unchanging mode, the
visible and changing copy modeled on it, and finally “the receptacle and nurse of all
becoming” (Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of Gender,” 93).
48. Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of Gender,” 94. In the context of discussions of reproduction
the notion of female passivity is also widespread. For example, in Aeschylus’s Eumenides,
658–61, Apollo says: “The mother is no parent of that which is called / Her child, but only
nurse of the new-planted seed / That grows. The parent is he who mounts. A stranger she /
preserves a stranger’s seed, if no god interfere” (Aeschylus, Eumenides, trans. Richmond
Lattimore, in The Complete Greek Tragedies: Aeschylus, vol. 1, ed. David Grene and
Richmond Lattimore [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959]).
49. The evidence and translations in this paragraph can be found in Carson, “Putting Her in Her
Place,” 137–38.
50. Aristotle’s views on the physical traits of male and female will be discussed in chapter 2 at
greater length. He is ambivalent about “the moist”; healthy bodies are both hot and moist, and
they will become increasingly cold and dry as they age—but to be both cold and moist (which
is how he characterizes the female) is the worst combination. I assume that the elemental
theory of GC Book 2 underpins the theory of animal generation in the GA, but that is not to
say that conception and embryological development on Aristotle’s view can be explained
simply by appeal to material processes, as we will see.
51. See G. E. R. Lloyd, “The Hot and the Cold, the Dry and the Wet in Greek Philosophy,”
Journal of Hellenistic Studies 84 (1964): 102–4.
52. Notice that Parmenides nonetheless identifies the female with the left; we will see later that
usually what is hot is identified with the right.
53. Aristotle has a very interesting discussion at PA 2.2 648b11–649b8 of the different senses in
which something might be said to be hotter than another, enumerating at least five, including
(1) “that which makes what touches it hotter [than the other]” to (3) “the more meltable and
more combustible [than the other]” (PA 2.2 648b14–19). His point seems to be that both
Parmenides and Empedocles might be right—we would have to know just which sense of
“hotter” they were ascribing to one sex.
54. See Lloyd, “Right and Left,” 171.Galen interpreted Parmenides to mean that the male is
conceived (κυῖσκομαι) on the right side, but the passage might mean only that male embryos
are located more often on the right side, which would be consistent with Aristotle’s own view.
55. Peck treats this passage as problematic, glossing “the right side” in the first phrase as “the
right testis,” and speculating that the second phrase is an interpolation “as they [the words in
question] are inconsistent with the view just described” (Aristotle, Generation of Animals,
trans. A. L. Peck, 373 nn. b–c). But there is no necessary inconsistency; Anaxagoras’s view
may simply have been that the testes and the uterus are analogous.
56. Someone must have thought that the placement in the uterus was causally responsible for the
sex of offspring, since Aristotle attacks that view at GA 765a11–21, but it is worth noting that
Galen may have misinterpreted Parmenides, who may only have meant that the male embryo
is more likely to develop on the right side (a position Aristotle himself holds), and in the case
of Anaxagoras it seems to be the male seed that determines the sex rather than its location in
the uterus.
57. Aristotle’s reference here to columns and to pairs of contraries may have been based on
something more than, or other than, the Pythagorean lists of opposites. In the De caelo he is
critical of the Pythagoreans for focusing on right and left to the exclusion of front and back,
above and below, which Aristotle believes are more “fundamental” than or “prior” to right and
left (DC 2.2 285a11–27). Lloyd argues that “Aristotle’s use of the word sustoichia,
‘coordinate,’ in connection with his own theory of the pairs right and left and hot and cold at
PA 670b22 is obviously reminiscent of the way in which he refers to the Pythagorean
principles as arranged in coordinate columns (kata sustoichian, Met. 986a22f.), and yet on
several occasions he explicitly contrasts his own account of these and other related opposites
with that of the Pythagoreans; and many of his detailed biological theories based on the
distinction between right and left are clearly original. It seems, then, that the belief in the
inherent superiority of the right-hand side is not an exclusively Pythagorean doctrine. Indeed,
in some of the elements the Pythagorean Table of Opposites itself merely defined and made
explicit extremely old, and no doubt widespread, Greek beliefs (Lloyd, “Right and Left,” 178).
For Aristotle’s analysis of and disagreements with Pythagoreans, see DC 2.2.
58. Aristotle does concede some plausibility to the views on right and left that he criticizes, saying
that “the opinion that the cause of male and female is heat and cold, and that the difference
depends upon whether the secretion comes from the right side or from the left, has a modicum
of reason in it, because the right side of the body is hotter than the left; hotter semen is semen
which has been concocted . . . set and compacted, and the more compacted semen is, the more
fertile it is” (GA 4.1 765a35–b4). But he adds, “All the same, to state the matter in this way is
attempting to lay hold of the cause from too great a distance” (GA 4.1 765b4–6).
59. See Lloyd, “Right and Left,” 176; Charlotte Witt, “Aristotle on Deformed Animal Kinds,” in
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 43 (2012): 83–106.
60. Lloyd, “Right and Left,” 177. See also PA 4.10 686a27–31, where human beings are described
as the species that conforms best to the natural orientation of the cosmos.
61. Lloyd, “Right and Left,” 170.
62. Lloyd, “Right and Left,” 170.
63. Aristotle seems, then, to accept the Pythagorean list of opposites, except that he has transposed
the resting-moving opposition, placing “movement” in the column with “male” and “better.”
But the Pythagorean connotation may have been different, with “rest” signifying not passivity
but permanence.
64. For an account that emphasizes the naturalness of the purported weakness of women, see
Susan B. Levin, “Women’s Nature and Role in the Ideal Polis: Republic V Revisited,” in
Feminism in Ancient Philosophy, ed. Julie K. Ward (New York: Routledge, 1996), 13–30.
65. See, e.g., Aeschylus, fr. 243, Ch. 594–98; Sophocles, fr. 932; Aristophanes, Thesm. 504ff.,
Ekkl. 468–70, 616–20; Lys. 551ff. See also Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place,” 139.
66. Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place,” 139.
68. Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place,” 138–39, 142–43, 156.
69. Fear is wet and causes Anakreon to drip; painful anxiety “falls in drops” within the minds of
Aeschylus’s chorus (Ag. 179–80) (Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place,” 138).
70. I follow here the order of the books of the HA proposed by Gaza, and usually (although not
always) followed by editors since, transposing the book now numbered 7 from its position in
the manuscripts after the book now numbered 9, and so calling Book 9 that which in the
manuscripts appeared as 8. In Balme’s ordering of the books, they are as follows, with the
Bekker numbers at which they start: 7 (8) 588a10, 8 (9) 608a10, 9 (7) 581a10, 10 633b10 (see
also this chapter, n. 72).
71. Doubts about the authorship of Book 9 were raised by L. Dittmeyer (“Die Unechtheit des IX
Buches der Aristotelischen Tier-Geschichte,” Blätter f. d. bayerische Gymn. 23, 10 [1887],
65–79), H. Joachim (“De Theophrasti libris περὶ ζῴων” [Ph.D. diss., Bonn, 1892]) (both cited
in D. M. Balme, “Authenticity and Date of HA VII–X,” in Aristotle: History of Animals,
Volume III: Books 7–10, trans. D. M. Balme [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1991]) and more recently Carnes Lord (“On the Early History of the Aristotelian Corpus,”
American Journal of Philology 107, no. 2 [1986]: 152–53), all of whom suggest that
Theophrastus may have been the author. J. Tricot (Aristote: Histoire des Animaux I–X [Paris:
Vrin, 1957]); G. E. R. Lloyd (Science, Folklore, and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in
Ancient Greece [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 21–22); and A. L. Peck
(“Authenticity,” in Aristotle, History of Animals, Books 1–3, [Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press], lvi) are unpersuaded by their arguments. For an overview of the arguments
against the authenticity of Book 9, and an argument that Aristotle is in fact the author, see
Balme, “Authenticity and Date of HA VII–X,” 1–30.
72. Carson, for example, sees women’s restriction to the household as a social strategy to prevent
the unboundedness attributed to women from infecting the larger political community. She
cites as evidence for this view the legal prohibitions imposed on women by Solon (Carson,
“Putting Her in Her Place,” 156). There is some indication of this fear of infection in a speech
by Eteocles, addressing a chorus of Theban women in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes,
which included the lines: “Here now running wild among the citizenry / You have roared them
into spiritless cowardice” and “What is outside is a man’s province: let no / Woman debate it:
within doors do no mischief!” (191–92, 200–201) (Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, trans.
David Grene, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 2, ed. David Grene and Richmond
Lattimore [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959]).
73. Lovibond, for example, suggests that the view of what she calls the “Platonic-Aristotelian
tradition” was that because the appropriate place for women is the household, there was no
need for them to have a capacity to determine boundaries. She understands the notion of the
unbounded against a background in which virtue is a formal principle and purposive action
“expresses an enduring psychic structure of the kind appropriate to (civilized) humanity,” and
so moral rationality emerges “from the gradual exchange of a mental condition that is private
for one that is shared” (Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of Gender,” 92). Since women belong
in the household (by convention), they do not develop this shared mental condition and hence
are incapable of purposive action, which Lovibond takes to be the process of imposing
boundaries; this is the sense in which, and the reason that, they are unbounded. She says:
“Because the setting of women’s existence is not the public but the private sphere, there is not
the same need for women to have installed in their souls that identical form whose presence in
each male citizen makes him a fit person to participate in social and political life. That is why
it is only to be expected that the female mind should be multiple, unstable (cf.
‘resting/moving’), devious (cf. ‘straight/curved’), obscure (cf. ‘light/dark’) . . . in short, that it
should have all the qualities typical of those who have not been fully integrated into the
cultural order and whose behavior is therefore not fully intelligible (to others or even to
themselves) in terms of the current conceptual repertoire” (Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of
Gender,” 92).
75. For an overview of the Hippocratic works, see Elizabeth Craik, “The ‘Hippocratic Question’
and the Nature of the Hippocratic Corpus” (25–37), and Jacques Jouanna, “Textual History”
(38–62), in The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, ed. Peter Pormann (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018). Hippocratic texts are cited here with title, book (where
applicable) and section numbers, as found in the LCL editions, sometimes supplemented with
references in parentheses to volume, page, and line numbers in Emile Littré’s, Oeuvres
completes d’Hippocrate, 10 vols. (Paris: Baillière, 1839-61; repr. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1961–
2).
76. Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London:
Routledge, 1998), 28.
77. Translations of Diseases of Women 2 are from Hippocrates, Diseases of Women 1–2, ed. and
trans. Paul Potter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
78. For a discussion of the anatomy of the uterus in Hippocratic works, see Lesley Dean-Jones,
Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 65–69.
79. King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 28–29.
80. For a more detailed discussion of Hippocratic accounts of menarche and the accumulation and
evacuation of menstrual fluid, see Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, 47–65. She notes that
“because the majority of Hippocratic gynaecological treatises deal with pathology, and most
pathological conditions were thought to originate after menstrual blood had passed into the
womb, it is not possible to say with certainty that all the gynaecological authors believed that
menstrual blood was originally nourishment soaked from the stomach into the flesh of a
woman, but no alternative theory is put forward apart from that of Genit. and Nat. Puer.”
(Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, 59).
81. Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, 45. See also Ann Ellis Hanson, “The Medical Writer’s Woman,”
in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed.
David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991), 309–38.
82. Hippocrates, Diseases of Women 1–2, trans. Potter.
83. Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, 45.
84. Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, 46; but see Hanson, “The Medical Writer’s Woman,” 332.
85. “The males of all species are warmer and drier, and the females moister and colder, for the
following reasons: originally each sex was born in such things and grows thereby, while after
birth males use a more rigorous regimen, so that they are well warmed and dried, but females
use a regimen that is moister and less strenuous, besides purging the heat out of their bodies
every month” (Vict. 1.34). Translations of Regimen 1–3 are from Hippocrates, Nature of Man;
Regimen in Health; Humours; Aphorisms; Regimen 1–3; Dreams; Heracleitus: On the
Universe, vol. 4, trans. W. H. S Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).
86. Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, 46. Aristotle may have been following the Sicilian tradition of
Pythagoras and Empedocles, rather than the Hippocratic tradition, in taking a colder
temperature to explain wetness.
87. It is not clear how widespread or credible this view might have been, but we may see some
indication of its influence in the citizenship laws of Athens. Until 451/0 these laws stipulated
that a freeborn adult man qualified as a citizen if he was descended on his father’s side from
an Athenian citizen. This may have been because mothers were believed not to contribute
anything but a place for gestation for their offspring. After 451/0, however, a free adult man
had to have descended from Athenian citizens on both sides in order to count as a citizen,
suggesting that by then mothers were generally believed to have some influence over the
nature or quality of their offspring (see this chapter, section 1.5.1, for the legal status of
women in Athens). On citizenship see also Roger Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life
(London: Routledge, 1989), chap. 3; Loraux, The Children of Athena, 111–23.
88. For Hippocratic treatments of infertility, see Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, 152–53.
89. Censorinus writes: “Illud quoque ambiguam facit inter auctores opinionem, utrumne ex patris
tantummodo semine partus nascatur, ut Diogenes et Hippon stoicique scripserunt, an etiam ex
matris” (De die nat. 5.4). See Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, 149, and Lloyd, Science, Folklore,
and Ideology, 87–88, 107 n. 182, for these citations.
90. See Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 93–101, for an argument that we should understand
Aristotle’s account of generation as a “two-seed” theory.
91. See Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, 149, and Lloyd, Science, Folklore, and Ideology, 87–88,
107 n. 182, for these citations.
92. On the subject of the authenticity of HA 10, Dean-Jones notes that “until recently, it has been
widely accepted by modern scholars that HA X is not part of HA and Aristotle is not the
author of this work,” and adds that the “main argument against Aristotelian authorship is that
the author describes a woman as contributing seed to conception in the same way a man does,
while Aristotle argues vigorously in Generation of Animals (GA) and elsewhere that among
animals that reproduce sexually, the roles of the mother and father are not parallel, and in
particular that the female contribution to conception cannot involve the equivalent of the male
seed” (Lesley Dean-Jones, “Clinical Gynecology and Aristotle’s Biology: The Composition of
HA X,” Apeiron 45, no. 2 (2012): 181). Peck believes that since HA 10 is about the causes of
sterility in humans, it does not belong to HA, which is why it is omitted from the LCL (Peck,
“Authenticity”), and Föllinger points out that HA 10 does not use the terms “form” and
“matter” in speaking about reproduction and so may not have been written by Aristotle
(Sabine Föllinger, Differenz und Gleichheit: Das Geschlechterverhältnis in der Sicht
griechischer Philosophen des 4. bis 1. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1996), 143–
56). Dean-Jones also argues that “much is explained by accepting it as a treatise written by a
doctor” for clinical medical use, because (1) HA 10’s theory of conception differentiates
between three reproductive fluids in the female (female seed, menses, and vaginal lubricant),
(2) it is practical and therapeutic in emphasis, and (3) it bears similarities to works by
Hippocratic authors (Dean-Jones, “Clinical Gynecology,” 183, 188, 198–99). For counter-
arguments, see Balme, “Authenticity and Date”; Philip J. van der Eijk, “On Sterility (‘HA X’),
a Medical Work by Aristotle?,” Classical Quarterly 49, no. 2 (1999): 490–502; Connell,
Aristotle on Female Animals, 106–7.
93. “Now whereas food gives everything strength, a man’s seed comes from all the moisture in his
body (ἀπὸ παντὸς τοῦ ὑγροῦ τοῦ ἐν τῷ σώματι ἐόντος), and is the excretion of its most
powerful part (τὸ ἰσχυρότατον): proof that what is excreted is the most powerful part is the
fact that when we have intercourse we become weak (ἀσθενέες), although what we emit is so
little” (Genit. I.1 470.1–5); “I assert that seed is secreted from the whole body (ἀπὸ παντὸς τοῦ
σώματος), from the solid parts and the soft parts, and from all its moisture (ἀπὸ τοῦ ὑγροῦ
παντός)” (Genit. I.3 474.6–8); “In the uterus the seed (ἡ γονὴ) of both the woman and the man
comes from their whole body (ἀπὸ παντὸς τοῦ σώματος)—weak from the weak parts and
strong from the strong parts—so that the child must be formed accordingly” (Genit. I.8 480.7–
10). All translations of Genit. are from Hippocrates, Generation; Nature of the Child;
Diseases 4; Nature of Women and Barrenness, ed. and trans. Paul Potter, vol. 10 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
94. See GA 4.1 764b4–6. There are many questions about how this might work: for example, how
is it arranged that in a given coupling one animal will, and the other will not, contribute certain
parts?
95. See DK 68A141, A143, and GA 4.1 764b19.
96. Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, 163–64.
97. Ἔτι εἰ τὸ θῆλυ μὴ προΐεται σπέρμα, τοῦ αὐτοῦ λόγου μηδ᾿ ἀπὸ παντὸς ἀπιέναι. κἂν εἰ μὴ ἀπὸ
παντὸς ἀπέρχεται, οὐθὲν ἄλογον τὸ μηδ᾿ ἀπὸ τοῦ θήλεος, ἀλλ᾿ ἄλλον τινὰ τρόπον αἴτιον εἶναι
τὸ θῆλυ τῆς γενέσεως” (GA 1.18 724a8–12).
98. Although some commentators have speculated that those who denied that the female
contributed seed to the embryo were motivated by ideology, in the sense that the rejection was
a way of insisting on the lesser importance of women, there does not seem to be adequate
evidence for that explanation. The problem is not only that we lack positive evidence for the
motives of those denying female seed, but that there is plenty of misogyny among those who
did posit female seed, so that in the contemporary context it does not seem to be true that
positing female seed would have been understood as claiming equal importance for men and
women. See Horowitz, “Aristotle and Woman”; Suzanne Saïd, “Féminin, femme et femelle
dans les grands traités biologiques d’Aristote,” in La femme dans les sociétés antiques, ed.
Edmond Lévy (Strasbourg: Université des sciences humaines de Strasbourg, 1983), 93–117;
Stephen R. L. Clark, “Aristotle’s Woman,” History of Political Thought 3, no. 2 (1982): 177–
91; and Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1988), 24–46, for the claim that denying the existence of female seed was an
ideological position.
99. “Τῇσι δὲ γυναιξί <φημι> ἐν τῇ μίξει τριβομένου τοῦ αἰδοίου καὶ τῶν μητρέων κινευμένων,
ὥσπερ κνησμὸν ἐμπίπτειν ἐς αὐτὰς καὶ τῷ ἄλλῳ σώματι ἡδονὴν καὶ θέρμην παρέχειν. μεθίει
δὲ καὶ ἡ γυνὴ ἀπὸ τοῦ σώματος ὁτὲ μὲν ἐς τὰς μήτρας, αἱ δὲ μῆτραι ἰκμαλέαι γίνονται, ὁτὲ δὲ
καὶ ἔξω, ἢν χάσκωσιν αἱ μῆτραι μᾶλλον τοῦ καιροῦ . . . διότι δὲ μᾶλλον ὁ ἀνὴρ ἥδεται,
ἀποκρίνεται αὐτῷ ἐξαπίνης ἀπὸ τοῦ ὑγροῦ ἀπὸ ταραχῆς ἰσχυροτέρης ἢ τῇ γυναικί” (Genit. I. 4
474.16–476.10).
100. See also Prob. 4.15 878b1–14.
101. Some but not all of these theories were preformationist. As Dean-Jones says about the view in
Nature of the Child: “It was thus a question of which parent provided the most material from
their nose, not which nose nudged its way on to the face” (Women’s Bodies, 164).
102. Dean-Jones points out that most Hippocratic theories, while they can explain how children
might resemble mothers and why conception can only occur at a certain moment, “have
difficulty explaining why, if a woman can produce her own seed, she cannot produce
parthenogenically” (Women’s Bodies, 161). Moreover, HA 10 says that females in some
species do reproduce parthenogenically (e.g., locusts at HA 10.6 637b16–19), but in other
animals, if seed from only one parent formed the matter in the uterus, then it would produce a
molar pregnancy, analogous to a wind-egg (HA 10.7 638a6–b38).
103. He has already quoted Empedocles, at GA 1.18 723a23–26: “Suppose it is true that the
differentiation between male and female takes place during conception, as Empedocles says:
Into clean vessels were they poured forth; / Some spring up to be women, if so be / They meet
with cold” (DK B65).
104. See Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1942), 373 n. e; Lloyd, “Right and Left,” 171–72, 182 n. 19; Dean-Jones, Women’s
Bodies, 167.
105. See Lloyd, “Right and Left,” 182 n. 19.
106. See Galen Hippocr. Epid. VI. 48, CMG V 10.2.2 119 12ff., quoting Parmenides (DK B17: “on
the right, boys; on the left, girls”), cited by Lloyd, “Left and Right,” 171.
107. See Lloyd, “Right and Left,” 182–83 nn. 21–22, who cites Epid. II.6.15 (v.136.5 ff.); Epid.
VI.2.25 (v.290.7 ff.); Aph. V.48 (iv.550 ff.); cf. Prorrh., II.24 (ix.56.19 ff.). Other Hippocratic
treatises indicate other correlations between the male embryo and the right-hand side of the
mother’s body, e.g., Aph. V.38 (iv.544.11 ff.).
108. For commentary, see Iain M. Lonie, The Hippocratic Treatises, “On Generation,” “On the
Nature of the Child,” “Diseases IV”: A Commentary (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), 7.478.
See also Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 39; Föllinger, Differenz und Gleichheit,
42; King, Hippocrates’ Woman, 8.
109. Dean-Jones suggests this elegant explanation: “A possible answer is that the ‘parts’ from
which the seed is drawn are the humors which have different potencies” (Women’s Bodies,
168).
110. Plutarch attributes this to Solon and attempts to explain the motivation of the law: “It seems an
absurd and foolish law which permits an heiress, if her lawful husband fail her, to take his
nearest kinsman; yet some say this law was well contrived against those who, conscious of
their own unfitness, yet, for the sake of the portion, would match with heiresses, and make use
of law to put a violence upon nature; for now, since she can quit him for whom she pleases,
they would either abstain from such marriages, or continue them with disgrace and suffer for
their covetousness and designed affront; it is well done, moreover, to confine her to her
husband’s nearest kinsman, that the children may be of the same family” (Plutarch, “Solon,” in
Lives, Volume 1, Books 1–5, trans. John Dryden, rev. Arthur Hugh Clough [Boston: Little,
Brown, 1859], 187). For the legislation of Solon, see Claude Wehrli, “Les gynéconomes,”
Museum Helveticum 19, no. 1 (1962): 33–38; see also Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place,”
156.
111. See also Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life, 29; Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae, ed. R. G.
Ussher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 197), 1024f.
112. Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place,” 156: “A good woman does not exceed the boundary of her
oikos.” See Leonard Woodbury, “The Gratitude of the Locrian Maiden: Pindar, Pyth. 2.18–
20,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 108 (1878): 296–97, with
references. For restrictions on space and movement see Plutarch, Is. et Os. 75: the tortoise on
which Aphrodite rests her foot in the statue by Pheidias at Elis represents “a woman’s life,
closed upon itself in its own domestic space” (Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place,” 156);
Xenophon Oec. 7.20, 22, 30; Demosthenes, 59.122; Plato, Rep. 9 579b3–c4; Jean-Pierre
Vernant, “Hestia-Hermes: Sur l’expression religieuse de l’espace et du movement chez les
Grecs,” L’homme 3, no. 3 (1963): 12–50; Michael N. Nagler, Spontaneity and Tradition: A
Study in the Oral Art of Homer (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1974), 77–78; Ruth Padel, “Women: Model for Possession by Greek Daemons,” in Images of
Women in Antiquity, ed. Averil Cameron and Amélie Kuhrt (London: Routledge,1983), 3–19.
113. We can distinguish among pallakê, hetaera, and pornê. Pallakai were concubines, in practice
much like wives except that they were not provided with a dowry. Concubines were “kept for
the procreation of legitimate children” and treated in the same way as wives, sisters, mothers,
and daughters (Demosthenes, 23.53–55; see also Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores,
Wives and Slaves [New York: Shocken Books, 1975], 91). Hetaerai were companions, a kind
of aristocratic prostitute, “though the status of such women was hardly fixed. . . . First seen in
the sixth century BCE, the hetaira may be an aristocratic reaction-formation, an ‘invention of
the symposium’ ” (Madeleine M. Henry and Sharon L. James, “Woman, City, State: Theories,
Ideologies, and Concepts in the Archaic and Classical Periods,” in A Companion to Women in
the Ancient World, ed. Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon [Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell,
2012], 88); see Leslie Kurke, Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in
Ancient Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 181. Pornai were slave
prostitutes, usually foreign women captured during conflicts. For the claim that non-citizen
women might have work that was non-sexual in nature, see Pomeroy, Goddesses, 71–73.
114. Commentators sometimes suggest that enslaving women for men’s sexual use was a pragmatic
strategy for preserving the chastity of free women: “Because urbanization brought men easier
access to one another’s wives, sisters, and daughters, men’s sexual urges also constituted a
public danger. . . . The slave prostitute (pornê, ‘purchased female’) was a civic necessity for
peaceable relations among citizen men” (Henry and James, “Woman, City, State,” 88).
115. Ussher, in Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae, xx–xxv.
116. Plato, Republic 5, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1993), 224.
117. See Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 61; Plato,
The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 381.
Saxonhouse says that “there are enough questions raised within Book V itself and elsewhere
in the dialogue to make us doubt the seriousness of these proposals,” but she does not suggest
that they were humorous (Arlene W. Saxonhouse, “The Philosopher and the Female in the
Political Thought of Plato,” Political Theory 4, no. 2 [1976]: 195).
118. See Plato, Republic 5, ed. and trans. Halliwell, 224–25.
119. Plato, Republic 5, ed. and trans. Halliwell, 224–25. Some commentators have speculated that
Aristophanes may have known an early version of the Republic, or that both he and Plato drew
on some common unknown theoretical tract (despite Aristotle’s later assertion of the
uniqueness of the Socratic proposals). See Plato, Republic 5, ed. and trans. Halliwell, 224–25,
and James Adam, ed., The Republic of Plato, Vol. 1, Books I–V (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1963), 345–55, for summaries. For a discussion of possible sources for these
ideas, see Moses Hadas, “Utopian Sources in Herodotus,” Classical Philology 30, no. 2
(1935): 113–21; Nancy Demand, “Plato, Aristophanes, and the ‘Speeches of Pythagoras’,”
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 23, no. 2 (1982): 179–84; Friedrich Solmsen, Intellectual
Experiments of the Greek Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015),
chap. 3. Schofield says: “I think that fun [i.e., the fun that readers feel Plato is having with
them] consists precisely in arguing out in all seriousness and from first principles a social
political programme which . . . had quite recently been most memorably acted out as a sexual
extravaganza on the Attic stage” (Malcolm Schofield, Plato: Political Philosophy [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006], 229).
120. Translations of Assemblywomen are from Aristophanes, Assemblywomen, trans. Jeffrey
Henderson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
121. “τὴν γῆν πρώτιστα ποιήσω κοινὴν πάντων καὶ τἀργύριον καὶ τἄλλ᾿ ὁπόσ᾿ ἐστὶν ἑκάστῳ. εἶτ᾿
ἀπὸ τούτων κοινῶν ὄντων ἡμεῖς βοσκήσομεν ὑμᾶς ταμιευόμεναι καὶ φειδόμεναι καὶ τὴν
γνώμην προσέχουσαι” (Ekkl. 597–600).
122. “πάνθ᾿ ὅσα ξύννομα ζῶα θήλεα καὶ ὅσα ἄρρενα, τὴν προσήκουσαν ἀρετὴν ἑκάστῳ γένει πᾶν
κοινῇ δυνατὸν ἐπιτηδεύειν πέφυκεν” (Criti. 110c1–3).
123. Schofield calls this the “alienating” image, where his point is that in suggesting that it would
be best for the city and most respectful of human nature to train and employ men and women
in the same ways, Socrates draws the analogy with dogs in order to alienate us from
convention and from a conventional sense of ourselves as human beings (Schofield, Plato,
227–28). But dog analogies are common in the Republic (e.g., at 3 416a1–b5; 4 422d2–7; 5
451d4–e5, 466c6–d8; 7 537a5–8) and do not always seem to be intended to suggest a distance
from human nature. For example, at Rep. 2 375a2–76c7 the philosopher is compared to a
purebred dog, where the point seems to be that a philosophical nature is innate to some people.
So the point of the dog analogy here may be to emphasize the identical nature of men and
women (I’m grateful to Léa Derome for this suggestion).
124. These proposals are summarized at Timaeus 18b1–d5.
125. Cohen argues that the changes to women’s role proposed in the Laws are “revolutionary,” and
that “in Plato’s state women were expected, indeed required, to participate in all aspects of
political and civic life” (David Cohen, “The Legal Status and Political Role of Women in
Plato’s Laws,” Revue internationale des droits de l’antiquité 34 [1987]: 37). There is
disagreement about that last point, since some commentators believe that while Plato in the
Laws proposes education and military training for women, he restricts their political role to
offices related to marriage, or at any rate does not grant them equality in political participation
(see Glenn R. Morrow, Plato’s Cretan City: A Historical Interpretation of the “Laws”
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960)).
126. “τὰ αὐτὰ δὲ δὴ καὶ περὶ θηλειῶν ὁ μὲν ἐμὸς νόμος ἂν εἴποι πάντα ὅσαπερ καὶ περὶ τῶν
ἀρρένων, ἴσα καὶ τὰς θηλείας ἀσκεῖν δεῖν . . . τὰ δὲ νῦν ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν οἶδα ὅτι μυριάδες
ἀναρίθμητοι γυναικῶν εἰσὶ τῶν περὶ τὸν Πόντον, ἃς Σαυρομάτιδας καλοῦσιν, αἷς οὐχ ἵππων
μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ τόξων καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ὅπλων κοινωνία καὶ τοῖς ἀνδράσιν ἴση προστεταγμένη
ἴσως ἀσκεῖται . . . φημί, εἴπερ ταῦτα οὕτω ξυμβαίνειν ἐστὶ δυνατά, πάντων ἀνοητότατα τὰ νῦν
ἐν τοῖς παρ᾿ ἡμῖν τόποις γίγνεσθαι τὸ μὴ πάσῃ ῥώμῃ πάντας ὁμοθυμαδὸν ἐπιτηδεύειν ἄνδρας
γυναιξὶ ταὐτά. σχεδὸν γὰρ ὀλίγου πᾶσα ἡμίσεια πόλις ἀντὶ διπλασίας οὕτως ἐστί τε καὶ
γίγνεται ἐκ τῶν αὐτῶν τελῶν καὶ πόνων· καί τοι θαυμαστὸν ἂν ἁμάρτημα νομοθέτῃ τοῦτ᾿
αὐτὸ γίγνοιτο” (Laws 7 804d7–805b1).
Okin says “Plato’s arguments and conclusions in the Laws about the natural potential of
women are far more radical than those put forward in the Republic” (Susan Moller Okin,
“Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on the Family,” Philosophy and Public Affairs
6, no. 4 [1977]: 361 and Women in Western Political Thought [Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979], 43). Schofield concurs, remarking that “the Republic’s more
strenuously argued thesis that women should receive the same training and education for the
same occupations as men is reiterated in the Laws with more force and passion than ever”
(Schofield, Plato, 232).
127. Schofield concludes: “The Laws retains the Republic’s rejection of discrimination between
women and men—at least in its most general theoretical statements—with undiminished
fervour” (Schofield, Plato, 234).
128. See Plato, Republic 5, ed. and trans. Halliwell, 224–25, for a concise and complete account of
the similarities and differences between the proposals of Socrates and those of Praxagora.
129. Schofield says: “Plato’s collectivist proposals in Book 5 of the Republic are designed to secure
the advantage of aristocracy so defined while pre-empting its characteristic disadvantage”
(Schofield, Plato, 225). The characteristic advantage of aristocracy is that power is “placed in
the hands of the best men, i.e. those best qualified for deliberation” (see Herodotus, Histories
3.81); the characteristic disadvantage is a tendency to stasis among the aristocracy (Schofield,
Plato, 225).
130. Schofield, Plato, 212.
131. The question is not whether Plato or Socrates was a feminist; the question is whether the
proposals of Republic 5 should be interpreted to be feminist.
132. This is why Annas argues that “it is quite wrong to think of Plato as ‘the first feminist’ ” (Julia
Annas, “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” Philosophy 51, no. 197 [1976]: 747). See also Plato,
Republic 5, ed. and trans. Halliwell, 14–15.
133. For example, Stalley argues that while the Laws would make important changes to the
political role of women (compared to their status in Athens in the time of Plato), the proposed
changes were motivated not by a desire to achieve justice for women, but by Plato’s
collectivist desire to maximize the resources available to the state (R. F. Stalley, An
Introduction to Plato’s “Laws” [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983], 106). Annas had made the
same point about Republic 5: “[Plato’s] complete lack of interest [in the psychology of
women] underlines the fact that his argument does not recommend changing the present state
of affairs on the ground that women suffer from being denied opportunities that are open to
men . . . His argument is authoritarian . . . rather than liberal” (“Plato’s Republic and
Feminism,” 312).
134. Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of Gender,” 94.
135. Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of Gender,” 97.
136. Halliwell makes this point, noting that although Plato clearly intends not to make women
happier but to make the city happier, his proposals amount to a challenge that women are a
genos, a kind separate from men with certain distinctive and essential (as opposed to
contingent) features: “Bk. 5 presumes that in many activities, including the supreme fields of
philosophy and politics, the lives of male and female Guardians could be almost
indistinguishable; and it supposes that such an aim could be carried a very long way even in
the sphere of military training and warfare” (Plato, Republic 5, ed. and trans. Halliwell, 15).
See also Saxonhouse, “The Philosopher and the Female,” for the argument that in Republic 5
the female is ‘de-sexed’ in the sense that her peculiar nature goes unrecognized.
137. See Annas, “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” 307–21; Okin, Women in Western Political
Thought, 60–70; Susan B. Levin, “Plato on Women’s Nature: Reflections on the Laws,”
Ancient Philosophy 20, no. 1 (2000): 81–97.
138. See Cohen, “Legal Status and Political Role,” 27–40; Luc Brisson, “Ethics and Politics in
Plato’s Laws,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 28 (2005): 98–106; Trevor J. Saunders,
“Plato on Women in the Laws,” in The Greek World, ed. Anton Powell (London: Routledge,
1995), 591–609. For a discussion of the issues, see Schofield, Plato, 227–34; Christopher
Bobonich, Plato’s Utopia Recast: His Later Ethics and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 385–89.
139. Gregory Vlastos, “Was Plato a Feminist?,” in Feminist Interpretations of Plato, ed. Nancy
Tuana (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 11–23.
140. Schofield, Plato, 31.
141. For variations on this interpretation, see Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of Gender,” 88–101;
Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 2–7, 18–22; Levin, “Plato on Women’s
Nature.”
142. As Halliwell says, “The radicalism of the idea of female Guardians resides not so much in the
specifics of a way of life, as in the degree to which Plato’s case approaches a gender-neutral
interpretation of ‘human nature.’ And in that sense we have grounds for judging that what is
really at issue in much of Bk. 5 is not a view of women, but a philosophical conception of
human beings as creatures to whose lives biological gender can be made largely irrelevant”
(Plato, Republic 5, ed. and trans. Halliwell, 15).
143. “Τῶν αὐτῶν ἄρα ἀμφότεροι δέονται, εἴπερ μέλλουσιν ἀγαθοὶ εἶναι, καὶ ἡ γυνὴ καὶ ὁ ἀνήρ,
δικαιοσύνης καὶ σωφροσύνης” (Meno 73b5–7). Schofield says that here “Socrates does not
endorse Meno’s belief that virtue for a man functions within the public sphere, but within the
domestic for a woman . . . cf. e.g. Xen. Symp. 2.9; Arist. Pol. 1.13, 1260a20–22; D.L. 6.12
[Antisthenes], 7.175 [Cleanthes]” (Schofield, Plato, 248 n. 106).
144. There are other passages in Plato’s corpus where it is suggested that the nature of rule across
contexts is identical: at Statesman 259b the Visitor says, “Well, then, surely there won’t be any
difference, so far as ruling is concerned, between the character of a large household, on the
one hand, and the bulk of a small city on the other?” and Socrates agrees. Given that Greek
city-states could have populations as small as twenty-five citizens, this is perhaps not so
surprising.
145. Translations of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus are from Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and
Historical Commentary, trans. Sarah B. Pomeroy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). This
passage reads: “ἀλλὰ σωφρόνων τοί ἐστι καὶ ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς οὕτως ποιεῖν, ὅπως τά τε
ὄντα ὡς βέλτιστα ἕξει καὶ ἄλλα ὅτι πλεῖστα ἐκ τοῦ καλοῦ τε καὶ δικαίου προσγενήαι” (Oec.
7.15).
Chapter 2
1. Many commentators have denied that the menses is a passive substratum, or (what amounts to
the same thing) asserted that it possesses dunameis. See, among others, Aristotle, Generation
of Animals, trans. Peck, xii–xiii; Jessica Gelber, “Form and Inheritance in Aristotle’s
Embryology,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 39 (2010): 198; Connell, Aristotle on
Female Animals, 121–22.
2. See Devin M. Henry, “How Sexist Is Aristotle’s Developmental Biology?,” Phronesis 52, no.
3 (2007): 251–69; Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 280–91. Gelber also argues that the
female is not a failure, although she grants that the male is the “default” result of the process
of generation (Jessica Gelber, “Females in Aristotle’s Embryology,” in Aristotle’s “Generation
of Animals”: A Critical Guide, ed. Andrea Falcon and David Lefebvre (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018), 171–87). See section 2.9.5 for a discussion of this issue.
3. Karen M. Nielsen, “The Private Parts of Animals: Aristotle on the Teleology of Sexual
Difference,” Phronesis 53, nos. 4–5 (2008): 373–405.
4. Henry, “How Sexist Is Aristotle,” 251–69; Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 344–49;
Nielsen, “The Private Parts of Animals,” 373–405.
5. This understanding is drawn from Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 64–84; see
especially 66–67.
6. See Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 81–84, for an argument that Aristotle presents a
coherent account of the female role in generation throughout the GA.
7. For a helpful discussion of male and female as opposed, see Connell, Aristotle on Female
Animals, 280–84.
8. Aristotle uses the terms genos and eidos as relative terms: a genos is divided into eidê, so that
the same kind may be a genos relative to species that fall under it, and a species relative to the
genera under which it falls. See Categories 5 2a12–3b23 and D. M. Balme, “Genos and Eidos
in Aristotle’s Biology,” Classical Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1962): 81–98.
9. Met. 10.3 1054a23–26: “ἐπεὶ οὖν αἱ ἀντιθέσεις τετραχῶς, καὶ τούτων κατὰ στέρησιν λέγεται
θάτερον, ἐναντία ἂν εἴη, καὶ οὔτε ὡς ἀντίφασις οὔτε ὡς τὰ πρός τι λεγόμενα.” Cat. 10 11b18–
19: “λέγεται δὲ ἕτερον ἑτέρῳ ἀντικεῖσθαι τετραχῶς, ἢ ὡς τὰ πρός τι, ἢ ὡς τὰ ἐναντία, ἢ ὡς
στέρησις καὶ ἕξις, ἢ ὡς κατάφασις καὶ ἀπόφασις.”
10. Despite the implication here that male and female, like odd and even, are contraries without an
intermediate, it is possible that Aristotle recognized such an intermediate in the phenomenon
of dual-sexed animals and people (tragainai), who he says have sexual organs of both male
and female (GA 4.4 770b36).
11. In sections 2.5 I take up the question of the nature of “vital heat” (also called “natural heat”
and “soul heat”).
12. Henry has a helpful discussion of male and female as archai of generation in two senses (as
starting-points and as causes), in which he points out that in GA 1.2 this is a hypothesis, which
has to be established in subsequent chapters (Devin M. Henry, Aristotle on Form, Matter, and
Moving Causes: The Hylomorphic Theory of Substantial Generation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019), 111–12.
13. Aristotle says that both male and female contribute σπέρμα to generation, and that is why they
are both principles of generation (GA 1.2 716a11–14). In this passage σπέρμα refers to a
fertile residue of either sex. See the introduction to section 2.5, for a discussion of the terms
Aristotle uses throughout the GA for the fertile residues of male and female.
14. Aristotle is replying to those who assume that the male must contribute some material
component to the offspring (Anaxagoras, certain Hippocratic authors, Empedocles, and
Democritus), and arguing, by way of analogy, that it is possible that he does not; necessity
does not require it.
15. Several passages, at GA 1.20 729a9–12, 1.21 729b18–19, 2.1 732a4–5, and 4.1 765 b12,
associate the male with form, and some scholars have relied on them in developing
hylomorphic theories of natural generation, according to which (in its crudest form) the male
contributes form and the female matter (and nothing else) to the process of generation.
Connell argues against a hylomorphic theory of natural generation and for a theory that she
calls “archêkinêtic,” the broad outlines of which conform with my interpretation of Aristotle’s
account of animal generation in what follows (Sophia M. Connell, “Nutritive and Sentient
Soul in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals 2.5,” Phronesis [2020], 1–31. I agree with her, in
particular, on two points: that Aristotle emphasizes the role of the male as efficient cause, and
that both nutritive and sensitive soul must be present potentially in both semen and katamênia.
16. I agree with Connell that Aristotle’s discussion of wind-eggs does not demonstrate that the
female somehow contributes nutritive soul to the offspring independent of sensitive soul
(Connell, “Nutritive and Sentient Soul,” 16–19). For an interesting alternative view see Henry,
Aristotle on Form, Matter, and Moving Causes, 138–41. Although Henry advocates for a
hylomorphic theory of natural generation, it is not the crude version according to which the
male “provides” form to the material supplied by the female; he says that “the father’s semen
is responsible for endowing the offspring with sensory soul, not by implanting some kind of
latent soul directly into the female’s matter, but by endowing the matter with a set of active
powers which (in conjunction with its own passive powers) cause it to develop the sorts of
organs whose developed capacities constitute the sensory part of the offspring’s soul” (Henry,
Aristotle on Form, Matter, and Moving Causes, 141).
17. I discuss in sections 2.6.3 and 2.6.4 the issue of wind-eggs, and what they suggest about the
transmission of soul to the offspring.
18. These two points are rather different: although the males of many animal species act as the
source of the form by way of motions in the semen, there are ways of transmitting the motions
that bestow form on the offspring without producing semen (see GA 1.18 725b30–35; 726a5–
10). It is characteristic of all male animals to be the source or origin of form and to transmit it;
concocting and ejaculating semen is just one way of accomplishing the transmission. It is the
way the male serves as the source of form in all perfect or viviparous animals, including
humans (GA 2.4 737b26–29). So the difference between male and female in these animals is
some capacity or incapacity to concoct sperma, and thereby some capacity or incapacity to act
as the source of form.
19. I will have more to say about vital heat, the heart and their role in concoction in sections 2.4
and 2.5 of this chapter and also in chap. 4.
20. Connell argues that the two residues are not different in kind, but only in degree (Aristotle on
Female Animals, 150), but that view seems to depend on taking the ταὐτὸ at 766a1 (which in
the Platt translation is rendered as “the same product”) as indicating something that is identical
in the sense of the same in kind, which is not obviously the sense. The question is whether one
should understand a more perfect or complete stage in the concoction of a single thing (the
ultimate nutriment) as different in kind or only in degree. In some cases, e.g., the maturing of
a fruit, we might be inclined to understand it as a difference in degree. But the important point
about the difference between male and female fertile residues seems to be that they have
different capacities, and two things which are made from the same stuff but possess different
abilities are different in kind. This is true even though Connell is certainly right to assert that
“the female contribution is very far from being ‘raw’ material”—that it is, in fact, “highly
specialized and full of dynamic potential,” (149–50). The point is that the dynamic potential of
the katamênia is different from the dynamic potential of the semen, although they are
coordinated potentialities. The menses has a peculiar status, in one respect resembling blood
(insofar as it provides matter for the offspring), but in another respect resembling gonê
(insofar as it does potentially have soul).
21. I discuss in section 2.9.5 the claim that the female is a deformity or monstrosity.
22. Although I will not discuss oviparous or asexual species, it is worth noting that the account of
sexual difference in oviparous animals will be different. See GA 3.1–7.
23. The analogy with the craftsman suggests that the male need not provide matter, but the
conclusion that he does not provide matter seems unwarranted by that analogy. On the other
hand, the curdling analogy at GA 2.4 739b21–31 does help to motivate the idea that the male
does not provide matter, insofar as it suggests how it might be possible for a material
substance (rennet) to shape and form another material substance (milk) without becoming a
part of that substance.
24. The potentiality for sensitive soul in the katamênia is more remote; just as a block of marble
has a statue of Hermes in it potentially, so too the katamênia has sensitive soul. In both cases,
an external, active power must act on the matter to realize that potentiality.
25. Although this passage implies that sex is not a pervasive characteristic of an animal body, such
that we speak loosely when we say that an individual animal is “male” or “female,” in other
passages Aristotle asserts precisely that sex is pervasive of the whole body; see GA 4.1
764b28–765a3. So we might wonder whether sex belongs only to certain organs specifically
associated with reproduction or is a feature of the body as a whole.
26. We will see in section 2.8 that Aristotle describes embryological development in just this way.
27. He adds that “in the blooded animals the parts which serve for copulation differ in their
shapes” (GA 1.2 716b2–4). In this passage, the phrase “appear to the senses” is probably a
reference to empirical evidence, from dissections or graphs or diagrams. It cannot indicate a
distinction between external and internal organs, since the list of organs Aristotle offers as
appearing to the senses includes both internal and external organs.
28. Aristotle appears to be unaware of the ovaries, although there is one passage in History of
Animals 9 where the author (if it was Aristotle) seems to mention something like ovaries in
pigs, the kapria that “grows onto [the two sides of] the womb” (HA 9.50 632a25–6). He treats
breasts as insignificant for sexual difference (both men and women have breasts, on his view,
although they differ in size [GA 4.8 776b19–20]), and so does not mention them as among the
sexual body parts evident to the senses.
29. In animals that have longer spermatic ducts that double back on themselves, the testes function
as weights on the ducts, to hold them in place and allow the semen to proceed through the
ducts in a steady, unhurried way: “This then is the object for which the testes have been
contrived: they make the movement of the seminal residue more steady (στασιμώτεραν)” (GA
1.4 717a30–32). The testes do not then produce sperma or participate in its concoction.
30. Aristotle is concerned to explain the location of the uterus, as he is with other animal parts:
“The reason why the uterus is always inside is that it is the container for the young creature
while it is being formed, and this needs protection, shelter, and concoction, which the outer
part of the body cannot provide, being easily injured and cold” (GA 1.12 719a31–35).
31. Some commentators have suggested that Aristotle understands the sexual organs he identifies
as such to be the same structures in male and female, differentiated only by size, or place. This
is the view propounded by Laqueur (Making Sex, 33), who sees Aristotle as introducing the
view later held by Galen. I do not think there is sufficient evidence to conclude, as Laqueur
does, that Aristotle sees a symmetry in male and female sexual organs. For criticisms of
Laqueur’s thesis and argument, see Katharine Park and Robert A. Nye, “Destiny Is Anatomy,”
New Republic, 18 February 1991, 53–57; Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The
Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). The most interesting
evidence that Aristotle may have thought the sexual organs of male and female were parallel
structures occurs in contexts where Aristotle discusses sexual pleasure. For example, at GA
1.20 728a32–34 he says: “An indication that the female emits no semen is actually afforded by
the fact that in intercourse the pleasure is produced in the same place as in the male by contact,
yet this is not the place from which the liquid is emitted [τῇ ἁφῇ κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν τόπον τοῖς
ἄρρεσιν· καίτοι οὐ προΐενται τὴν ἰκμάδα ταύτην ἐντεῦθεν.].”
32. In both passages I have cited, the heat in question is characterized as natural (φυσικήν); in one
it is described as inborn or connate (σύμφυτον). This is the heat that is usually called “vital
heat” to indicate that it is peculiar to living things (but, for example, in Mugnier’s French
translation in the Budé edition, it is also called “natural heat” [“une certaine chaleur
naturelle”]) (Aristotle, Petits traités d’histoire naturelle, trans. René Mugnier, 2nd ed. [Paris:
Les Belles Lettres, 1965]).
33. The heart in effect determines whether the individual animal is male or female by determining
the degree of vital heat transmitted to the blood and hence the degree to which the blood can
be concocted. I discuss in section 2.8.6 the passage at GA 4.1 764b21–765a3 where Aristotle
discusses how the heart determines the organs of sexual difference; for the moment we should
note that his answer is that the sexual organs are formed for the sake of the vascular
differences, which, in turn, are for the sake of the differences in the capacity of the heart to
transmit vital heat to the blood.
34. Ross, like Hett, translates “τὸ γε κύριον τῶν αἰσθητερίων” as “the supreme organ of the sense-
faculties” (“On Youth and Old Age,” in Aristotle, Parva Naturalia, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1955). Mugnier translates it as “le principe souverain des sensations”
(Aristotle, Petits traités d’histoire naturelle, trans. Mugnier). The point is that it exercises
some kind of supremacy over other organs.
35. I have modified Hett’s translation of this sentence to convey more clearly what Aristotle is
saying about the heart and its role. Hett has: “But the heart is the supreme power, and
contributes the final step”; Ross translates: “But it is the heart that has supreme control,
exercising an additional and completing function” (Aristotle, “On Youth and Old Age,” ed.
Ross); Mugnier renders the passage as: “Quant au coeur, c’est la partie la plus importante et il
ajoute la fin à tout le reste” (Aristotle, Petits traités d’histoire naturelle, trans. Mugnier).
Mugnier seems to me to capture best the sense of the Greek.
36. In this passage Aristotle does not demonstrate that the heart is the most authoritative organ by
associating the heart with blood vessels and blood vessels with sensation, and then identifying
sensation as the peculiar activity of animals. He argues, rather, that the heart is the seat of
nutrition and sensation from the premise that it is the most authoritative or sovereign organ.
37. The claim that the heart is the first organ formed is connected to Aristotle’s claim that the
heart is the origin of sensation. We have seen that he defines the male principle as that which
imparts sensitive soul to the offspring, and we will see in sections 2.6 and 2.7 that he
understands conception as a process that begins when sensitive soul actualizes the katamênia
provided by the female. The formation of the heart in the embryo occurs when the male
bestows sensitive form (through movements in the semen) on the katamênia, which already
possesses in potentiality a nutritive soul faculty.
38. We might expect Aristotle to say that the telos of an animal is sensation, but in fact he claims
that the telos of animals (other than human beings) is the reproduction of another like itself
(see GA 2.1 731b20–34 and DA 2.4 415a25–415b2). The nutritive and reproductive functions
of an animal are both included in the nutritive faculty, so the ends of nutrition are subordinated
to the ends of both sensation and reproduction.
39. The analogy is obviously imperfect; the heart is not a conscious being setting ends for other
conscious beings as the master craftsman sets the ends for his subordinates. Determining ends
is not, for Aristotle, always a conscious process.
40. Notice that Aristotle does not hold the view (attributed to him by some scholars, e.g., Jean
Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, 2nd ed.
[Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981], 44) that the female’s contribution to
generation is only as a vessel, that the uterus is a place for the development of the form
provided by the male. The female, in Aristotle’s view, provides the material cause, which is
both the menses and the nutrition ingested by the female during gestation, as well as an
appropriate place for the embryo and fetus to develop.
41. This is why some commentators have supposed that Aristotle uses σπέρμα ambiguously (in
the sense of “seed”) to refer to the fertile residue of either sex, or both, only in the first book of
the GA, and that after the discussion of fertile residues at GA 1.17–23 it becomes a more
technical term that he uses to refer exclusively to the male residue (in the sense of “semen”).
But there is considerable evidence, some cited earlier, that Aristotle continues to use σπέρμα
(in the sense of “seed”) to refer to the fertile residues of both sexes later in the GA, even as he
sometimes uses it to refer only to semen. For a discussion of the evidence, and an argument
that Aristotle sometimes uses σπέρμα throughout the GA to refer to the female as well as the
male seminal fluid, see Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 101–7.
42. In one passage, at GA 2.7 747a18, where Aristotle compares the nature of the brain to the
nature of γονή, he might be referring to the fertile residue of either sex.
43. Pneuma is also the source of sensation: the blood in the central chamber of the heart is the
purest because it has most pneuma; see G. R. T. Ross, Aristotle, De Sensu and De Memoria:
Text and Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1906), 16–17; see chap. 4, section 4.2.
44. There are two passages concerned with lungs and their function in the PA (3.4 667a16–30 and
3.6 668b34–669b1) that suggest that pneuma, although it is defined as “hot air,” is capable of
cooling as well as heating. And as we will see in section 2.7.3, this seems to be necessary for
the process of embryological formation.
45. Notice in this passage the claim that the process of concoction is sometimes subject to outside
influences; this will be important when we come to discuss Aristotle’s explanation of wind-
eggs.
46. For the natural as an internal principle of change, see Metaphysics 5.4, where one of the senses
of “nature” is “the source from which the primary movement in each natural object is present
in it in virtue of its own essence [ὅθεν ἡ κίνησις ἡ πρώτη ἐν ἑκάστῳ τῶν φύσει ὄντων ἐν αὐτῷ
ᾗ αὐτὸ ὑπάρχει]” (1014b19–21), and Physics 2.1, where Aristotle says that a thing with a
nature “has within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness (in respect of place, or of
growth and decrease, or by way of alteration) [τὰ μὲν γὰρ φύσει ὄντα πάντα φαίνεται ἔχοντα
ἐν ἑαυτοῖς ἀρχὴν κινήσεως καὶ στάσεως—τὰ μὲν κατὰ τόπον, τὰ δὲ κατ᾿ αὔξησιν καὶ φθίσιν,
τὰ δὲ κατ᾿ ἀλλοίωσιν]” (192b14–17).
47. But notice that at Meteor. 4.5 382b4–5 Aristotle says that the cold, because it is found in earth
and water, which are characterized primarily by the dry and the moist, is also passive.
48. There is a contrast here between two kinds of change: (1) mastery as a process of generation
(where what is generated is either concocted through heat or determined through cold) and (2)
the failure to master as a process which, at its most extreme, leads to decay. Decay occurs,
Aristotle points out, when external heat destroys the internal heat and thereby strips away its
natural moisture (Meteor. 4.1 379a11–26); notice that vital heat, by contrast with external heat,
attracts moisture (Meteor. 4.1 379a24–6). And so decay is caused by external heat and internal
coldness (Meteor. 4.1 379a21–22). It is not clear that there is a contrast between (1) the
“inconcoction” that is produced by cold (Meteor. 4.2 379b13–14), and (2) what results when
the hot “fails to master”, which is also described as inconcoction (Meteor. 4.2 379a2–3). We
might expect that there should be a contrast, since in (1) the cold is said to act to generate
something, whereas in (2) there is a resistance to being acted on, and nothing is generated. But
first, these may amount to the same thing, since in (1) something is imperfectly concocted
because of cold and in (2) imperfect concoction also occurs because of the presence of
cold/insufficient heat. And second, some of the cases that seem to fall under (1) mentioned in
the passages at Meteor. 4.3 381a17–23 and 381b18–19 (parboiling and scorching) suggest that
while some change is undergone, nothing new is generated, and in the case of rawness there is
no change at all, and certainly nothing new generated.
49. Neither the active nor the passive qualities—the hot, cold, moist, and dry—are in and of
themselves good or bad on Aristotle’s account. Clearly the passive and active qualities are
equally and mutually necessary if generation is to occur. Aristotle often does seem to define
the cold in negative terms (at, e.g., Met. 12.3 1070b12, Meteor. 4.1 379a18–19). And we may
think that the resistance to having a limit imposed on it is a negative feature for a passive
quality like the dry. But it is more usual for Aristotle to suggest that certain combinations of
these qualities are bad (or worse than others). For example, the combination of the cold and
the dry is associated with old age and death (Meteor. 4.1 379a15-b8), and the combination of
the cold and the moist is associated with the female.
50. G. E. R. Lloyd points out that the notion of “perfection” in the definition of concoction must
allow for different manifestations of perfection: “Concoction is a bringing of something to
perfection or completion achieved through heat operating principally on the wet. Its species
differ in the kind of completion they are, that is by the goal or end in view (379b25ff.). They
are further differentiated either by the kind of heat (e.g. ‘wet’ ‘dry’) or by the material worked
on, and failures, that is ‘inconcoctions,’ are similarly put down to one or other factor or the
relationship, the imbalance, between them” (G. E. R. Lloyd, Aristotelian Explorations
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 85). In other words, if concoction perfects or
completes its object, then there must be a determinate end to the process, but that end will
differ according to the species of concoction (i.e., maturation, digestion, seed production,
embryological development).
51. Aristotle defines a fetation (κύημα) as “the first mixture of male and female [sperma]” (GA
1.20 728b34–35). For the distinction between the fetation and the embryo see this chapter,
section 2.6.1.
52. On the variety of processes that are grouped together as instances of pepsis, see Lloyd,
Aristotelian Explorations, 85.
53. Aristotle describes the contrast between useful and useless nourishment this way: “By ‘useless
nourishment’ I mean that which contributes nothing further to the natural organism and which
if too much of it is consumed causes very great injury to the organism; ‘useful nourishment’ is
the opposite of this” (GA 1.18 725a5–7).
54. For a full account of the concoction of semen see Lloyd, Aristotelian Explorations, 91–95; for
an account that emphasizes the role of different parts of the body, see Andrew Coles,
“Biomedical Models of Reproduction in the Fifth Century BC and Aristotle’s Generation of
Animals,’” Phronesis 40, no. 1 (1995): 48–88.
55. Sperma at GA 1.18 725b7 may refer only to semen, and not to both semen and katamênia,
since Aristotle seems to believe that the female need not emit sperma in the same way or at
the same time as the male; certainly he believes that conception does not require female
orgasm (GA 1.19 727b7–12). See this chapter, n. 67. It will still be the case that the sperma
produced by both sexes is the final product of the concoction of the ultimate nutriment.
56. The evidence that both seminal residues are useful and natural is among the evidence for the
view that Aristotle believes the female to be natural and valuable; if menses is natural, then the
female animal that produces menses must be natural.
57. Since the heart is the source of natural heat and the difference in natural heat between male
and female is ultimately responsible for their different capacities, in some species it may be
that the heart is the only bodily site where pneuma is added to the residue of the nutriment,
and hence the site where sperma is concocted. But in certain animals more pneuma is added
during intercourse, while the semen is in the spermatic ducts of the male, and it is this final
addition of pneuma that definitively differentiates semen from menses in these cases. In male
animals with testes, Aristotle tells us, the residue of blood is concocted into semen during
copulation when, because of the heat produced by friction, more pneuma is added (GA 1.5
717b23–6). Aristotle thus provides us with a functional account of intercourse, the final cause
of which is the friction that, by producing heat, further concocts the male semen in the
spermatic ducts. This makes clear that pneumatization does not occur only in the heart in
certain species.
58. “Le pneuma congénital se forme à partir du sang qui est en même temps chaud et humide:
cette production se fait principalement dans le coeur par une évaporation constante: nous
savons que le pneuma interne contient en lui la chaleur vitale; il en résulte que ce pneuma
remplit le rôle d’instrument dans les activités de l’âme et tout d’abord dans l’activité de l’âme
nutritive. Le coeur est donc vraiment l’organe central de l’organisme vivant” (G. Verbeke,
“Doctrine du pneuma et entéléchisme chez Aristote,” in Aristotle on Mind and the Senses:
Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium Aristotelicum, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd and G. E. L. Owen
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 195). Henry writes, “Aristotle thinks of
concoction as a kind of refining process (cf. 728a28: πεπηρωμένον). For example, in several
places spermatogenesis is compared to the process of refining fruit (728a26–30, 765b19–35,
cf. 725a11–18). As in this process, spermatogenesis begins from a large bulk of material and
refines it, gradually removing its impurities (the fluid portion) until what results is a pure form
of concentrated seed” (Henry, “How Sexist is Aristotle,” 257). Although katamênia certainly
contains more fluid than does semen, the impurities that are removed in the process of
purification will also include “earthy” elements.
59. The female does not, Aristotle emphasizes, contribute a second residue to the generation of
offspring. We should notice that this position was controversial in the context of the ancient
debate, where many believed that the female provided two different fluids to the process of
generation, because they attributed formal generative powers to the fluids secreted at the
cervix and in the vagina. See, e.g., the Hippocratic discussion in Genit. and Nat. Puer.; see
also the discussion of this question in Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, 153–60, and Aline
Rousselle, “Observation feminine et idéologie masculine: Le corps de la femme d’après les
médecins grecs,” Annales 35, no. 5 (1980): 1089–1115. The identification of the fluids
secreted at the cervix and in the vagina with the fertile fluid was probably due to the
resemblance between such clear or milky fluids and the semen produced by the male. See
Daryl McGowan Tress, “The Metaphysical Science of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and
Its Feminist Critics,” Review of Metaphysics 46, no. 2 (1992): 307–41.
60. See Andrea L. Carbone, “The Axes of Symmetry: Morphology in Aristotle’s Biology,”
Apeiron 49, no. 1 (2016): 1–2 n. 1; Scott Atran, “Pre-Theoretical Aspects of Aristotelian
Definition and Classification of Animals: The Case for Common Sense,” Studies in the
History and Philosophy of Science 16, no. 2 (1985): 122; Johannes Morsink, “Was Aristotle’s
Biology Sexist?,” Journal of the History of Biology 12, no. 1 (1979): 84 n. 7.
61. The difference in capacity is also, I will suggest in chap. 4, a difference that we might expect
to affect the capacity for sensation.
62. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, lxiv–lxv.
63. Connell claims that this heat is not different in kind from the heat of the sun (Aristotle on
Female Animals, 223–24), but if it were not we would expect Aristotle to explain why it can
produce effects in the body that it does not produce external to the body.
64. As Connell points out, rather than saying that the male “provides” sensitive soul to the
katamênia, we should say that “the male simultaneously establishes the beginning of the
development of the intertwined and co-dependent nutritive and sentient aspect of the soul of
the particular kind” (Connell, “Nutritive and Sentient Soul,” 29). This is why I generally
describe the action of semen on katamênia as one in which the male “produces” rather than
“transmits” or “provides” soul: the soul is already present in potentiality in the katamênia, and
both sexes participate in the transmission of soul.
65. Notice that in GA 2.1 731b20–24, Aristotle contrasts the coupling of efficient and material
cause as the “necessary” in opposition to the final cause.
66. In claiming that both male and female contribute sperma to generation and identifying the
sperma of the female as the menses, Aristotle is clearly establishing a position in contrast to
two distinct views: that the female is only a vessel (a view he attributes to Anaxagoras and
other physiologers at GA 4.1 763b30–764a1), and that her sperma is identical to that of the
male (a view he attributes to Empedocles and Democritus at GA 4.1 764a1–765a5).
67. A more obscure argument for the position is offered at GA 1.19 727b7–12, where Aristotle
says, “Here is an indication that the female does not discharge semen of the same kind as the
male, and that the offspring is not formed from a mixture of two semens, as some allege. Very
often the female conceives although she has derived no pleasure from the act of coitus.” If
conception does not require female orgasm, that will be because the female semen is not of the
same kind as the male, and need not be emitted during intercourse. But it is not clear what
follows from this.
68. Although Aristotle says that the female sperma lacks the ἀρχή or origin of the soul (GA 2.3
737a27), he cannot mean that the female sperma lacks any potentiality for soul; as the material
cause of the animal to be generated it must have some potentiality for soul. G. E. R. Lloyd
writes: “Aristotle is particularly exercised, in his account of reproduction, to specify how the
soul is present in the seed, distinguishing the nutritive soul, which is present already
potentially in the seed (and comes into operation as soon as the seed draws nourishment to
itself, GA 736b8ff.), from the perceptive soul, which is supplied by the male parent and is
present, again potentially, only at the point when a new animal is recognisable as such”
(Lloyd, Aristotelian Explorations, 42). Lloyd implies that the nutritive soul is not supplied by
the male parent, and since no other explanation is offered by Aristotle, we must suppose that it
is supplied, in potentiality, by the female parent. But in a note Lloyd expresses some
uncertainty, allowing that there are passages where the female sperma is “said to lack the
arche of the soul” (GA 2.3 737a27), but also passages in which he “talks of movements in the
seed that are derived from both parents” (GA 4.3 768a10ff.; contrast with John M. Cooper,
“Metaphysics in Aristotle’s Embryology,” in Knowledge, Nature, and the Good [Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004], 174–203) (Lloyd, Aristotelian Explorations, 42 n. 7).
The point, Lloyd says, is that “while in some texts the differences between male and female
contributions to reproduction are stressed, in others the emphasis is on the point that the
female katamênia are analogous to the semen in males (e.g. GA 727a2ff.) and are indeed seed,
even if not pure, not fully concocted . . . e.g. 728a26ff)” (42 n. 7). For evidence that the
nutritive soul is already potentially in the seed, while the perceptive soul is present potentially
only at the point when a new animal is recognisable as such, Lloyd directs us in a note to:
735a4ff., 735a16ff., 736a35ff., 736b1ff., 738b25ff., 757b15ff. (42 n. 6). On my view the
perceptive or sensitive soul must be present potentially in what Lloyd calls “the seed” (i.e., the
katamênia) since it is possible for perceptive soul to be actualized in the katamênia as it is
informed, but it is present as a passive potentiality rather than as an active potentiality.
69. Aristotle’s discussion of spontaneous generation (at GA 3.11 762a18–763b16; see also GA 2.6
743a35–36) may also offer some evidence of the capacity of the material cause in the
generation of an animal, although the tensions between this discussion and Aristotle’s larger
account of generation make it difficult to extend with confidence the claims he makes about
the material cause in the case of spontaneous generation to the case of sexual generation (on
the difficulties, see Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 255–64). Aristotle attempts to
identify the counterparts to the male and female principles in instances of spontaneous
generation. On his account, the heat present in the environment concocts and shapes in some
manner some quantity of sea-water and earth; this is the equivalent to the female principle (GA
3.11 762b13–16). In the Metaphysics, as Peck points out, Aristotle says that “the natural things
which (like some artificial objects) can be produced spontaneously are those whose matter can
be moved even by itself in the way in which the seed usually moves it; but those things which
have not such matter cannot be produced except by parents” (Met. 7.9 1034b16–19). Peck
comments: “ ‘Matter,’ the ἐξ οὗ of living things, might be looked upon as considerably more
than mere lifeless, inert material” (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, 585). This
seems right and supports the idea that we should understand the katamênia as capable rather
than inert.
70. For an argument that Aristotle’s discussion of wind-eggs is not sufficient evidence to suggest
that he thought the female is capable of contributing form in some way, see Gelber, “Form and
Inheritance,” 198–202. Gelber’s argument depends on the claim that the wind-egg does not
have actual nutritive soul because it does not have organs—but it is actually growing, which
suggests that the nutritive soul it has, while clearly imperfect, is not entirely potential.
71. This passage from the GA reiterates the concept of degrees of actuality that we find in the De
anima in a passage in which Aristotle uses the distinction between sleeping and waking to
differentiate degrees of potentiality and actuality, although in this passage he seems to
compress the geometer who is awake and the one who is “busy at his studies” into a single
phase (see DA 2.1 412a21-26).
72. Alan Code, “Soul as Efficient Cause in Aristotle’s Embryology,” Philosophical Topics 15, no.
2 (1987): 55.
73. Many commentators have worried about this passage insofar as it suggests that pneuma is the
physical substance of soul. Whether it just is soul (Gad Freudenthal, Aristotle’s Theory of
Material Substance: Heat and Pneuma, Form and Soul [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999],
106–48) or is the instrument of soul (Verbeke, “Doctrine du pneuma,” 191–214), whether this
is an intractable problem (François Nuyens, L’évolution de la psychologie d’Aristote [Leuven:
Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1948])—these are all important questions, about which I
have nothing to say here.
74. For this sense of “the faculty of soul of every kind” see DA 2.3: “Among the capacities of the
soul (τῶν δὲ δυνάμεων τῆς ψυχῆς), all belong to some, to others some of them belong, and to
still others only one belongs. The capacities we mentioned were: the nutritive faculty, the
perceptual faculty, the desiderative faculty, the faculty of motion with respect to place, and the
faculty of understanding. The nutritive faculty alone belongs to plants; both this and the
perceptual faculty belong to others” (414a29-b2). Later in the chapter Aristotle refers to these
“faculties of soul” simply as “souls” (ταῖς ψυχαῖς). So in the passage from the GA under
discussion here, the most natural reading of “souls” is “faculties of soul”—nutritive, sensitive,
etc. It is not, as one might suppose on first reading, a reference to the different souls that
different species possess (i.e., a reference to different essential forms), since then we would
not expect the link to be drawn to different values in the physical substances that transmit the
soul. That is, it is implausible that Aristotle is here suggesting that the semen of a giraffe is
more or less worthy than the semen of a hedgehog.
75. Some qualifying points: (1) I say “primarily” because it is clear both that the menses must also
have a passive potentiality for sensitive soul and that the potentiality for sensitive soul in the
semen must include an active potentiality for nutritive soul. (2) It has been suggested to me
that Aristotle’s point about a difference in value is not intended to contrast male and female
sperma, but rather to contrast “the hot” in sperma with fire (since the former is more worthy
because capable of generation). But that interpretation does not make sense of the claim that
the souls (or faculties of soul) differ from one another in worthiness. (3) Aristotle has already
excluded the possibility that one faculty of soul, nous, the rational faculty, could be conveyed
to the offspring in some physical substance (GA 2.3 736b27–29). I discuss this claim in
section 2.10.2 of this chapter.
76. Henry, for example, distinguishes between two stages in the formation of offspring: in the
first, embryogenesis, “the semen ‘gives form’ to the embryo in the purely mechanical sense of
imposing a limit or boundary (dioriountos) on the relatively indeterminate fluid causing it to
set)” (Henry, Aristotle on Matter, Form and Moving Causes, 119); in the second, in which
mature offspring are produced, the male provides the animal’s form in the sense of its essence,
insofar as the capacity for sensation is “the defining contribution of the male animal” (133).
77. For a discussion of Aristotle’s use of συνιστάναι and συνίστασθαι see Aristotle, Generation of
Animals, trans. Peck, lxi–lxii. Peck says, “ συνιστάναι . . .denotes the first impact of Form
upon Matter, the first step in the process of actualizing the potentiality of Matter,” because the
term is “specially frequent in passages describing the initial action of the semen in constituting
a ‘fetation’ out of the menstrual fluid of the female.” He also points out that it is the term
Aristotle uses to describe the action of rennet on milk. I argue that there are reasons to think
that, at least sometimes (as here at GA 2.1 733b20–23), it refers not only to the initial impact
but to the entire process of embryological development.
78. In the discussions of wind-eggs, setting is described as the separation of yolk and white, where
the white is identified as the part that bears the soul-heat, and the yolk as the matter that will
be acted on by the soul-heat. Aristotle is emphatic that both white and yolk are from the
female residue; the male sets but does not provide any matter (GA 3.1 751b21–752a4).
79. This is true of the conception of an animal, but Aristotle, as we have seen, also speaks of the
process by which a wind-egg is formed as “setting,” although the wind-egg does not have
differentiated organs.
80. Two points are worth remarking in this passage. First, the claim that the nature of milk and the
nature of menstrual fluid are the same may seem surprising, but it is obvious in light of
Aristotle’s views on the concocting of the bodily residues: both menstrual fluid and the milk
of blooded animals are useful residues concocted from the excess of blood produced by the
body of the female animal. Second, the claim that setting occurs both because of necessity and
for a purpose is an instance of a phenomenon we see often in the GA: the claim that material
necessity is at work at the same time that conditional necessity is at work. See this chapter,
section 2.9.
81. Gelber speculates that the κινήσεις are more like the changes in a chemical reaction than like
locomotive movements; if so, we can see that setting and organ formation may not be distinct
processes—it is the analogy with the carpenter that suggests the movements might be
locomotive (Gelber, “Form and Inheritance,” 187 n. 13). Connell distinguishes between the
plural κινήσεις and the singular κινήσις, arguing that “the male role as hê archê kinesêos is not
a spatial motion or a qualitative change in temperature and it is not initially characterized by
Aristotle as comprising a set of motions or changes. Instead the male provides hê archê
kinesêos, the beginning of the process of substantial change which must occur if a new
substance, that is a new animal, is to come into existence” (Connell, Aristotle on Female
Animals, 170). As I understand her, she is suggesting that there is a difference between the
κινήσις that the male is a principle of, which is something purely metaphysical, and the
κινήσεις that are in the male semen, which may be spatial motions or qualitative changes in
temperature. But I see no evidence that Aristotle thought there was some kind of metaphysical
change produced by the male that was not also a physical change in the katamênia, whether
the creation of the fetation, the differentiation of solids and fluids, or the formation of organs
in the embryo.
82. See also GA 2.1 734b9.
83. Code suggests that we understand the form in the male semen as “the active principle, or
efficient cause, for the generation,” and so as a degree of active potentiality prior to the form
in the fully formed and realized foetus (“Soul as Efficient Cause,” 56). On this view the
efficient cause of soul that is the “heat” in the semen is the same entity, but at a lower degree
of actualization, as the soul in the fully formed animal.
84. This language is reminiscent of Plato’s Timaeus at 69c3–5, where the god “himself fashioned
those that were divine, but assigned his own progeny the task of fashioning the generation of
those that were mortal.”
85. If the dunameis are identified with the soul, then they should be responsible only for formal
resemblance, but instead they seem to be responsible for other kinds of resemblance. Gelber
argues that non-formal inherited features (including sex) should not be construed as accidents
due to the matter, but as the per se result of certain kinêseis ( “Form and Inheritance,” 191).
She draws an analogy between these non-formal, non-accidental inherited features and an
accent acquired in the process of learning a language: they are not included in the goal of the
process, but neither are they accidental to the process (195–96).
86. On this point, see Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, 587; Aristotle, Aristotle. De
Sensu, ed. and trans. Ross, 16–17. See also this chapter, section 2.5.1, n. 44.
87. On the role of the “innate pneuma” (πνεῦμα σύμφυτον) see Martha C. Nussbaum, “The
Sumphuton Pneuma and the De Motu Animalium’s Account of Soul and Body,” in Aristotle,
Aristotle’s “De Motu Animalium,” trans. Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1978), 143–64. See Jessica Moss, Aristotle on the Apparent Good (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 23–27, 58–61, for an account of the process of heating,
cooling, expanding, and contracting and its relation to motivation and action in the Movement
of Animals.
88. See Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, 583, for this parallel.
89. That a potential soul faculty should be a potentiality is not surprising; but the notion that heat
is a dunamis needs some clarification. In a passage of the Metaphysics at 9.1 1046a22–29,
Aristotle distinguishes active and passive potentialities: “For the one [i.e., the passive
potentiality] is in the thing acted on; it is because it contains a certain source of change (τινὰ
ἀρχήν), and because even the matter is a certain source of change, that the thing acted on is
acted on, one thing by one, another by another; for that which is oily is inflammable, and that
which yields in a particular way can be crushed; and similarly in all other cases. But the other
potentiality is in the agent, e.g. heat and the art of building (ἡ οἰκοδομική) are present, one in
that which can produce the heat and the other in the man who can build.” Here Aristotle
explicitly identifies heat as a dunamis, and moreover he mentions heat and the dunamis of
building in the same phrase. The suggestion is that producing heat and building are both active
potentialities, in the agent rather than in the patient of change. Given the analogy in the
Generation of Animals 1.22 (described earlier) between the activity of the builder and the
activity of heat in generation, we can conclude that Aristotle conceives of heat in sperma as a
dunamis that, when actualized, is active and constructive.
90. Connell views it this way; see Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 80.
91. Henry understands the male parent to be the primary external efficient cause, “responsible for
forming the embryo and fashioning its primitive heart,” but claims that the “proximate
efficient cause is the process of development itself (the ‘internal motion’), which is initiated
and controlled by a principle in the embryo itself (its own nature). This is the primary internal
efficient cause” (Aristotle on Matter, Form and Moving Causes, 155).
92. The movements imparted through the male semen probably do not cease with the formation of
the parts. The analogy with automated puppets (GA 2.1 734b8–10, 2.5 741b8–10) suggests
that the movements are passed on, and that soul takes over as the origin of motion in the newly
formed animal. See Code, “Soul as Efficient Cause,” 54–58.
93. Code also suggests that the soul of an animal can exist at various degrees of active
potentiality: “The crucial idea here is that the δύναμις in the male semen is such that (1)
embryological development is the incomplete actuality of that δύναμις and (2) the soul of the
animal is the complete actuality of that same δύναμις. This interpretive claim is motivated by
the attempt to see the embryological development as natural in the sense that its efficient cause
is the nature internal to the developing embryo” (Code, “Soul as Efficient Cause,” 56). But he
does not distinguish the various faculties of the soul.
94. For the first position see Henry, “How Sexist Is Aristotle,” 251–69; for the second see Nielsen,
“The Private Parts of Animals,” 373–405; for the third see Gelber, “Form and Inheritance,”
183–212.
95. Some commentators suppose that the movements here are exclusive to the semen so that these
“potential movements” of the female are in the male semen. For example, John Cooper
assumes that the female katamênia has no movements of its own, and is only able indirectly to
affect the form of the offspring (Cooper, “Metaphysics in Aristotle’s Embryology,” 174–203).
But this is a plausible reading only if in the passages where Aristotle speaks of semen in the
plural (spermata) he means only male semen. Henry, on the other hand, argues that the
maternal movements directly affect the form (the individual form) of the offspring (Devin M.
Henry, “Understanding Aristotle’s Reproductive Hylomorphism,” Apeiron 39, no. 3 [2006]:
257–88). Gelber, by contrast, argues that the maternal movements can cause resemblance to
the mother but that those resemblances are not formal features (even sub-specific formal
features) of the animal ( “Form and Inheritance,” 183–212). The important point for now is
that all fertile residues, both male and female, have, on my view, movements, whether
potential and/or actual.
96. The text of this passage is uncertain, with one editorial team (Aubert and Wimmer) omitting
the final sentence, and another (Susemihl) omitting the ἀνὴρ in that sentence (Aristotle,
Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, 406 n. 3). H. J. Drossaart Lulofs (Aristotelis, De
Generatione Animalium [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965]) and Peck retain the sentence as it is.
97. Further evidence that Aristotle does intend to distinguish the movements of the male from the
movements of the individual is found at GA 4.3 768a6–9, where he is speaking of the
consequences of a failure of mastery: “Hence, if this [the dunamis that has failed to master the
matter] is the faculty in virtue of which the agent is male, then the offspring formed is female;
if it is that in virtue of which the agent is Coriscus or Socrates, then the offspring formed does
not take after its father but after its mother.” I discuss the context of this passage later.
98. If Gelber is correct that there are non-essential features that are inherited, transmitted in the
process of generation by kinêseis rather than owing to material necessity, then the movements
of the male parent, both as a male and as a father, will be the movements responsible for such
non-essential features (see Gelber, “Form and Inheritance,” 183–212). Gelber distinguishes
the causal powers of the movements in the katamênia and those in the semen, arguing that the
movements in the katamênia cannot transmit form: “The male provides form, and the female
provides matter, but they both contribute kinēseis. The kinēseis, and not form, are the per se
causes of inherited traits. Since they are tools used in the process of generation, kinēseis can
have per se effects distinct from the effects of the first agent who imparts form,” (210). Three
points seem important to Gelber’s argument: (1) it is a mistake to think that all features that
are not due to substantial form are accidental, or due to matter (191–92 n. 22); (2) kinêseis are
tools by means of which substantial form is transmitted to the katamênia, but they are also the
per se causes of non-formal features, including sex; and (3) if (1) and (2) are true, then it is
possible for the offspring to inherit features (including sex) from the mother, by means of
kinêseis in the katamênia, and yet the female parent would not be contributing any formal
feature. It is not clear how, on her view, we are to distinguish between formal effects and per
se non-accidental effects.
99. Henry takes the movements of the male to be among the movements of the individual
(“Understanding Aristotle’s Reproductive Hylomorphism,” 270ff.). This is presumably
because Aristotle distinguishes them from the movements of the universal—and Henry thinks
(and I agree with him on this point) that Aristotle does not think maleness as such is a feature
of the species form or the genus form. But if maleness is not part of the species form, it could
still be true that the movements of the male are more universal than the movements of the
father without conveying the essential form.
100. I will justify this claim in the next section, where I discuss the teleology of sexual difference.
For a discussion of the question whether Aristotle views the production of male offspring (and
not female offspring) as the end for the sake of which generation occurs, see Henry, “How
Sexist Is Aristotle,” 251–69; and Nielsen, “The Private Parts of Animals,” 373–405.
101. He also distinguishes between “changing over” and another way in which offspring can fail to
resemble their male parent: “loosening” or “relapse” (λύεσθαι). When the movements relapse,
it is because the menstrual fluid is acting upon the semen, rather than being acted on by the
semen: “The reason why the movements relapse is that the agent in its turn gets acted upon by
that upon which it acts (e.g., a thing which cuts gets blunted by the thing which is cut, and a
thing which heats gets cooled by the thing which is heated, and, generally, any motive agent,
except the ‘prime mover,’ gets moved somehow itself in return, e.g. that which pushes gets
pushed somehow in return, and that which squeezes gets squeezed in return” (GA 4.3 768b16–
21). We need to consider the difference between the movements “relapsing” and the
movements “changing over” in terms of the difference between features that are (1) near or far
(GA 4.3 768b9–10) rather than (2) opposed, and the difference between (3) mastery and
failure to master on the one hand, and (4) acting upon and being acted upon, on the other.
“Changing over” occurs (2) between opposed features (e.g., male to female) and because of
(3) the failure to master; “relapsing” occurs (1) between features that are near or far and
because (4) the semen is acted upon. The difference, then, between changing over and
loosening movements is a question of the difference between different movements being
realized, and the same movements being realized, but with blunted contours (GA 4.3 768a22–
b29).
102. See Cooper for the view that male semen holds potentially all the movements that will
produce resemblance to any female with whom that male should copulate (“Metaphysics in
Aristotle’s Embryology,” 183, 192–97). That view makes nonsense of the distinction Aristotle
draws between species movements and movements of the individual. If male semen contains
movements that will permit resemblance to any fertile member of its species, then the
difference between individual and species movements collapses.
103. Connell makes the point that the sexual organs develop before an animal has the capacity to
generate a fertile residue, and hence that the organs cannot develop in response to the quantity
of residual blood or its degree of concoction and must develop from the principle of male or
female (Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 279–80).
104. In making this claim I disagree with Henry, who sees the first step in conception, in which the
katamênia is “set” and sex is determined, as preceding any resemblance (Henry,
“Understanding Aristotle’s Reproductive Hylomorphism,” 281–82). Since the morphological
development of the embryo follows, on Aristotle’s account, on the determination of sex and
always corresponds to it, it seems likely that he understands sex in the sense of a capacity for
concoction, and not just sex as a set of sexual organs, to exhibit resemblance to one parent or
the other. See also this chapter, n. 33.
105. For ways of understanding how these four senses of necessity correspond to the senses of
necessity in the natural treatises, see John M. Cooper, “Hypothetical Necessity and Natural
Teleology,” in Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology, ed. Allan Gotthelf and James G.
Lennox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 260 n. 20; Mary Louise Gill,
“Material Necessity and Meteorology IV.12,” in Aristotelische Biologie: Intentionen,
Methoden, Ergebnisse, ed. Wolfgang Kullman and Sabine Föllinger (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 1997), 147 n. 6, cited in Leunissen, Explanation and Teleology, 99–103 n. 50.
106. He says, “Though the wall does not come to be without these [materials], it is not due to these,
except as its material cause,” and “but the end is not due to these except as the matter, nor will
it come to exist because of them. Yet if they do not exist at all, neither will the house, or the
saw. . . . The necessary in nature, then, is plainly what we call by the name of matter, and the
changes in it” (Phys. 2.9 200a5–6, 200a24–31). That is, while materials are conditionally
necessary for the achievement of the end, it is not material necessity that brings about that end.
107. For the reference to “the two sorts defined in our philosophical discussions” see A. Po. 2.11
94b37–95a3, cited earlier; they are what I am calling material necessity and compulsion.
Lennox calls material necessity “the unqualified necessity involved in objects obeying their
natural impulses” and compulsion “the enforced necessity of objects changing contrary to
their own natures due to an external power”; Balme calls the former “necessitated by a natural
state” and the latter “necessitated by force” (Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals I–IV, trans.
James G. Lennox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 148–49; Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium
I and De Generatione Animalium I: With Passages from II.1–3, trans. D. M. Balme [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1972], 100).
108. Some commentators understand the structures of the body to be necessary but not
conditionally necessary, construing conditional necessity in a narrower way. That is, they think
that “parts the having of which is directly implied in the statement of the animal’s essential
nature” are not conditionally necessary; conditional necessity enters in only to explain why
certain materials are necessary to form those parts (Cooper, “Hypothetical Necessity and
Natural Teleology,” 253–54; see also Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium I and De Generatione
Animalium I, trans. Balme, 87). But this assumes both that the essence of an animal kind
implies certain particular organs and other structures, and that it is clear which of these follow
directly from the human essence; neither of these assumptions seems evident. Moreover, the
argument at GA 2.1 takes the final cause to be separation of material and efficient causes
through the separation of male and female principles. As we saw in section 2.2, male and
female are not part of the essence of animal, but animal is part of their essence. So it cannot be
right to suppose that male and female are necessary as part of the essence of animal, and more
likely that Aristotle meant to say that they are conditionally necessary for the achievement of
the specified telos.
109. While some commentators have assumed that this necessity corresponds to the necessity of
compulsion, it is more likely to be a form of the necessity that cannot be otherwise. I am in
agreement with Peck on this question (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, xli–xlii).
Peck refers to this per accidens necessity as “an instance of a necessity enforced by the nature
of the Matter” in a note on the passage at GA 4.3 767b10–13 (Aristotle, Generation of
Animals, trans. Peck, 402 n. a). The point of the example, as I see it, is not so much that the air
is forced (if this were the point, Aristotle would not say that the second form of necessity is
owing to nature) as that the hot substance and the air react as they do because of their material
natures. Lennox points out that the example does not conform to Aristotle’s own account of
breathing (Aristotle, Parts of Animals, trans. Lennox, 151).
110. There is a third kind of necessity that is necessary to explain, not the phenomena associated
with individual animals, but the cycle of the generation of animal kinds. We have seen that one
form of simple necessity (3a) is identified with material necessity (PA 1.1 642a33-b4). At the
same time, there is a distinct sense of simple necessity (3b) that Aristotle will say is only
found in the sub-lunary world in cyclical processes. Thus, at GC 2.11 338a15–18 Aristotle
says, “So that which is necessary simpliciter exists in movement and generation in a circle;
and if it is in a circle, it is necessary for each one to come to be and to have come to be; and if
necessary, the generation of these things is in a circle.” This is the conclusion of a discussion
in response to the question whether there is anything that will necessarily exist. In that
discussion Aristotle makes quite clear that it is not necessary simply (although it may be
necessary conditionally) that any individual in a sequence of generations should come to be; at
the same time, if the sequence in question is cyclical, then the sequence itself may be simply
necessary. The implication of this for animal kinds is: no individual animal is generated of
necessity, except perhaps of conditional necessity (i.e., if this offspring is to be generated, then
the parent of that offspring must of conditional necessity be generated); but a species is eternal
and absolutely necessary. For a particularly lucid account of the differences among material,
conditional, and simple necessity in the natural philosophy, see Leunissen, Explanation and
Teleology, 99–105.
111. Balme points out that Aristotle does not state clearly the connection between having a soul and
being as eternal as possible, although he allows that “presumably the connection is that soul
makes reproduction possible, as he will presently argue” (Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium I
and De Generatione Animalium I, trans. Balme, 156). See also this chapter, n. 119.
112. This is true although, as we saw in the discussion of pneuma in section 2.5, the soul heat in
pneuma is analogous to aether and more divine than other physical substances (GA 2.3
736b30–737a1); it is both capable of generating life and present in any living thing. So in a
sense, every ensouled being has an element of the divine, although it is incapable of eternal
being.
113. See GC 2.11 338b7–20. Also see Lloyd, Aristotelian Explorations, 32–33.
114. The grammar of the second part of this sentence is a matter of debate among editors, but the
questions (principally whether the η should be read as ἡ (“the” in “the principle”) or ᾗ (“in
that”)) do not alter the basic sense of the passage.
115. The implication is probably that the efficient principle is better because it is more divine, but
Aristotle only says: βελτίονος δὲ καὶ θειοτέρας, without stating the causal link.
116. There are two other passages in which Aristotle makes arguments similar to this, at GC 2.11
338b7–18 and DA 2.4 415a27-b9. See also DC 2.8. In Plato’s Symposium at 206a–207a we
find a similar argument, cast as an explanation for the occurrence of erotic desire.
117. See Chap. 1, section 1.2.2.3.
118. The ways in which mortal beings might resemble divine beings are then several: (1) insofar as
any living being has pneuma which is analogous to aether (GA 2.3 736b30–737a1) they have
an element of divinity (see the beginning of this section); (2) in the capacity to generate other
beings like themselves, and so to enjoy eternal life as a species, every animal kind resembles
(in a way) eternal being; (3) insofar as human beings can engage in intellectual activity their
activity resembles the activity of the gods; (4) insofar as male animals act as efficient causes
of generation, and actualize the receptive matter provided by the female, they resemble the
causal efficiency of the gods. This means that while every living species attempts to approach
the divine by means of eternal reproduction, human beings have another avenue, intellectual
activity, by which they might approach the divine. Nonetheless, human beings are not divine:
the gods, while they have bodies, do not have corruptible bodies; their intellectual activities do
not rely on their bodies, whereas thinking for us depends on imagination and ultimately on
sensation; and the gods engage in intellectual activities eternally, where our activities are finite
because of our mortality and reliance on our bodies. For a helpful discussion of celestial
thinking, see Andrea Falcon, Aristotle and the Science of Nature: Unity without Uniformity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 95–96.
119. Sexual difference is then like what Leunissen calls “luxury parts”—they are “for the better” or
for “living well,” because they give rise to a function the animal could—strictly speaking—do
without (see Leunissen, Explanation and Teleology, 19–20). Animal kinds could do without
the separation of male and female principles, i.e., could do without sexual difference as a
feature, so long as the principle of male and female was preserved within the kind.
120. Henry argues that the separation of the inferior from the superior principle is “better” in an
unqualified sense—“not better for anything.” Henry, Aristotle on Matter, Form and Moving
Causes, 214, and “How Sexist Is Aristotle,” 16–18.
121. Because Aristotle calls it “accidental” some commentators have been reluctant to identify it as
a form of the necessity that cannot be otherwise (and hence as material necessity), and often
assume it must be a form of the compulsory. But it’s not clear what is acting to compel and
what is being compelled, and it seems more natural to see this form of necessity as a variation
on what cannot be otherwise, given the nature of the materials in question. See Leunissen,
Explanation and Teleology, 143–44. She takes this to be a case of secondary teleology; I will
offer reasons later to suggest that it is not.
122. For this distinction, see Met. 10.9 (discussed in this chapter, section 2.2), where Aristotle
describes the distinction of male and female as a distinction in the “matter” of the genus as
opposed to its form.
123. Leunissen, Explanation and Teleology, 18–19. Leunissen does not take the production of
females or the concoction of katamênia as examples of secondary teleology in this work, but
she does do so in her book From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017), 143.
124. I consider Henry’s case against this view—the possibility that Aristotle did not believe that
male offspring is the original telos of generation—later in the chapter.
125. Leunissen, Explanation and Teleology, 19.
126. Leunissen, Explanation and Teleology, 19.
127. Connell says that “femaleness is a sort of second-ranking goal for an individual animal,”
(Aristotle on Female Animals, 286) and compares the relation of male to female as goals to the
relation of the life of contemplation to the political life.
128. On “natural” monstrosities see Philip J. van der Eijk, “The Matter of Mind: Aristotle on the
Biology of ‘Psychic’ Processes and the Bodily Aspects of Thinking,” in Aristotelische
Biologie: Intentionen, Methoden, Ergebnisse, ed. Wolfgang Kullman and Sabine Föllinger
(Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997), 236–39.
129. Aristotle’s use of the terms τὸ τέρας and ἡ ἀναπηρία does not suggest a significant difference
in their sense. I follow Peck in translating τὸ τέρας as “monstrosity,” ἡ ἀναπηρία as
“deformity,” and πεπηρωμένος as “deformed.”
130. Witt argues that we should not read too much into the ὥσπερ (“Aristotle on Deformed Animal
Kinds,” 83–106).
131. Some commentators reject the claim that Aristotle asserts that the female is a deformity. See
Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 342–52; she argues that if we understand the verbs
parekbaino and existathai in more neutral terms—as “change” rather than “depart from
type”—then they do not have the negative valence conveyed by Peck’s influential translation.
Supporting evidence for Peck’s translation is available, however, in Aristotle’s claim that the
female has an incapacity, and is worse than the male. Connell denies that for Aristotle the
female is “simply” a failure (Aristotle on Female Animals, 287) and argues that the generation
of a female is also telic; that seems right. Gelber takes the less qualified view that females
cannot be failures because they are for the sake of something (“Females in Aristotle’s
Embryology,” 171–87). But it seems to me that Aristotle is trying to show that although the
female is a failure, or a defect, in one sense (the sense that she is not able to fully concoct
residual blood to the point where it is a fertile residue with the capacity to initiate conception),
she is also for the sake of something in another (because the fertile residue with this incapacity
is also a fertile residue with the capacity to act as the material cause for the generation of an
animal).
132. For the best recent defense of this interpretation, see Nielsen, “The Private Parts of Animals.”
133. Henry, “How Sexist Is Aristotle,” 251–69.
134. Henry has an inventive reading of the phrase παρεκβέβηκε ἐκ τοῦ γένους, acccording to which
the γένος refers not to the species form but rather to “a continuous generation of things of the
same kind, namely males producing males,” citing Met. 5.27 1024a29–30 (Henry, “How
Sexist Is Aristotle,” 259–61). See also Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 344–48.
135. It is not clear how to interpret the likeness in question: it may be as general as likeness of
species, or as particular as likeness to the male parent. On the narrower reading, the female
aims to generate something that is not like her in at least one respect: sex.
136. Connell attempts to address this by treating the inferiority of the female as an aesthetic rather
than a functional inferiority, by drawing a comparison of male animals with cakes that both
taste good and achieve certain aesthetic norms and female animals with cakes that taste good
but fail to achieve those norms (Connell, Aristotle on Female Animals, 286). This, however,
obscures the relation between male and female embodiment, the need for their subordinate
teloi, and the telos of the faculty of generation. The fertile residue of the female is, on
Aristotle’s account, not only aesthetically but also functionally different from that of the male.
137. The case of the female, represented by Aristotle as both deformed and necessary and for the
best, suggests that it is coherent to conceive of the animal kinds that Aristotle treats as
deformed in the same way—i.e., that “the existence of a deformed kind is, in principle,
compatible with Aristotle’s teleological view of nature” (Witt, “Aristotle on Deformed Animal
Kinds”: 101).
138. Nielsen, “The Private Parts of Animals,” 386.
139. Nielsen, “The Private Parts of Animals,” 397.
140. Lindsay Judson, “Chance and ‘Always or for the Most Part’ in Aristotle,” in Aristotle’s
Physics: A Collection of Essays, ed. Lindsay Judson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 73–99.
141. Witt, “Aristotle on Deformed Animal Kinds,” 87.
142. Malcolm Heath, “Aristotle on Natural Slavery,” Phronesis 53, no. 3 (2008): 260. Heath
attempts here to distinguish between what he calls “deformities” (τέρατα) and impairments (or
deviations) (ἀναπηρία), but there is at least one passage, at GA 2.4 738a34–b4 (quoted earlier),
where Aristotle clearly implies that a female is a deformity. Thus, there does not seem to be an
important distinction between the two terms.
143. Van der Eijk, “The Matter of Mind,” 238. See GA 770b10ff., EN 1154b11ff., Prob. 954b8ff.,
955a39–40 for evidence of these claims.
144. There is considerable scholarly debate about the success of Aristotle’s proposal that unity of a
definition, or an essence, might be guaranteed by the actualization of one “part” by another
“part” (e.g., in a definition, the actualization of the genus by the differentia). For recent
contributions to that debate see Alan Code, “An Aristotelian Puzzle about Definition:
Metaphysics Z.12,” in Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf,
ed. James G. Lennox and Robert Bolton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 78–
96; Mary Louise Gill, “Unity of Definition in Metaphysics H.6 and Z.12,” in Being, Nature,
and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf, ed. James G. Lennox and Robert
Bolton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 97–121; Daniel Devereux, “Aristotle
on the Form and Definition of a Human Being: Definitions and Their Parts in Metaphysics 10
and 11,” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 26 (2010): 167–
96; Frank A. Lewis, How Aristotle Gets By in Metaphysics Zeta (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013); David Charles, Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2002); David Charles, “Aristotle and the Unity and Essence of Biological Kinds,” in
Aristotelische Biologie: Intentionen, Methoden, Ergebnisse, ed. Wolfgang Kullman and Sabine
Föllinger (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997), 27–42; Theodore Scaltsas, David Charles,
and Mary Louise Gill, eds., Unity, Identity, and Explanation in Aristotle’s Metaphysics
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Lucas Angioni, “Definition and Essence in Aristotle’s
Metaphysics vii 4,” Ancient Philosophy 34 (2014): 75–100; Marguerite Deslauriers, Aristotle
on Definition (Leiden: Brill, 2007). Here I do not intend to argue that Aristotle is successful.
My intention is only to show that his claim that when the sensitive faculty actualizes the
nutritive faculty, it produces a unity—a soul that is one although it contains different faculties
—is not an isolated claim, but one that we find him making in the logical works and in the
Metaphysics.
145. At least one commentator takes these to be two different problems, both concerned with unity:
see Edward Halper, “Metaphysics Z 12 and H 6: The Unity of Form and Composite,” Ancient
Philosophy 4 (1984): 146–58.
146. On this passage, see Stephen Menn, “The Aim and the Argument of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
Part Two: The False Path (Z and H), IIe: Z17-H6: How to Give the λόγος τῆς οὐσίας of a
Composite Thing,” 33. (https://www.philosophie.hu-
berlin.de/de/lehrbereiche/antike/mitarbeiter/menn/contents).
147. On the transmission of reason see Code, “Soul as Efficient Cause,” 42 n. 6.
148. See Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, 168–69 n. a.
149. While there is no specific organ or organs the development of which corresponds to the
acquisition of reason, it is clear that reason only emerges in beings with a fully actualized
human form, a form that includes a certain perceptual apparatus, blood of a certain quality,
high levels of vital heat, etc. I do not mean to suggest that there are no anatomical or
physiological requirements for the acquisition of reason, only that reason is unlike other soul
faculties in Aristotle’s account insofar as it is not associated by him with any particular organ
or set of organs.
150. There are distinctions within the faculty of reason that Aristotle considers in works of moral
and political philosophy; νοῦς (the intellect) does not exhaust the human capacity for reason.
It is not clear whether, in this passage, Aristotle has such distinctions in mind, and means to
say that it is intellect in particular that enters in from the outside (while, say, deliberative
reason is somehow transmitted to the offspring by a physical substance). Balme, commenting
on this passage, claims that “the position reached at 736b29, therefore, is that both the
perceptive and the intellective faculties are brought by the seed in a state of potentiality, the
former embodied in the seed, and the latter disembodied (cf. 737a7–10)” (Aristotle, De
Partibus Animalium I and De Generatione Animalium I, trans. Balme, 160). In reaching this
conclusion, Balme argues that Aristotle holds that the perceptive faculties come to be without
pre-existing and without entering from outside, which seems right. But he also says, “The
intellect, on the other hand, both pre-exists (because it is everlasting) and enters the seed from
outside (which it can do because it is not in body)” (Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium I and
De Generatione Animalium I, trans. Balme, 160). It is not clear to me how, on this view, the
intellective faculties are “brought by the seed” at the same time that they are “disembodied.”
So what is mysterious is not only how the rational faculty gets into the male semen from the
outside, but also what it means for a non-physical entity to be conveyed by a physical entity.
Chapter 3
1. For an account of the oikos in ancient Athens, see chap. 5 in Cheryl Anne Cox, Household
Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in Ancient Athens (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). For an account focused on Aristotle, see D. Brendan
Nagle, The Household as the Foundation of Aristotle’s Polis (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006).
2. Children, slaves, and women are treated together here, as in many other ancient texts, almost
certainly because of their shared civil status as minors under the control of some male citizen.
The household is centered on the patriarch, and those over whom he rules have that subjection
to rule in common. See David M. Halperin, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,” in One
Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990), 30.
3. There are some textual uncertainties in this passage, and possibly a lacuna. Following Lord
(although reducing his suggested interpolation, and modifying the translation in other
respects) I have added a phrase in square brackets to make sense of the ’Επεὶ that begins the
first sentence (Aristotle, Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Carnes Lord, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2013).
4. If we assume that a man achieved adulthood in Athens at the moment that he acquired the
rights of political participation, then adulthood began at eighteen. Manville writes that “the
citizens of the polis were native Athenian males who had reached the age of eighteen, and who
had been duly registered in the same local Attic village, or deme, to which their fathers
belonged” (Philip Brook Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 8). For a discussion of the evidence for the age of
majority, see P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian “Athenaion Politeia” (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1981), 497–98. In social terms, adulthood may have been achieved
with marriage, ideally by the age of thirty-seven for a man, according to Aristotle (Pol. 7.16
1335a29).
5. This is not, of course, the only way of seeing the connection. An alternative view of the
relation between the claims of chaps. 1 and 2 and the discussion of the household in later
chapters is that this discussion is offered in support of the claim that the polis is natural: see
W. L. Newman, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887); R. G. Mulgan,
Aristotle’s Political Theory: An Introduction for Students of Political Theory (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977).
6. At different times Aristotle will describe the parts of the polis in different ways. Some
commentators seem to assume that the primary elements are always the individual citizens or
inhabitants (see, e.g., Robert Mayhew, “Part and Whole in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy,”
Journal of Ethics 1, no. 4 [1997]: 329), but in fact there are a number of different
characterizations of the elements of the polis at different moments in the Politics: as individual
citizens: 3.1 1274b38–40, 3.1 1275b21, 7.4 1325b36–39; as households: 1.2 1252b15–17, 1.3
1253b1–2, 4.3 1289b25; as villages: 1.2 1252b16–30, 3.9 1280b39–a1; as classes: 1.3
1253b3–6, 3.12 1283a16–20, 4.3 1289b28–31, 7.14 1332b12–15.
7. For the view that the discussion of the household is intended as an analysis of the parts of the
polis, see, e.g., Raymond Weil, Aristote et l’histoire: Essai sur la “Politique” (Paris: Librairie
C. Klincksieck, 1960). He says that the subject of Book 1 is the household and quotes
Barthélémy-Saint-Hilaire: “L’auteur examine et décrit les éléments constitutifs de l’État: les
individus et les choses” (28). See also Benjamin Jowett, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1885). Jowett places emphasis on the analytical method of Book 1, which he
sees as allowing Aristotle to build up the state “out of its elements” (xiii). These elements, he
says, are “the parts into which it can be dissected, not the elements out of which it has grown”
(xix).
8. This point is important to Aristotle as a response to a claim advanced by Plato and Xenophon
that a capacity for rule is simply a question of a certain kind of knowledge; I discuss this
debate in chap. 1, section 1.5.6. It is also important because the argument of Book 1, on my
interpretation, is connected to the discussion of the constitutions later in the Politics; that there
are different kinds of people, and that these differences are natural, is fundamental to
Aristotle’s argument that there is more than one correct constitution.
9. In focusing on the natural rule to which women, children, and slaves are subject, I will have
nothing to say about the case of banausoi, those free citizens who are productive but whose
work is viewed by Aristotle as mechanical and menial. They are not by nature incapable of
rule and yet they are systematically excluded from rule. For an argument that “Aristotle does
not provide a clear argument that the workers in his ideal state are naturally unfitted for the
political rights that are denied them,” and so “we have to conclude that his ideal state is in his
own terms (and not merely ours) unjust, and that he does not face this point because he does
not focus on the workers and their status clearly enough,” see Julia Annas, “Aristotle on
Human Nature and Political Virtue,” Review of Metaphysics 49, no. 4 (1996): 751–52.
10. We should note that while Aristotle does argue that slavery can be a natural relation of rule, he
will also allow that it is often not natural, and in that case it is unjust.
11. We will see in section 3.5 of this chapter that these composite wholes are models for the
various koinôniai or associations that Aristotle believes aim to benefit the parts that constitute
them.
12. If the state is “prior” to the family and to the individual, then the priority in question clearly is
not temporal. Newman, in his note on this passage, calls the method Aristotle here employs
the “genetic method” and refers us to Meteor. 4.12 389b24ff. (Newman, The Politics of
Aristotle, 2:103). He adds, “In tracing the growth of the πόλις from its earliest moments,
Aristotle follows Plato’s example both in the Republic (369A) and in the Laws (678 sqq.).
Plato’s object, however, is different from Aristotle’s. In the Republic his object, or nominal
object, is to find justice—in the Laws it is to discover τί καλῶς ἢ μὴ κατῳκίσθη κ. τ. λ. (Laws
683B); whereas Aristotle’s object is to distinguish the δεσποτικός, οἰκονομικός, βασιλικός,
and πολιτικός, and still more to prove that the πόλις is by nature and prior to the individual,
and the source of αὐταρκεία to the latter. His substitution of this method of watching the
growth of the πόλις from its smallest elements is not a desertion of the method of division
(διαιρεῖν) announced just previously; it is, on the contrary, its best application” (Newman, The
Politics of Aristotle, 2:103–4).
13. Miller argues that these are the only senses of priority recognized by Aristotle that might
plausibly be at work here (Fred D. Miller, Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics
[Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], 47); I think he is right about that. For the sense of priority,
see Aristotle, Cat. 12 and Met. 5.11. Miller also directs us (in n. 48) to briefer discussions at
Phys. 7.7 and 9, PA 2.1, GA 2.6, Met. 1.8, 7.1 and 13, 9.8, 13.2, Rhet. 2.19, and summaries by
Ross (Metaphysics, 1948) ii. 317–18, and David Keyt (“Three Basic Theorems in Aristotle’s
Politics,” in David Keyt and Fred D. Miller, A Companion to Aristotle’s “Politics”
[Blackwell, 1991], 126–27).
14. For this objection, see Miller, Nature, Justice, and Rights, 54–55, and David Keyt, “Three
Fundamental Theorems in Aristotle’s Politics,” Phronêsis 32, no. 1 (1987): 77–78. Keyt thinks
it makes no sense to suppose that a person would perish if separated from the polis, but that
doesn’t seem to be what Aristotle intends—only that a person would not properly speaking be
a person were he to be separated from the polis. See Mayhew, “Part and Whole,” 325–40;
Mayhew says that citizens in a city, united through a constitution, do not have the same
relation of parts to whole that we find in an organism or even a household; “So when, in
Politics i 2, Aristotle states that the city is or exists by nature, he cannot mean by this that the
city is a natural organism” (Mayhew, “Part and Whole,” 335). But this is premised on the
assumptions that (1) the parts of the polis are individuals and (2) that individuals can exist
separate from the polis.
15. Support for this is found also in Aristotle’s claim that only brutes and gods can live outside a
polis (Pol. 1.1 1253a27–30), and in the argument in Pol. 2 (discussed in section 3.5 of this
chapter) that the healthy and stable functioning of a polis depends on the structure of
households; this is why he rejects the Socratic suggestion that households might be eliminated,
at least among the guardian class.
16. In interpreting Aristotle’s claims that people are political animals and that the polis is natural, I
rely on Miller’s interpretation in Nature, Justice, and Rights, 32–36. Miller is responding to
David Keyt’s influential article, “Three Fundamental Theorems,” 54–79. In developing the
account of an extended sense of natural, Miller is responding to Keyt’s claim that the natural
impulse of human beings to live in a political community does not entail “the naturalness of
the polis,” because the “product of a natural impulse need not itself” be natural (Keyt, “Three
Fundamental Theorems,” 63). In particular, he contests Keyt’s conclusion that Aristotle’s
claims about nature in Politics 1 are incoherent; I agree with Miller that the claims are
coherent if interpreted correctly (Miller, Nature, Justice, and Rights, 35–36). My view differs
from Miller’s in the interpretation of the claim that the polis is prior to the household, and in
how that claim connects with the picture of social associations as organic wholes.
17. For an interesting argument that the polis is natural in the sense that it has an internal principle
of change, see Adriel M. Trott, Aristotle on the Nature of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), especially chap. 2. On her view, the political community is natural
because its activity (which she identifies as “deliberation over living well”) “does not lead to
self-sufficiency but accomplishes it” (53). While I agree with Trott that Aristotle does not
think human individuals can thrive outside of political life, the teleological interpretation does
not seem to me to be incompatible with that claim.
18. Miller, Nature, Justice, and Rights, 40–41.
19. He cites Susemihl and Hicks, Newman, Bradley, and Barker as predecessors in advocating this
reading (Miller, Nature, Justice, and Rights, 41 n. 37): Franz Susemihl and R. D. Hicks, The
Politics of Aristotle (London: Macmillan, 1894), 23–4; Newman, The Politics of Aristotle,
1:20; A. C. Bradley, “Aristotle’s Conception of the State,” in A Companion to Aristotle’s
“Politics,” ed. David Keyt and Fred D. Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 25–26; Ernest
Barker, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 7 n. 1. In a note, Miller
writes: “I do not claim that the teleological interpretation is original, but only that it is correct”
(Miller, Nature, Justice, and Rights, 41 n. 37).
20. For a discussion of the meaning of this phrase, see Pierre Pellegrin, “Natural Slavery,” trans.
E. Zoli Filotas, in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Politics, ed. Marguerite
Deslauriers and Pierre Destrée (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 92–116.
21. This suggests that female children and natural slave children have a combination of
deliberative deficiencies, which resolve into a single deficiency as they mature.
22. In some places Aristotle uses the term phronêsis to designate a particular virtue, limited to free
adult men. In other places, he uses the term in a broader sense, where it refers to some
capacity to anticipate the future and to make judgments about different courses of action; in
this sense, animals as well as the different kinds of people can be said to have phronêsis. In
chap. 4 I discuss this distinction and its implications for political sexual difference.
23. For the argument that Aristotle cannot maintain that someone in whom the deliberative faculty
is defective is properly human, see Ernest Barker, The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle
(New York: Dover, 1959). Barker claims: “That reason should be present even in an imperfect
form means a potentiality of reason in its fullness” (365). See also Elizabeth Spelman,
“Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on
Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding and
Merrill B. Hintikka, 2nd ed. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003), 21–24. For the argument
that Aristotle can reconcile the claim that someone is missing a deliberative faculty with the
claim that that person is human, see Judith A. Swanson, The Public and the Private in
Aristotle’s Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 34–35 n. 8;
Malcolm Schofield, “Ideology and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Theory of Slavery,” in
Aristoteles’ “Politik”: Akten des XI Symposium Aristotelicum, ed. Günther Patzig (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 12–15; Deborah K. W. Modrak, “Aristotle: Women,
Deliberation, and Nature,” in Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and
Aristotle, ed. Bat-Ami Bar On (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 207–22.
24. Something like this is suggested by Plato at Republic 9, 590c–d, where Socrates argues that in
the case of a person in whom the “best part” (τὸ τοῦ βελτίστου εἶδος) of the soul is naturally
weak (590c3–4), that person ought to be enslaved to another in whom the “best part” rules,
because “it is better for everyone to be ruled by divine reason (ὑπὸ θείου καὶ φρονίμου),
preferably within himself and his own, otherwise imposed from without,” (590d 3–5).
25. This interpretation was first proposed by Horowitz, who claimed that the sense in which
women are without authority in the Politics has parallels to the sense in which females have a
weaker power to concoct semen in the GA. Horowitz cited two kinds of evidence: (1)
Aristotle took women to be “cleverer” than men, and understood this to be a biologically
determined trait that would undermine their decision-making abilities (209), (2) the biological
“softness” that Aristotle attributes to women makes them less able to control their appetites
(211) (Horowitz, “Aristotle and Woman,” 207–12). William W. Fortenbaugh developed the
idea that Aristotle meant to say that women are more easily overcome by non-rational desires
in “Aristotle on Slaves and Women,” in Articles on Aristotle, vol. 2, Ethics and Politics, ed.
Jonathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield, and Richard Sorabji (London: Duckworth, 1977), 135–
39; in “Aristotle on Women: Politics i 13.1260a13” (Ancient Philosophy 35 [2015]: 395–404)
Fortenbaugh reiterated the point (“Aristotle sees the female as naturally acratic,” [396]),
adding evidence from a scholion but also acknowledging that such an interpretation creates a
problem (401–2). See also Modrak, “Women, Deliberation, and Nature,” 207–22; Spelman,
“Politicization of the Soul.” Sparshott offers a rather different line of interpretation, denying
that Aristotle meant to say that women were overcome by emotion, and taking the lack of
authority of a woman’s deliberative faculty to be a function of the age difference between
(adolescent) wives and (middle-aged) husbands, based on the remark at Politics 1.12 1259b3–
4 (Francis Sparshott, “Aristotle on Women,” Philosophical Inquiry 7, no. 3 [1985]: 177–200).
But that remark could equally well be a reference to parents and children. At any rate
Sparshott recognizes that if Aristotle meant that men ruled women because they were older,
then he ought to have justified the age difference as natural (“Aristotle on Women,” 187–88).
Two more recent articles that interpret the claim that women’s deliberative faculty is without
authority to mean that women are controlled by non-rational motivations are David J.
Riesbeck, “Aristotle on the Politics of Marriage: ‘Marital Rule’ in the Politics,” Classical
Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2015): 134–52; Karen Margrethe Nielsen, “The Constitution of the Soul:
Aristotle on Lack of Deliberative Authority,” Classical Quarterly 65, no. 2 (2015): 572–86.
Nielsen has a particularly interesting analysis of the non-rational motivation.
26. Modrak argues that Aristotle does say things that suggest that women cannot control their
appetites (“Women, Deliberation, and Nature,” 213). She claims that the passage at HA 9.1
608a32–b12 indicates that women have less control over their appetites than men. She also
suggests that the deficiency of the deliberative faculty in women is equivalent to the
deficiency of morally weak agents, pointing to Aristotle’s description of weakness of a will as
a kind of softness (at EN 7.7 1150a32–b16), and the association of softness with women.
Bradshaw argues that Aristotle’s description of incontinence at EN 7.8 1151a (she does not
cite line numbers) might offer “an explanation of the peculiar condition of women” (as people
whose deliberative faculties are without authority); she cites Rist for this view and finds some
evidence to support it at EN 7.7–8 1150b, but she also acknowledges that there is no clear
evidence for a “natural” propensity in women toward incontinence (Leah Bradshaw, “Political
Rule, Prudence and the ‘Woman Question’ in Aristotle,” Canadian Journal of Political
Science 24, no. 3 [1991]: 567–68); see also John M. Rist, The Mind of Aristotle: A Study in
Philosophical Growth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 152–53.
27. Riesbeck acknowledges this objection but thinks it can be met if we allow that Aristotle “need
only have thought that women are somehow affected emotionally by being subject to their
husbands’ authority, so that their non-rational motives cooperate with rather than oppose their
reason” (“Aristotle on the Politics of Marriage,” 145). But he does not indicate how or why
women should be “affected emotionally” in this way by the rule of their husbands.
28. Dobbs, “Family Matters,” 74, 78. Sister Prudence Allen argued for a “complementary”
account of sexual difference in The Concept of Woman, Vol. 1: The Aristotelian Revolution,
750 BC–AD 1250 (Montreal: Eden Press, 1985).
29. Dobbs, “Family Matters,” 78. I think this claim is false. Aristotle certainly thinks that the
virtues of men and women are different in kind, and while it is possible that he means they are
different but not normatively different, that seems unlikely in the context, where women’s
moral abilities are compared to those of slaves and children. (see Pol. 1.5 1254b10–20; 1.13
1260a2–31). Moreover, women, as natural subjects, will not have the virtues of command, and
it is unlikely that Aristotle did not think that made them morally inferior.
30. Dobbs, “Family Matters,” 84.
34. For a proponent of this view, see Swanson, The Public and the Private, 44–68. I once thought
that a version of this interpretation, according to which the authority of men is strictly
conventional, was right; see my “Social and Civic Implications of Aristotle’s Notion of
Authority,” in Law, Politics and Society in the Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. Baruch
Halpern and Deborah W. Hobson (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic,1993), 122–36.
35. The Rhetoric to Alexander is not a work by Aristotle, although it has been transmitted as part
of the Aristotelian corpus.
36. Aristotle, L’éthique à Nicomaque, trans. René Antoine Gauthier and Jean Yves Jolif, 2nd ed.
(Leuven: Béatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1970).
37. Riesbeck makes this point (“Aristotle on the Politics of Marriage,” 143–44).
38. Notice that the comparison of forms of household rule with various political constitutions is
useful to Aristotle in distinguishing the case of women from the case of slaves, but not so
useful in distinguishing women from children. In this passage the constitutional rule of women
is contrasted with the kingly rule of children, but in other passages, as we will see, the rule
over women is characterized as both constitutional and kingly or aristocratic. In general,
Aristotle seems to be more concerned with distinguishing the case of women from that of
slaves.
39. I once argued that there was no way to reconcile the claim that men rule over women both
constitutionally and naturally; see my “Aristotle on Andreia, Divine and Sub-Human Virtues,”
in Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity, ed. Ralph M. Rosen and
Ineke Sluiter (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 187–211. I have changed my mind.
40. Aristotle’s view reflects perhaps the peculiar legal status of free women in Athens in
Aristotle’s time: as free, they were politically distinct from slaves, and yet as women they
were politically disenfranchised. See Eva Cantarella, Pandora’s Daughters: The Role and
Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity, trans. Maureen B. Fant (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 38–51.
41. Herodotus, Histories, ed. James Romm, trans. Pamela Mensch (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
2014).
42. Nielsen suggests that Aristotle refers to Amasis in order to highlight the importance of his
“strong executive powers” as differentiating him from those over whom he rules. So she takes
the point to be that although “women and men are equal in rational ability, they are unequal in
their ability to put decisions into action” (“The Constitution of the Soul,” 585). I am
sympathetic to this understanding of Aristotle’s views on the incapacity of women (which I
return to in chap. 4, section 4.3.4), but there is no suggestion that the Egyptians are unable to
put decisions into action. For a discussion of other interpretations of the Amasis story, see
Trott, Aristotle on the Nature of Community, 195–96.
43. I am assuming that the form of the foot-basin and the form of the statue are non-essential
forms, and that the essential form of the gold persists whichever of these forms it assumes.
This is the best way to construe the parallel between foot basin and statue on the one hand and
Amasis as subject and king on the other; the man who changes from subject to king clearly
does not change his essential form, but remains a man. “The rank is but the guinea’s stamp;
the man’s the gowd for a’ that” (Robert Burns, “A Man’s a Man for A’ That”).
44. “ἀνδρὸς δὲ καὶ γυναικὸς ἀριστοκρατικὴ φαίνεται· κατ᾿ ἀξίαν γὰρ ὁ ἀνὴρ ἄρχει, καὶ περὶ ταῦτα
ἃ δεῖ τὸν ἄνδρα· ὅσα δὲ γυναικὶ ἁρμόζει, ἐκείνῃ ἀποδίδωσιν. ἁπάντων δὲ κυριεύων ὁ ἀνὴρ εἰς
ὀλιγαρχίαν μεθίστησιν· παρὰ τὴν ἀξίαν γὰρ αὐτὸ ποιεῖ, καὶ οὐχ ᾗ ἀμείνων” (EN 8.10
1160b32–1161a1). See also EN 8.11 1161a22–33.
45. At Met. 5.25 1023b19–22 he reiterates the point that being a whole is a question of having a
form, in naming one of the senses of “part”: “The elements into which the whole is divided, or
of which it consists—‘the whole’ meaning either the form or that which has the form; for
example, of the bronze sphere or of the bronze cube both the bronze—i.e. the matter in which
the form is—and the characteristic angle are parts.” Also in the Metaphysics, at 8.3 1043a31,
Newman points out that “τὸ κοινόν is used as equivalent to ἡ σύνθετος οὐσία ἐξ ὕλης καὶ
εἴδους, and such a σύνθετος οὐσία may be composed not only of συνεχῆ, but also of
διῃρημένα, like τὸ ὅλον in 4 (7). 8 1328a21 sqq.” (Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, 2:142).
46. In the case of the city-state, the form will be the constitution, which Aristotle identifies with
the form of the polis (Pol. 3.3 1276b1–6). And the form of the city-state not only determines
the aim and the excellence of the polis, but also influences the telos of households and of the
relationships that constitute the household, and the excellence proper to them: “For since the
household as a whole is a part of the city, and these things [men and women, fathers and
children] of the household, and one should look at the virtue of the part in relation to the virtue
of the whole, both children and women must necessarily be educated looking to the
constitution” (Pol. 1.13 1260b13–15). So the virtue and the function of the master/slave
relation, the male/female partnership, and the relation of father to children in the household
contribute to the virtue and the function of the polis. The collective aim, and hence the
collective task, and the excellence of each of these “wholes” will be determined by the larger
wholes—first the household, and then the city-state—in which they are found, and will
contribute to the excellence of those wholes.
47. At Pol. 1.6 1255b9–11 Aristotle makes the same point about the good of master and slave:
“the interests of part and whole, of body and soul, are the same, and the slave is a part of the
master.”
48. κτῆμα here has sometimes been interpreted as a reference to slaves. Chase translates it as
“slave” (Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, trans. D. P. Chase [London: J. M.
Dent, 1911]). Rackham translates it as “a chattel,” and in a footnote writes “i.e., a slave” (293
n. b) (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham [Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1926]).
49. Some commentators have made this assumption, and so interpreted Aristotle’s concerns about
holding women in common (in Politics 2) as an instance of his concern about holding property
in common. But Aristotle did not take women to be property belonging to their husbands or
fathers (see footnote 65 in this chapter) and had, as I will argue later, other reasons for
objecting to Socratic proposals to hold women in common.
50. These will both be forms of natural rule. Aristotle takes for granted that the whole is better
than its parts—that they exist for the sake of the whole. At the same time, clearly one part of
an organic whole might be better than other parts—as reason is better than desire, and the
heart better than the other organs of the body.
51. Garsten makes this point: “Although Aristotle treats citizens as equals, he also preserves a
distinction between citizens who are ruling and those who are being ruled. He stipulates that
all citizens can participate in deliberating and judging, but he also insists that ‘all cannot rule
at the same time’ (II 2, 1261a31–32). Moreover, he directly discusses the fact that free citizens
are often in the circumstance of being ruled (III 4, 1277a21, 25 ff.). These statements seem to
indicate that participating in the citizenly activities of judging and deliberating does not
amount to ruling. Perhaps this is why he is willing to say that juries and assemblies open to all
citizens can be spoken of as some kind of indefinite office but not simply as an office (archê)
(III 1, 1275a31)” (Bryan Garsten, “Deliberating and Acting Together,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Aristotle’s Politics, ed. Marguerite Deslauriers and Pierre Destrée [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013], 337).
52. Garsten points out that “judging well what others are saying about deliberative questions
seems a fair rendering of what most citizens sitting in the Assembly need to do. The
deliberation occurring in these institutions is the sort in which a few speakers address a large
audience of listeners and judges. . . . The intellectual virtue that is required of citizens when
they are deliberating but not ruling seems to be the ability to judge well the arguments that are
made in the Assembly about what the city should do” (Garsten, “Deliberating and Acting
Together,” 338–39).
53. Joseph Karbowski argues that on Aristotle’s view women are “not only naturally limited in
their ability to grasp the ends of human action but also in their ability to determine the proper
means to achieving them, at least at the political level,” and so understands the lack of
authority he attributes to women to be a set of intellectual deficiencies (Joseph Karbowski,
“Aristotle on the Deliberative Abilities of Women,” Apeiron 7, no. 4 [2014]: 450). But there
does not seem to me to be sufficient evidence that Aristotle believes women are intellectually
defective in these ways, and, if he did, it is difficult to see how he thought they could achieve
virtue.
54. Heath points out that slaves must deliberate about technical matters, even if they do not
deliberate about moral matters (Malcolm Heath, “Aristotle on Natural Slavery,” Phronêsis 53,
no. 3 [2008]: 246–53). For this point see also Pellegrin, “Natural Slavery,” 92–116, footnote
55 in this chapter, and chapter 4, section 4.4.3 and note 50.
55. Again, both slaves and women will, and should, participate in deliberations and decisions
about technical matters within their purview. That is, Aristotle does not intend to exclude
women or even slaves from all decision-making (in particular, the decision making that is part
of the pragmatic management of a household), just from decisions that are central to a good
human life.
56. In setting out these objections I have largely used the language of Newman (The Politics of
Aristotle, 2:229). One might think that there is a third objection: (iii) It is unclear how we are
to interpret the sense of “possessed in common” Socrates intends (1261a13–14). Aristotle
certainly says this; the question is whether it is a distinct objection. I have interpreted it as part
of (ii). See Peter Simpson, “Aristotle’s Criticisms of Socrates’ Communism of Wives and
Children,” Apeiron 24, no. 2 (1991): 100–103 for a discussion of other ways in which one
might distinguish the objections.
57. This feature of Aristotle’s account of sexual difference may remind the reader of later
concerns that the liberation of women from their traditional role in the family would result in
the destruction of the family, where the family is assumed to rely upon the subordination of
women to men. Notice, however, that Aristotle attempts to show why that subordination is
good for the larger community, and how it serves the political aim of living well.
58. On the naturalness of the household, and the importance of this point, see Thanassis Samaras,
“Aristotle on Gender in Politics I,” History of Political Thought 37, no. 4 (2016): 600–601.
59. Affection characterizes the true city, as well as the household, because people are unwilling to
form communities with their enemies (Pol. 4.11 1295b24). This passage might seem to imply
that communities can only be formed by equals, since immediately before saying that people
are unwilling to form communities with their enemies Aristotle was describing the enmity
between masters and slaves. And at Politics 7.8 1328a36 he says that a city is a “community
of equals,” which might suggest that communities more generally will be limited to political
equals. But in other passages, he allows that friendships between unequals are possible, so
long as the inequality is addressed. Moreover he is clear that couples of men and women
constitute communities, and that friendship is possible between them (EN 8.12 1162a17–29;
see also EN 8.11 1161a24–26, EN 8.7 and 9). So philia is possible between those who are
unequal, and communities can be constituted by non-equals.
60. In the middle books of the Politics (see, e.g., 4.11 1295b34–1296a17, 5.3 1303a24–b7), by
contrast, Aristotle argues that differences foment faction; this apparent tension can be
explained, as we will see, by distinctions among differences: certain differences promote
unity, others promote conflict.
61. There are different ways to read the phrase “just as if a greater weight depresses the scale,” but
either way the import remains the same. For a discussion of the sense of τῷ τοιούτῳ in this
passage, and the reference to Arcadia, see Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, vol. 2, 231–33.
62. Aristotle has a second objection: that the affection pursued by the halved creatures, an intense
and passionate bond, is not the kind of affection that would in fact be promoted among
citizens by the common possession of women and children (Pol. 2.4 1262b14–16).
63. This passage takes up an objection first voiced at Pol. 2.2 1261a13–14. One issue that
Aristotle himself raises, and that many commentators have subsequently noted, is that Plato
does not make clear whether his proposals for women are confined to the guardian class or are
intended to extend to all classes in the Kallipolis.
64. While Socrates seems to think that common possession would lead each person to think of the
object possessed as belonging to him individually (the distributive sense of “mine”), Aristotle
claims that in fact it would lead each person to view the object possessed as a common
possession (the collective sense). For a discussion of the distributive and collective sense, and
its bearing on Aristotle’s criticisms of Socrates, see Martha C. Nussbaum, “Nature, Function,
and Capability: Aristotle on Political Distribution,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy,
suppl. (1988): 145–84; David Charles, “Perfectionism in Aristotle’s Political Theory: Reply to
Martha Nussbaum,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. (1988): 185–206; and
Martha C. Nussbaum, “Reply to David Charles,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl.
(1988): 207–14. See also Karen Margrethe Nielsen, “Economy and Private Property,” in the
Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Politics, ed. Marguerite Deslauriers and Pierre Destrée
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 67–91.
65. Aristotle’s views on affection also make clear that he does not treat women and children
simply as a form of property, as some commentators have contended (see, e.g., Okin, Women
in Western Political Thought), construing the arguments against holding women in common as
an instance of the arguments against abolishing private property. One reason to suppose that
Aristotle does not see women as a form of property is that he allows that in the household
affection occurs, and indeed insists that it should occur, between men and women as well as
between parents and children. Aristotle is concerned with affection not only among equal
citizens, but also between those who rule and those who are ruled, and the ways in which
affection might equalize people who are naturally unequal. While the arguments about holding
property in common are concerned only with the effect of private property on free men (e.g.,
on whether two men who share property feel more united or more affectionate toward one
another), the arguments about holding women in common are not only about the effects of
common possession on the relationships among men, but also about the effects on the
relationships between men and women.
66. Aristotle is emphatic that while every community should have organic unity, they should not
have it to the same degree. He goes so far as to suggest at Pol. 2.2 1261a16–22 that a city that
is more unified than it should be will become a household, and a household that is too unified
will become an individual.
67. See, e.g., Aristotle, Politics, Books I and II, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995), 110. Newman also takes the “likes” in the passage at Politics 2.2 1261a29–b5,
where Aristotle says that a city must be made of people different in kind, and not from people
who are alike, to be people with the same profession (e.g., shoemakers); see Newman, The
Politics of Aristotle, 2:233. Annas, while implying a distinction between “minimal” self-
sufficiency as economic and some larger sense of self-sufficiency that might include a moral
dimension, points out that a state “can hardly be a paradigm of self-sufficiency . . . if it is
economically dependent on the commercial activities of people whose primary political
loyalties lie elsewhere” (Annas, “Aristotle on Human Nature,” 739).
Chapter 4
1. Kraut, for example, says that “ethics is an autonomous field” for Aristotle, and that a “full
understanding of what is good does not require expertise in any other field” (Richard Kraut,
“Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta, 3.2,
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/aristotle-ethics/). On such a view,
Aristotle’s practical philosophy is independent of his natural philosophy, which suggests that
we should not look for explanations of moral or political phenomena in natural science. By
contrast, some commentators think that the methods of the sciences are employed by Aristotle
in the practical works, without necessarily claiming that the biology provides a theoretical
foundation for practical philosophy; see, e.g., Allan Gotthelf, “First Principles in Aristotle’s
Parts of Animals,” in Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology, ed. Allan Gotthelf and James
G. Lennox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 167–98; Carlo Natali, “Posterior
Analytics and the Definition of Happiness in NE I,” Phronesis 55, no. 4 (2010): 304–24).
Others defend the view that Aristotle thought our political views should be informed by the
facts of natural science (see, e.g., Mariska Leunissen, From Natural Character to Moral Virtue
in Aristotle [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017], xxiii–xxvi; James G. Lennox, “Aristotle
on the Biological Roots of Virtue: The Natural History of Natural Virtue,” in Bridging the Gap
between Aristotle’s Science and Ethics, ed. Devin Henry and Karen Margrethe Nielsen
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015], 193–213; Christopher Shields, “The Science
of Soul in Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Bridging the Gap between Aristotle’s Science and Ethics, ed.
Devin Henry and Karen Margrethe Nielsen [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015],
232–53).
2. One of the first attempts to connect the biological claims to the political (though undeveloped)
is that of Horowitz, who says that Aristotle took the distinction between natural rulers and
natural subjects to be biological: “The vital heat of the heart, which gives an embryo the future
potential to concoct generative seed, might also give an embryo the future potential to
deliberate” (211) (Horowitz, “Aristotle and Woman,” 207–12). Horowitz seems to think that
on Aristotle’s account women are “cleverer” than men in a way that interferes with the
deliberative capacity, and that “cleverness is ‘a biologically based female trait’ ” (209–10),
although she does not elaborate on that biological basis beyond pointing to the deficiency in
vital heat attributed to the female. See also this volume, chap. 3, section 3.4.1, n. 25. Deborah
Modrak is appropriately cautious in her interpretation, recognizing that Aristotle does not say
that the lack of authority of deliberative reason in women is a result of sexual differences in
the body (Modrak, “Aristotle: Women, Deliberation, and Nature,”). She does, however, seem
to think that he ought to have done so, saying, “What is needed to fill out Aristotle’s story in
the Politics is evidence that weakness in the movements of the semen correspond to the
defective replication of the human form such that female humans have poorer ratiocinative
powers. Such evidence, however, is hard to come by” (209). A more recent and more
developed interpretation of this path to explaining political sexual differences in terms of
physiology is found in Leunissen, From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle.
3. See Allen, The Concept of Woman, 83–126; Mayhew, The Female in Aristotle’s Biology, 92–
113. See also Dobbs, “Family Matters.” Dobbs, whose views I discussed in chap. 3, section
3.4.1, thinks there are links between biological and political sex differences, although he does
not trace the links so much as assert them (75). He claims that Aristotle’s account of
reproductive biology has “unequivocal” political implications (75). Dobbs says that Aristotle
“acknowledges that women and men are equal in substance” but also “recognizes that the
sexes are, by nature, functionally different and complementary” (75). What is interesting for
my purposes is Dobbs’s claim that these functional differences are differences in spiritedness
and the capacity for nurture (82). He denies that Aristotle believes men to be superior to
women in intellect or virtue (82, 84), and so does not see Aristotle’s commitment to the
naturalness of men’s rule over women as founded on intellectual or moral differences as such.
Rather, he argues that men are to rule as a “therapy” rather than a privilege, where the therapy
of rule is intended to chasten and subdue the high degree of thumos that men, by nature, have
(86). On this view, Aristotle excludes women from rule not because of some inferiority on
their part, but rather because their desires are better ordered in the first place (85).
4. The implausibility of Dobbs’s interpretation stems largely from his assertion that Aristotle did
not believe that women were inferior in intellect or virtue to men. While Aristotle ascribes all
the virtues that men have to women, he also implies that, as those who are ruled, they will be
lacking the virtue that is peculiar to rulers (Pol. 1.5, 1.12–13). And he plainly states, as we
have seen, that the deliberative faculty of women is without authority relative to that of men
(Pol. 1.13 1260a11–14). In arguing that Aristotle sees the differences between men and
women as complementary, Dobbs is attempting to harmonize the claim that women and men
are the same in substance (and hence equal in that respect), with the claim that men and
women are different—if the differences are complementary, then they are equally valuable, no
hierarchy is implied, and we can understand Aristotle to mean that the sexes are different and
yet equally good (82). (As an aside, Dobbs seems to accept that the differences Aristotle posits
between the sexes are indeed natural, since he says that Aristotle “recognizes that the sexes
are, by nature, functionally different and complementary” [italics added]; to recognize
differences is to see differences that really are there.) But Aristotle plainly does want to justify
the rule of men over women in terms of the superiority of men (Pol. 1.13 1259b31–1260a18),
and he nowhere says or implies that rule should be undertaken by men as a therapy and hence
a benefit to themselves. The rule of those who are superior is always justified by Aristotle on
the grounds that the superior will be able to rule in a way that provides a benefit to those who
are ruled. So it is implausible to suggest that Aristotle represents rule as a kind of therapeutic
intervention intended to improve the character of the ruler rather than a privilege obtained—in
the best circumstances, at least—by excellence of character, or—in other circumstances—by
wealth, social status, or force.
5. This is true even though the nutritive/reproductive faculty is not the highest in the animal soul,
and we might expect the highest faculty to be the source of the activity that is the final cause.
6. Pol. 1.2 1252b29–30: “The community (κοινωνία) arising from [the union of] several villages
that is complete is the city. It reaches a level of full self-sufficiency (ἤδη πάσης ἔχουσα πέρας
τῆς αὐταρκείας), so to speak; and while coming into being for the sake of living, it exists for
the sake of living well (γινομένη μὲν οὖν τοῦ ζῆν ἕνεκεν, οὖσα δὲ τοῦ εὖ ζῆν).” EN 8.12
1162a19–22: “With the other animals the sharing (ἡ κοινωνία) only goes this far [i.e., to the
point that it serves reproduction], whereas human beings cohabit not only for the sake of
producing offspring but also for the sake of the necessities of life (οὐ μόνον τῆς τεκνοποιίας
χάριν συνοικοῦσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τῶν εἰς τὸν βίον).” Pol. 1.2 1252a27–28: “First, then, there must
of necessity be a conjunction of persons who cannot exist without one another: on the one
hand, male and female, for the sake of reproduction (τῆς γενέσεως ἕνεκεν).” These passages
do not suggest that Aristotle is distinguishing carefully between βιόω and ζάω. For a
discussion of this distinction in Aristotle, see James Gordon Finlayson, who argues that the
distinction between living and living well does not track the distinction between βιόω and ζάω
as Aristotle uses them (James Gordon Finlayson, “ ‘Bare Life’ and Politics in Agamben’s
Reading of Aristotle,” Review of Politics 72, no. 1 [2010]: 111–12).
7. As Malcolm Heath points out, “Intellect (νοῦς) as such is not embodied (DA 2.1, 413a3–7;
3.4, 429a10–29), but thinking is. For thought is ‘not without’ phantasia (DA 1.1., 403a8–10;
3.7, 431a14–17; 3.8, 432a7–14); deliberation, in particular, involves ‘deliberative’ (as distinct
from perceptual) phantasia (DA 3.11, 434a5–10; cf. 3.10, 433b29); and the faculty of
phantasia is the same as the perceptual faculty (Insomn. 1, 459a14–22)” (Heath, “Aristotle on
Natural Slavery,” 254). On the physical aspects of thinking, see Philip van der Eijk, “The
Matter of Mind,” in Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity: Doctors and
Philosophers on Nature, Soul, Health and Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), 217–37. In section 4.2.4 I discuss the distinction between the two kinds of phantasia
that Heath calls “deliberative” and “perceptual” (“Aristotle on Natural Slavery”).
8. See Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals I–IV, trans. Lennox, 187; Henry, “How Sexist Is
Aristotle.” Henry does not extend the claim to the political realm.
9. Nielsen, “The Private Parts of Animals.”
10. References to animal intelligence are found both in the biological works (HA 1.1 488b15, 8.1
589a1, 9.48 631a27; PA 2.2 648a6 [φρονιμώτερα], 2.4 650b24 [διάνοιαν]; GA 3.2 753a10
[φρονιμώτερα]) and in other works (e.g., Met. 1.1 980b22, EN 6.7 1141a26ff). While different
terms are used to refer to animal intelligence in these passages, phronimos and its cognates are
recurrent.
11. See J. L. Labarrière, “De la phronesis animale,” in Biologie, logique, et métaphysique, ed.
Daniel Devereux and Pierre Pellegrin (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique,
1990), 405–28; Freudenthal, Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance, 52–53, who also cites
Urs Dierauer, Tier und Mensch im Denken der Antike: Studien zur Tierpsychologie,
Anthropologie und Ethik (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1977), 122–23, 135–37, 145–48.
12. We should notice the incongruity of identifying the practical failure of female animals as one
of an incapacity to care for the young, since Aristotle, among many, supposed that nature
assigns this task primarily to the female, and it would be odd for nature to assign the task to
the sex that is especially unfit to carry it out successfully.
13. Ross says that while the organ in which “the central function of sense is localised” is
“universally admitted to be the heart,” “great difficulties arise when we attempt to determine
whether it is the heart as a whole which is the organ or only some part of or constituent in it.”
He concludes that “if the organ of consciousness is not the heart as a whole but only some
constituent in it, the seat of this organ is probably the middle chamber of the heart,” citing
Joseph Neuhaeuser, Aristoteles’ Lehre von den sinnlichen Erkenntnissvermögen und seinen
Organen (Leipzig: Verlag von Erich Koschny, 1878), 86. This is because “the central organ of
sensation is not the heart itself, but a substance found in its middle chamber. . . . The point is
that this substance is different from the elements of the sublunary world and seems to serve as
a basis or substratum for terrestrial conscious life” (Ross, Aristotle, De Sensu and De
Memoria, 14–17).
14. The terms Aristotle uses to denote intelligence in these contexts vary, although he speaks most
often of διάνοια.
15. The term I have translated here as a “good blend” is sometimes rendered as “temperament” or
“constitution”. See PA 673b30 for the contrast with a bad blend or constitution of body (in
toads and tortoises). “τὸν ἐγκέφαλον ὑγρότατον ἔχουσι καὶ πλεῖστον τῶν ζῴων, τούτου δ᾿
αἴτιον ὅτι καὶ τὴν ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ θερμότητα καθαρωτάτην. δηλοῖ δὲ τὴν εὐκρασίαν ἡ διάνοια·
φρονιμώτατον γάρ ἐστι τῶν ζῴων ἄνθρωπος” (GA 2.6 744a27–32).
16. A passage that may seem to tell against this is at PA 3.4 667a1–6 (mentioned earlier), where
Aristotle says that the blood in the central cavity of the heart (located between the right and
the left) is intermediate both in amount and in heat and is also purest. But of course the most
unadulterated blood may not also be the hottest blood, although heating will purify blood that
is adulterated. If pure heat produces hotter blood, we can make sense of the association in the
passage at GA 2.6 744a28–32 of purer heat with a bigger and more fluid brain: if the heat of
the heart is purer and therefore hotter, the brain will have to be better able to cool down the
blood.
17. Lennox, in a note on this passage (referred to in this chapter, section 4.1.3, n. 8), says: “Blood
types (and blood-analogue types) are correlated with differences in character and intelligence
(noêsis). It would be wrong to see this as accounting for the character differences by reference
to differences in blood—ultimately the blood/blood-analogue differences will need to be
explained by reference to the role of differences in character and intelligence in the animal’s
life” (Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals I–IV, trans. Lennox, 187). His point is that the blood
and its qualities as a material part must be supposed to be a function of the character and
intelligence of the animal, because the material parts are for the sake of the functions of the
animal, which are prior, in this sense, to the material parts. If we transfer this point to the case
of the distinction between males and females, then the differences in the blood of males and
females will need to be explained by reference to the differences in the functions of male and
female—and those differences in function will not themselves be explained by the differences
in blood. In that case the material constitution of females would not be an imperfection or
accident, but the consequence, natural and purposeful, of the function of the female. This
would align Lennox’s position with the interpretation according to which the female is a
distinct telos of nature from the male.
18. This association of the right side with hotter blood is in accord with Aristotle’s claim in the
passage at PA 3.4 667a1–6 that the right cavity of the heart has the hottest blood. He says,
“That is why the right side of the body is hotter than the left” (667a2–3). We should be
reminded here of the Pythagorean columns of opposites (see chap. 1, section 1.3); Aristotle
also thinks that the right is axiologically better than the left, and what is “up” better than what
is “down,” and uses these spatial principles in his biology.
19. This phrase is difficult to interpret, for two reasons. First, the verb ἐκόπτω is describing what
the movement of the heat in the blood does to perceptual activity. Ogle translates it as
“destroys,” Louis as “émousse,” and Pellegrin as “réduit.” Aristotle himself uses the same
verb in the Rhetoric to mean that an inscription has been excised (ἐκκόψαι, Rhet. 2 400a25);
and at Div. 464b7–17 Aristotle says that “dream images are analogous to the forms reflected in
water” and thus difficult to interpret, “for the internal movement effaces the clearness of the
dream (ἡ γὰρ κίνησις ἐκκόπτει τὴν εὐθυονειρίαν)” (Aristotle, On Divination in Sleep, trans. J.
I. Beare in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan
Barnes [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984], 736–39). So perhaps “erases” or
“muddies” best reflects the idea that the movements somehow impede the clarity of
perception. What is clear is that the movement of heat in the blood somehow interferes with
perceptual activity, whether it is simply dulling it or removing it altogether. Second, it is not
clear what the motion of the heat in the blood (ἡ τῆς ἐν τῷ αἵματι θερμότητος κίνησις) refers
to; presumably this motion is not itself the movement of prior sensations, but in the context
Aristotle does not discuss other movements. See also GA 5.1 780a5–14, where Aristotle says
that stronger movements drive out (ἐκκρούει) weaker movements in the eye.
20. The De anima passage reads: “For in the other senses humans are surpassed by many other
animals, whereas in the case of touch humans differ from the others in being by a long
measure more precise. Humans are, accordingly, the most intelligent (φρονιμώτατόν) of
animals. As an indication of this: in the human race, natural aptitude (εὐφυεῖς καὶ ἀφυεῖς)
depends upon this sensory faculty but not upon any other. For whereas those with hard flesh
(οἱ σκληρόσαρκοι) have no natural aptitude for thought (ἀφυεῖς τὴν διάνοιαν), those with
delicate flesh (οἱ μαλακόσαρκοι) do [have such a capacity] (εὐφυεῖς).”
21. Freeland points out that “this should be taken with a grain of salt because Aristotle offers
several alternative explanations for humans’ superior intelligence,” referring us to PA 4.10, PA
2.7, PA 2.17 660a15–28, and HA 9.1 608a17–21(Cynthia Freeland, “Aristotle on the Sense of
Touch,” in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg
Rorty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 234.
22. For a summary of the evidence that female animals are less perceptually intelligent than males
because of their inferior bodies, see Leunissen, From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in
Aristotle, 153–54.
23. Aristotle says that the bones of male animals are harder than those of females (PA 2.9 655a11–
15), which suggests that the bones of females are softer, but we cannot extrapolate from that to
a claim that females have softer flesh or sense organs.
24. On the notion of “articulation” see Brooke Holmes, The Symptom and the Subject: The
Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2010), 185.
25. At least one commentator does think that Aristotle believes that women (and eunuchs) tend to
have flesh that is “softer” than “normal men,” and that this “contradicts his claim that among
humans, softer flesh means greater intelligence” (Mayhew, The Female in Aristotle’s Biology,
67). But Mayhew thinks this contradiction can be resolved by supposing that “Aristotle does
think women have a more accurate and discriminating sense of touch” but that this does not
cause women to have greater intelligence “since she otherwise lacks the intellectual
potentialities of normal men,” (67). Freeland asks why, if softer flesh leads to greater
intelligence, Aristotle does not extend the point to “those delightfully soft, squishy—and
unintelligent—beings, the oyster and the clam?” (Freeland “Aristotle on the Sense of Touch,”
235).
26. He does, however, attribute to the female a moral softness, as we will see in sections 4.3.1 and
4.3.2.
27. Labarrière writes: “c’est ici qu’intervient la différence constitutive de l’humain: il va former
une notion une [sic] de tout cela en tirant effectivement ‘la leçon de l'expérience’, tandis que
l’animal s’arrête en chemin” (J. L. Labarrière, “Imagination humaine et imagination animale
chez Aristote,” Phronesis 29, no. 1 (1984), 25). He argues that the difference between animals
and humans is manifest in the practical syllogism: in the process of practical reasoning
represented by the syllogism, a person is able to formulate the universal premise (i.e., the
“universal judgment”), which requires the ability to form a single phantasma from many (DA
3.11 434a9–10). This is just what animals cannot do (I will return to this point later).
28. The mention of age (δι᾿ἡλικίαν) in the On Memory passage as one reason that impressions
might not be formed because the surface is too like running water, and the mention of “old
walls” as unreceptive because hard, suggests that in this passage Aristotle primarily has in
mind differences between old and young people and those in their prime. But because the
features that distinguish the young (lack of heat and excessive moisture) also characterize
women, we can extend the claims about the young to women.
29. See Leunissen, From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle, 160–61. Mayhew
suggests that Balme (in Aristotle, History of Animals, Books VII–IX, trans. D. M. Balme
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991], 219) is right to translate μνημονικώτερον
as “has a longer memory,” if “he means to connote that Aristotle is saying that females are
petty and thus more likely to hold a grudge or not forget a perceived slight” (Mayhew, The
Female in Aristotle’s Biology, 96). On this interpretation, to be μνημονικώτερον is not to have
a positive intellectual quality, but is instead a moral failing: to be vindictive.
30. See Labarrière, “De la phronesis animale,” 417–20. He says: “Lorsqu’un animal exerce un
acte de phronèsis . . . cet acte . . . est bien un acte intelligent (c’est-à-dire une position du
bien), mais il faut que ce bien soit ‘représenté imaginativement’ dans le cas particulier et telle
est la fonction de la phantasia aisthètikè qui, pour être supérieure à la simple sensation, y reste
rattachée” (420).
31. Moss allows that this passage might be read to mean that “non-rational motivation is based on
perceptual phantasia and rational motivation on rational (or ‘calculative’) phantasia” (citing
David Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984],
89). She argues it is better to understand it to mean that “rational phantasia is at the basis of
decision” but “wish relies instead on perceptual phantasia” (Moss, Aristotle on the Apparent
Good, 140).
32. C. D. C. Reeve argues (“Aristotle on Women: Diminished Deliberation and Divine Male
Rule,” Revue Roumaine de Philosophie 64, no. 1 (2020): 3–38) that Aristotle believes the
deliberative defect of women to be severe, in that they lack “an understanding that grasps the
good” (28) which he believes can be traced to the earthiness of women’s blood, which has
“cognitive consequences” (32). This may be right; my point is that it is not clear how earthy
blood and the consequent perceptual inaccuracy would produce a deficiency in the
understanding that grasps the good, even once we allow that it will interfere with perceptual
accuracy.
33. See, e.g., Plato, Republic 4 439d for the distinction of the non-rational from the rational part of
the soul, and 439e3 for the description of thumos as a part of the non-rational—“that by which
we get angry (ᾧ θυμούμεθα).” Homer employs the term in varied senses, to mean something
like soul, spirit, or mind (see, e.g., Iliad II. 142, III. 395, IV. 494, XIII. 487, XIII. 704, XV.
710, XVI. 219, XVI. 410, XVII. 267). Snell says that “Thumos in Homer is the generator of
motion or agitation” (Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind [New York: Dover, 1953], 9).
34. For a discussion of this passage see Giles Pearson, Aristotle on Desire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 116–17, 127.
35. For a discussion of the physiology of desire and locomotion, see Moss, Aristotle on the
Apparent Good, 23–26. Moss points to a passage in the De motu animalium where Aristotle
associates heating and cooling of the body with the experience of a variety of passions, saying
that “daring and fears and lusts and the other bodily painful and pleasant [passions] are
accompanied by heating or cooling” (MA 8 702a3–4).
36. From what we have seen, we would expect heat to make blood less fibrous by concocting it
more, making it less earthy, less retentive of heat, and less likely to produce a choleric
temperament. But it may be that some blood is inherently fibrous, in which case it would
retain heat over time (rather than cooling off to a point conducive to accurate perceptions and
moderate responses to insult or contempt).
37. Aristotle allows that there will be variations even within Greece. But the general point is that
the climate of Greece is the most propitious for producing people who are likely to have both
thumos and dianoia—spirit and intelligence. Leunissen has an interesting discussion of this
passage and the physiology that it presupposes in From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in
Aristotle, section 2.2, especially p. 68.
38. Later in the De anima, at 3.9 432a22–b8, Aristotle acknowledges that the source for these
distinctions in the forms of desire is the Platonic tripartite division of the soul, without
endorsing that division: “And it is definitely absurd to break this [ὄρεξις] up, because wish
comes to be in the rational faculty, while appetite and spirit come to be in the irrational part,
and if the soul is threefold, there will be desire in each part” (DA 3.9 432b5–8). In this
passage, the contrast of thumos and two other forms of desire is reiterated, even though
Aristotle wonders whether it would be more accurate to say that desire is a separate faculty of
the soul, or alternatively to say that the different faculties each generate desires that
correspond to their operations. He is not arguing against the tripartite division; rather, his point
is that if we agree that there are three distinct parts of the soul, then ὄρεξις would be found in
all three parts, and so ὄρεξις would not constitute a distinct and separate part of the soul.
Aristotle preserves the tripartite division of desires consistently not only within the biological
works (among which I include the De anima) but also in the practical works. See also Plato,
Rep. 4 439a–41a, for the notion that kinds of desire correspond to parts of the soul.
39. Although Aristotle often uses ἐπιθυμία to refer to a desire for bodily pleasures in particular,
there are passages where he is clearly using it to refer to desires for a broad range of pleasures,
both those associated with the body and others (for the narrower use, see, e.g., EN 3.11
1118b9–15; for the broader use, see EN 3.3 1111a31–35).
40. For a helpful discussion of thumos as a desire (which he calls “retaliatory desire” because he
sees its primary object as revenge), see Pearson, Aristotle on Desire, 111–39.
41. This passage indicates that children have not only appetite (ἐπιθυμία) and thumos but also
βούλησις (wish) from the moment they are born, but not reasoning or intelligence. “Next, just
as soul and body are two things, so also do we see two parts of the soul, the irrational and that
having reason, and the dispositions belonging to these are two in number, one of which is
desire [ὄρεξις] and the other intellect [νοῦς]; and just as the body is prior in birth to the soul,
so is the irrational part to that having reason. This too is evident, for spiritedness [θυμὸς] and
wish [βούλησις], and furthermore appetite [ἐπιθυμία], are present in children immediately on
their being born, while reasoning [ὁ λογισμὸς] and intellect develop naturally in them as they
go along,” (Pol. 7.15 1334b17–26). This is odd, because elsewhere, as we have seen, Aristotle
identifies βούλησις as a form of rational desire. But the point remains that thumos is attributed
to the non-rational soul.
42. For a discussion of this passage that attempts to illuminate the claim that thumos listens to
reason, see Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 191–94. Lorenz says “The central point is that, in
appropriately conditioned adults, the functioning of spirit incorporates a general evaluative
outlook which derived from correct reason and which partially reflects reason’s own
evaluative outlook” (193). See also John M. Cooper, “Reason, Moral Virtue and Moral Value,”
in Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 253–80.
43. Appetite (ἐπιθυμία) also can and should be subjected to reason, but Aristotle seems to draw a
distinction between ἐπιθυμία and θυμὸς with respect to their relations to reason. Aristotle says:
“Thumos follows reason in a way, but appetite does not. In that case not being able to control
it [ἐπιθυμία] is the more shameful, in so far as the person behaving uncontrolledly with regard
to thumos is in a way giving in to reason, whereas the other sort is giving in to appetite and not
to reason” (EN 7.6 1149b1–4). This again suggests that thumos has some element of reason,
even when it is excessive.
44. The most developed recent account of the interpretation of women as akratic is in Nielsen,
“The Constitution of the Soul,” 577–78.
45. See also Topics 2.7 113a31–b1 for the suggestion that affection has thumos as its source:
“Again, if there be posited an accident which has a contrary, look and see if that which admits
of the accident will admit of its contrary as well; for the same thing admits of contraries. Thus
(e.g.) if he has asserted that hatred follows anger, hatred would in that case be in the spirited
faculty (ἐν τῷ θυμοειδεῖ); for that is where anger is. You should therefore look and see if its
contrary is also in the spirited faculty; for if not—if friendship is in the faculty of desire—then
hatred will not follow anger.”
46. The blood of the female is colder than that of the male of the species, and more fibrous (HA
3.19 521a21–25). More perfect animals have less fibrous blood (GA 2.1 732b31–32, GA 5.2
781b18–21). While the perfection in question belongs to the species, and not to the male sex,
the result will be that women have more fibrous, hence less perfect, blood relative to men,
although they have less fibrous, and hence more perfect, blood than other animal species.
47. See n. 42 in this chapter.
48. Aristotle allows that there will be variations even within Greece, such that some people will
have only thumos or dianoia, while others will have both. But the general point is that the
climate of Greece is the most propitious for producing people who are likely to have both. We
might have expected that a cold climate would make a people insufficiently thumotic, and a
hot one excessively thumotic, given the association of thumos with heat. Perhaps Aristotle
supposes that those who live in a cold climate must have hotter blood, and those in a warm
climate cooler blood, to compensate for the climatic conditions. Alternatively, Aristotle may
have subscribed to the Hippocratic idea that colder climates are more challenging and thus
stimulate manliness in Europeans, whereas hotter climates induce laziness in Asians (On Airs,
Waters, Places 16.1–14, 24.1–35).
49. One implication of this is that free Greek women would resemble in character the Asian men
that Aristotle describes as intelligent but incapable of rule in the ethnographic passage at
Politics 7.7 1327b19–38.
50. Malcolm Heath has argued persuasively that we should understand the impairment of slaves as
limited in important ways: “It is an impairment of the capacity for practical (not technical or
theoretical) reasoning; it is an impairment of the capacity for deliberation (not a conceptual or
motivational failure); it is an impairment of the capacity for global deliberation; and it is an
impairment that disrupts deliberation by detaching an individual’s conception of intrinsic
value from executive control of his behaviour” (Heath, “Aristotle on Natural Slavery,” 253).
The point is that, while the lack of a deliberative capacity is significant, it is not the case, as
some commentators have suggested, that slaves have no capacity for reasoning autonomously
(Heath, “Aristotle on Natural Slavery,” 145). (Heath mentions Fortenbaugh (“Aristotle on
Slaves and Women”) and Richard Kraut (Aristotle: Political Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002]) as among those who have argued that slaves have no capacity for
reasoning autonomously.) On Heath’s view, natural slaves are not entirely bereft of reason,
and indeed might have advanced technical and theoretical knowledge, and a capacity to
deliberate about the means to achieve a particular moral goal; what they will not be able to do
is to deliberate in a way “guided by a stable architectonic conception of the good life”—it is
not even that they may not have such a conception, just that they will not be able to use it to
guide their deliberation (Heath, “Aristotle on Natural Slavery,” 251). See chap. 3 (section
3.4.3 and nn. 54 and 55).
51. See Heath, “Aristotle on Natural Slavery” (254), for an account of how “climate affects
thumos, and thumos affects practical deliberation.”
52. I am in agreement, then, both with Heath, who argues that the barbarian will usually but not
without exception be a natural slave, citing Politics 1.2 1252b5–9, 1.6 1255a28–b2, and 3.14
128a19–21 (Heath, “Aristotle on Natural Slavery,” 245 n. 6), and especially with Pellegrin,
who says, “We must certainly suppose that the determinism of climate invoked here is not
strict, for Aristotle surely does not think that all the inhabitants of Asia Minor are natural
slaves, to say nothing of the Greeks living in Asia Minor” (Pellegrin, “Natural Slavery,” 107).
References
Ancient Works
Aeschylus. The Eumenides. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. In The Complete Greek Tragedies,
vol. 1, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 135–173. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1959.
Aeschylus. Seven against Thebes. Translated by David Grene. In The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol.
1, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 263–303. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1959.
Aristophanes. Assemblywomen. Translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Aristophanes. Ecclesiazusae. Edited by R. G. Ussher. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
Aristotle. Aristotle’s Politics. Translated by Carnes Lord. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2013.
Aristotle. Categories. Translated by J. L. Ackrill. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised
Oxford Translation, vol. 1, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 3–24. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1984.
Aristotle. Constitution of Athens. Translated by F. G. Kenyon. In The Complete Works of Aristotle:
The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 2341–83. Princeton, NJ:
Aristotle. De Anima, Books II and III. Translated by D. W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.
Aristotle. De Generatione et Corruptione. Translated by C. J. F. Williams. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1982.
Aristotle. Aristotle’s “De Motu Animalium.” Translated by Martha C. Nussbaum. Princeton, NJ:
Aristotle. Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Revised ed. Translated by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1966.
Aristotle. De Partibus Animalium I and De Generatione Animalium I. Translated by D. M. Balme.
Aristotle. Eudemian Ethics. Translated and edited by Brad Inwood and Raphael Woolf. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Aristotle. Eudemian Ethics. Translated by J. Solomon. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The
Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 1922–81. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Aristotle. Athenian Constitution; Eudemian Ethics; Virtues and Vices. Translated by H. Rackham.
Aristotle. Aristotelis, De Generatione Animalium. Edited by H. J. Drossaart Lulofs. Oxford:
Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Translated by A. L. Peck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1942.
Aristotle. History of Animals, Books I–III. Translated by A. L. Peck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Aristotle. History of Animals, Books IV–VI. Translated by A. L. Peck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Aristotle. History of Animals, Books VII–IX. Translated by D. M. Balme. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Aristotle. History of Animals. Translated by d’A. W. Thompson. In The Complete Works of Aristotle:
Aristotle. Aristote: Histoire des Animaux I–X. Translated by J. Tricot. Paris: Vrin, 1957.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2016.
Aristotle. Meteorologica. Translated by H. D. P. Lee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1952.
Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Translated by D. P. Chase. London: J. M. Dent, 1911.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1926.
Aristotle. L' éthique à Nicomaque. 2nd ed. Translated by René Antoine Gauthier and Jean Yves Jolif.
Leuven: Publications universitaires; Paris: Béatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1970.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Christopher Rowe. Edited by Sarah Broadie and
Christopher Rowe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Aristotle. On the Heavens. Translated by J. L. Stocks. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The
Aristotle. On the Parts of Animals I–IV. Translated by James G. Lennox. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2001.
Aristotle. Parts of Animals; Movement of Animals; Progression of Animals. Revised ed. Translated
by A. L. Peck and E. S. Forster. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. https://www-
lib.shinshu-u.ac.jp/opc/en/recordID/catalog.bib/BA18541230?hit=1&caller=xc-search
Aristotle. On the Soul. Translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised
Oxford Translation, vol. 1, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 641–92. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Aristotle. On the Soul; Parva Naturalia; On Breath. Translated by W. S. Hett. Cambridge, MA:
Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by Christopher Shields. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2016.
Aristotle. On Youth, Old Age, Life and Death, and Respiration. Translated by G. R. T. Ross. In The
Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1, edited by Jonathan Barnes,
745–63. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Aristotle. Parva Naturalia. Edited by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.
Aristotle. Sense and Sensibilia. Translated by J. I. Beare. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The
Aristotle. On Memory. Translated by J. I. Beare. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised
Aristotle. On Divination in Sleep. Translated by J. I. Beare. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The
Aristotle. Petits traités d’histoire naturelle. Translated by René Mugnier. 2nd ed. Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1965.
Aristotle. Physics. Translated by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye. In The Complete Works of Aristotle:
Aristotle. Politics. Translated by B. Jowett. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford
Translation, vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 1986–2129. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2005.
Aristotle. Politics. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998.
Aristotle. Politics, Books I and II. Translated by Trevor J. Saunders. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Aristotle. The Politics of Aristotle. Edited and translated by Ernest Barker. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1946.
Aristotle. The Politics of Aristotle. Edited and translated by Franz Susemihl and R. D. Hicks.
London: Macmillan, 1894.
Aristotle. Posterior Analytics. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. In The Complete Works of Aristotle:
Aristotle. Problems, Books 1–19. Edited and translated by Robert Mayhew. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised
Aristotle. Topics. Translated by W. A. Pickard-Cambridge. In the Complete Works of Aristotle: The
Herodotus. Histories. Edited by James Room. Translated by Pamela Mensch. Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 2014.
Hesiod. Theogony; Works and Days; Testimonia. Translated and edited by Glenn W. Most.
Hippocrates. Diseases of Women 1–2. Translated and edited by Paul Potter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Hippocrates. Generation; Nature of the Child; Diseases 4; Nature of Women and Barrenness.
Translated and edited by Paul Potter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Hippocrates. Nature of Man; Regimen in Health; Humours; Aphorisms; Regimen 1–3; Dreams;
Heracleitus: On the Universe. Translated and edited by W. H. S Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Hippocrates. Ancient Medicine; Airs, Waters, Places; Epidemics 1 and 3; The Oath; Precepts;
Nutriment. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923.
Hippocrates. Oeuvres completes d’Hippocrate, 10 vols. Edited by Emile Littré. Paris: Baillière,
1839–61; repr. Amsterdam : Hakkert, 1961–2.
Plato. Critias. Translated by Diskin Clay. In Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 1292–1306.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997.
Plato. Laws. Translated by Trevor J. Saunders. In Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 1318–
1616. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997.
Plato. Meno. Translated by G. M .A. Grube. In Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 870–97.
Plato. Statesman. Translated by C. J. Rowe. In Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 294–358.
Plato. The Republic. 2 vols. Translated by Paul Shorey. London: W. Heinemann, 1930.
Plato. Republic 5. Edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1993.
Plato. The Republic of Plato. Translated by Allan Bloom. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 1968.
Plato. The Republic of Plato, Vol. 1, Books I–V. Edited by James Adam. Cambridge: Cambridge
Plato. Statesman. Edited and translated by Christopher J. Rowe. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1995.
Plato. Timaeus. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl. In Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 1225–
91. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997.
Plutarch. Moralia, Volume V. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1936.
Plutarch. “Solon.” In Lives, Vol. 1, Books 1–5, translated by John Dryden, revised by Arthur Hugh
Clough, 168–202. Boston: Little, Brown, 1859.
Simplicius. On Aristotle’s “Physics 3.” Translated by J. O. Urmson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2002.
Xenophon. Memorabilia. Translated by Amy L. Bonnette. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1994.
Xenophon. Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary. Translated by Sarah B. Pomeroy.
Modern Works
Allen, Prudence. The Concept of Woman, Vol. 1: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 BC–AD 1250.
Montreal: Eden Press, 1985.
Angioni, Lucas. “Definition and Essence in Aristotle’s Metaphysics vii 4.” Ancient Philosophy 34
(2014): 75–100.
Annas, Julia. “Aristotle on Human Nature and Political Virtue.” Review of Metaphysics 49, no. 4
(1996): 731–53.
Annas, Julia. “Plato’s Republic and Feminism.” In Philosophy 51, no. 197 (1976): 747–61.
Atran, Scott. “Pre-Theoretical Aspects of Aristotelian Definition and Classification of Animals: The
Case for Common Sense.” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 16, no. 2 (1985):113–
63.
Balme, D. M. “Authenticity and Date of HA VII–X.” In Aristotle, History of Animals, Volume III:
Books 7–10, translated by D. M. Balme, 1–30. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Balme, D. M. “Genos and Eidos in Aristotle’s Biology.” Classical Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1962): 81–98.
Barker, Ernest. The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle. New York: Dover, 1959.
Bignone, Ettore. “Appendice VI: La struttura del poema fisico e l’ordine dei frammenti.” In
Empedocle: Studio critico, traduzione e commento delle testimonianze e dei frammenti, 651–76.
Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1963.
Bobonich, Christopher. Plato’s Utopia Recast: His Later Ethics and Politics. Oxford: Oxford
Bradley, A. C. “Aristotle’s Conception of the State.” In A Companion to Aristotle’s “Politics,” edited
by David Keyt and Fred D. Miller, 25–26. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Bradshaw, Leah. “Political Rule, Prudence and the ‘Woman Question’ in Aristotle.” Canadian
Journal of Political Science 24, no. 3 (1991): 557–73.
Brisson, Luc. “Ethics and Politics in Plato’s Laws.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 28 (2005):
93–121.
Brisson, Luc. Lectures de Platon. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2000.
Campbell, Gordon. Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Commentary on “De Rerum Natura” 5.
722–1104. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Cantarella, Eva. Pandora’s Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity.
Translated by Maureen B. Fant. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Carbone, Andrea L. “The Axes of Symmetry: Morphology in Aristotle’s Biology.” Apeiron 49, no. 1
(2016): 1–31.
Carone, Gabriele R. “Reversing the Myth of the Politicus.” Classical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2004): 88–
108.
Carson, Anne. “Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire.” In Before Sexuality: The
Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by David M. Halperin, John
J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, 135–69. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Charles, David. “Aristotle and the Unity and Essence of Biological Kinds.” In Aristotelische
Biologie: Intentionen, Methoden, Ergebnisse, edited by Wolfgang Kullman and Sabine Föllinger,
27–42. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997.
Charles, David. Aristotle on Meaning and Essence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.
Charles, David. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Charles, David. “Perfectionism in Aristotle’s Political Theory: Reply to Martha Nussbaum.” Oxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. (1988): 185–206.
Clark, Stephen R. L. “Aristotle’s Woman.” History of Political Thought 3, no. 2 (1982): 177–91.
Code, Alan. “An Aristotelian Puzzle about Definition: Metaphysics Z.12.” In Being, Nature, and Life
in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf, edited by James G. Lennox and Robert Bolton, 78–
96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Code, Alan. “Soul as Efficient Cause in Aristotle’s Embryology.” Philosophical Topics 15, no. 2
(1987): 51–59.
Cohen, David. “The Legal Status and Political Role of Women in Plato’s Laws.” Revue
internationale des droits de l’antiquité 34 (1987): 27–40.
Coles, Andrew. “Biomedical Models of Reproduction in the Fifth Century BC and Aristotle’s
Generation of Animals.” Phronesis 40, no. 1 (1995): 48–88.
Connell, Sophia M. “Nutritive and Sentient Soul in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals 2.5.” Phronesis
(2020): 1–31.
Connell, Sophia M. Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals. Cambridge:
Cooper, John M. “Hypothetical Necessity and Natural Teleology.” In Philosophical Issues in
Aristotle’s Biology, edited by Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox, 243–74. Cambridge:
Cooper, John M. “Metaphysics in Aristotle’s Embryology.” In Knowledge, Nature, and the Good,
174–203. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Cooper, John M. “Reason, Moral Virtue and Moral Value.” In Reason and Emotion: Essays on
Ancient Moral Theory, 253–80. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Cornford, Francis MacDonald. Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1997.
Cox, Cheryl Anne. Household Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in
Ancient Athens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Craik, Elizabeth. “The ‘Hippocratic Question’ and the Nature of the Hippocratic Corpus.” In The
Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, edited by Peter Pormann, 25–37. Cambridge: Cambridge
Dean-Jones, Lesley. “Clinical Gynecology and Aristotle’s Biology: The Composition of HA X.”
Apeiron 45, no. 2 (2012): 180–99.
Dean-Jones, Lesley. Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994.
Demand, Nancy. “Plato, Aristophanes, and the ‘Speeches of Pythagoras’.” Greek, Roman and
Byzantine Studies 23, no. 2 (1982): 179–84.
Deslauriers, Marguerite. “Aristotle on Andreia, Divine and Sub-Human Virtues.” In Andreia: Studies
in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity, edited by Ralph M. Rosen and Ineke Sluiter,
187–211. Leiden: Brill, 2003.
Deslauriers, Marguerite. Aristotle on Definition. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Deslauriers, Marguerite. “Social and Civic Implications of Aristotle’s Notion of Authority.” In Law,
Politics and Society in the Ancient Mediterranean World, edited by Baruch Halpern and Deborah
W. Hobson, 122–36. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993.
Deslauriers, Marguerite, and Pierre Destrée, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s
“Politics.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Devereux, Daniel. “Aristotle on the Form and Definition of a Human Being: Definitions and Their
Parts in Metaphysics 10 and 11.” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient
Philosophy 26 (2010): 167–96.
Diels, Hermann. Doxographi Graeci. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1879.
Diels, Hermann. “Studia Empedoclea.” Hermes 15, no. 2 (1880): 161–79.
Dierauer, Urs. Tier und Mensch im Denken der Antike: Studien zur Tierpsychologie, Anthropologie
und Ethik. Amsterdam: Grüner, 1977.
Dobbs, Darrel. “Family Matters: Aristotle’s Appreciation of Women and the Plural Structure of
Society.” American Political Science Review 90, no. 1 (1996): 74–89.
El Murr, Dimitri. “Hesiod, Plato, and the Golden Age: Hesiodic Motifs in the Myth of the Politicus
1.” In Plato and Hesiod, edited by G. R. Boys-Stones and J. H. Haubold, 276–97. Oxford: Oxford
Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought. 2nd ed.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Falcon, Andrea. Aristotle and the Science of Nature: Unity without Uniformity. Cambridge:
Falcon, Andrea, and David Lefebvre, eds. Aristotle’s Generation of Animals: A Critical Guide,
Fant, Maureen B., and Mary R. Lefkowitz. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome, 3rd ed. Translated by
Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Finlayson, James Gordon. “‘Bare Life’ and Politics in Agamben’s Reading of Aristotle.” Review of
Politics 72, no. 1 (2010): 97–126.
Föllinger, Sabine. Differenz und Gleichheit: Das Geschlechterverhältnis in der Sicht griechischer
Philosophen des 4. bis 1. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1996.
Fortenbaugh, William W. “Aristotle on Women: Politics i 13.1260a13.” Ancient Philosophy 35
(2015): 395–404.
Fortenbaugh, William W. “Aristotle on Slaves and Women.” In Articles on Aristotle, vol. 2, Ethics
and Politics, edited by Jonathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield, and Richard Sorabji, 135–39.
London: Duckworth, 1977.
Freeland, Cynthia. “Aristotle on the Sense of Touch.” In Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, edited by
Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, 227–48. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Freudenthal, Gad. Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance: Heat and Pneuma, Form and Soul.
Garsten, Bryan. “Deliberating and Acting Together.” In The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s
Politics, edited by Marguerite Deslauriers and Pierre Destrée, 324–49. Cambridge: Cambridge
Gelber, Jessica. “Females in Aristotle’s Embryology.” In Aristotle’s “Generation of Animals”: A
Critical Guide, edited by Andrea Falcon and David Lefebvre, 171–87. Cambridge: Cambridge
Gelber, Jessica. “Form and Inheritance in Aristotle’s Embryology.” Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy 39 (2010): 183–212.
Gill, Mary Louise. “Material Necessity and Meteorology IV.12.” In Aristotelische Biologie:
Intentionen, Methoden, Ergebnisse, edited by Wolfgang Kullman and Sabine Föllinger, 145–61.
Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997.
Gill, Mary Louise. “Unity of Definition in Metaphysics H.6 and Z.12.” In Being, Nature, and Life in
Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf, edited by James G. Lennox and Robert Bolton, 97–
121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Goldin, Owen. “The Pythagorean Table of Opposites, Symbolic Classification, and Aristotle.”
Science in Context 28, no. 2 (2015): 171–93.
Gotthelf, Allan. “Aristotle’s Conception of Final Causality.” In Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s
Biology, edited by Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox, 204–42. Cambridge: Cambridge
Gotthelf, Allan. “First Principles in Aristotle’s Parts of Animals.” In Philosophical Issues in
Aristotle’s Biology, edited by Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox, 167–98. Cambridge:
Gotthelf, Allan, and James G. Lennox, eds. Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology. Cambridge:
Graham, D. W. “Symmetry in the Empedoclean Cycle.” Classical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (1988): 297–
312.
Guthrie, W. K. C. “Empedocles.” In A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 2, 122–265. Cambridge:
Hadas, Moses. “Utopian Sources in Herodotus.” Classical Philology 30, no. 2 (1935): 113–21.
Halper, E. “Metaphysics Z 12 and H 6: The Unity of Form and Composite.” Ancient Philosophy 4
(1984): 146–58.
Halperin, David M. “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality.” In One Hundred Years of
Homosexuality, 15–40. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Hanson, Ann Ellis. “The Medical Writer’s Woman.” In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic
Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma
I. Zeitlin, 309–38. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Heath, Malcolm. “Aristotle on Natural Slavery.” Phronesis 53, no. 3 (2008): 246–53.
Henry, Devin. Aristotle on Form, Matter, and Moving Causes: The Hylomorphic Theory of
Substantial Generation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Henry, Devin M. “How Sexist Is Aristotle’s Developmental Biology?” Phronesis 52, no. 3 (2007):
251–69.
Henry, Devin M. “Understanding Aristotle’s Reproductive Hylomorphism.” Apeiron 39, no. 3
(2006): 257–88.
Henry, Madeleine M., and Sharon L. James. “Woman, City, State: Theories, Ideologies, and Concepts
in the Archaic and Classical Periods.” In A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, edited by
Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon, 84–95. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Holmes, Brooke. The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient
Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Holt, Parker. “Women and Medicine.” In A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, edited by
Sharon James and Sheila Dillon, 107–204. Chichester: Blackwell, 2012.
Horowitz, Maryanne Cline. “Aristotle and Woman.” Journal of the History of Biology 9, no. 2
(1976): 182–213.
Huffman, Carl A. Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean and Presocratic. Cambridge: Cambridge
Inwood, Brad. The Poem of Empedocles. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Johnson, Monte R. Aristotle on Teleology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.
Jouanna, Jacques. “Textual History.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, edited by Peter
Pormann, 38–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Jowett, Benjamin. The Politics of Aristotle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885.
Judson, Lindsay. “Chance and ‘Always or for the Most Part’ in Aristotle.” In Aristotle’s Physics: A
Collection of Essays, edited by Lindsay Judson, 73–99. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Just, Roger. Women in Athenian Law and Life. London: Routledge, 1989.Kahn, Charles H. “The
Myth of the Statesman.” In Plato’s Myths, edited by Catalin Partenie, 148–66. Cambridge:
Kahn, Charles H. Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: A Brief History. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
2001.
Karbowski, Joseph. “Aristotle on the Deliberative Abilities of Women.” Apeiron 47, no. 4 (2014):
435–60.
Keyt, David. “Three Basic Theorems in Aristotle’s Politics.” In David Keyt and Fred D. Miller, A
Companion to Aristotle’s “Politics,” 118–41. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Keyt, David. “Three Fundamental Theorems in Aristotle’s Politics.” Phronêsis 32, no. 1 (1987): 54–
79.
Keyt, David, and Fred D. Miller. A Companion to Aristotle’s “Politics.” Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
King, Helen. Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece. London:
Routledge, 1998.
King, Helen. The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence. Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2013.
Kraut, Richard. Aristotle: Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Kraut, Richard. “Aristotle’s Ethics.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta,
3.2, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/aristotle-ethics/.
Kurke, Leslie. Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Ancient Greece.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Labarrière, J. L. “De la phronesis animale.” In Biologie, logique, et métaphysique, edited by Daniel
Devereux and Pierre Pellegrin, 405–28. Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1990.
Labarrière, J. L. “Imagination humaine et imagination animale chez Aristote.” Phronesis 29, no. 1
(1984): 17–49.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA:
Lennox, James G. “Aristotle on the Biological Roots of Virtue: The Natural History of Natural
Virtue.” In Bridging the Gap between Aristotle’s Science and Ethics, edited by Devin Henry and
Karen Margrethe Nielsen, 193–213. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Leunissen, Mariska. Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature. Cambridge:
Leunissen, Mariska. From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017.
Levin, Susan B. “Plato on Women’s Nature: Reflections on the Laws.” Ancient Philosophy 20, no. 1
(2000): 81–97.
Levin, Susan B. “Women’s Nature and Role in the Ideal Polis: Republic V Revisited.” In Feminism
in Ancient Philosophy, edited by Julie K. Ward, 13–30. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Lewis, Frank A. How Aristotle Gets By in Metaphysics Zeta. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Lloyd, G .E. R. Aristotelian Explorations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Lloyd, G. E. R. “Right and Left in Greek Philosophy.” In Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic
Classification, edited by Rodney Needham, 167–86. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
Lloyd, G. E. R. “The Hot and the Cold, the Dry and the Wet in Greek Philosophy.” Journal of
Hellenistic Studies 84 (1964): 92–106.
Lloyd, G. E. R. Science, Folklore, and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece.
Lloyd-Jones, Hugh. Females of the Species: Semonides on Women. London: Duckworth, 1975.
Lonie, Iain M. The Hippocratic Treatises, “On Generation,” “On the Nature of the Child,”
“Diseases IV”: A Commentary. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981.
Loraux, Nicole. The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between
the Sexes. Translated by Caroline Levine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Lord, Carnes. “On the Early History of the Aristotelian Corpus.” American Journal of Philology 107,
no. 2 (1986): 137–61.
Lorenz, Hendrik. The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford
Lovibond, Sabina. “An Ancient Theory of Gender: Plato and the Pythagorean Table.” In Women in
Ancient Societies: An Illusion of the Night, edited by Léonie J. Archer, Susan Fischler, and Maria
Wyke, 88–101. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994.
Manville, Philip Brook. The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Marinella, Lucrezia. La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne. Venice: Giolito, 1601.
Martin, Alain, and Oliver Primavesi. L’Empédocle de Strasbourg (P. Strasb. gr. Inv. 1665–1666):
Introduction, édition et commentaire. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999.
Mayhew, Robert. “Part and Whole in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy.” Journal of Ethics 1, no. 4
(1997): 325–40.
Mayhew, Robert. The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason or Rationalization. Chicago: Chicago
Menn, Stephen. “The Aim and the Argument of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Part Two: The False Path (Z
and H), IIe: Z17–H6: How to Give the λόγος τῆς οὐσίας of a Composite Thing, 33.”
https://www.philosophie.hu-berlin.de/de/lehrbereiche/antike/mitarbeiter/menn/contents.
McKirahan, Richard D. Philosophy before Socrates. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994.
Miller, Fred D. Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Modrak, Deborah K. W. “Aristotle: Women, Deliberation, and Nature.” In Engendering Origins:
Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle, edited by Bat-Ami Bar On, 207–22. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1994.
Morford, Mark, Robert J. Lenardon, and Michael Sham. Classical Mythology. 10th ed. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014.
Morrow, Glenn R. Plato’s Cretan City: A Historical Interpretation of the Laws. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1960; revised edition 1993.
Morsink, Johannes. “Was Aristotle’s Biology Sexist?” Journal of the History of Biology 12, no. 1
(1979): 83–112.
Moss, Jessica. Aristotle on the Apparent Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Mulgan, R. G. Aristotle’s Political Theory: An Introduction for Students of Political Theory. Oxford:
Nagle, D. Brendan. The Household as the Foundation of Aristotle’s Polis. Cambridge: Cambridge
Nagler, Michael N. Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1974.
Natali, Carlo. “Posterior Analytics and the Definition of Happiness in NE I.” Phronesis 55, no. 4
(2010): 304–24.
Neuhaeuser, Joseph. Aristoteles’ Lehre von den sinnlichen Erkenntnissvermögen und seinen
Organen. Leipzig: Verlag von Erich Koschny, 1878.
Newman, W. L. The Politics of Aristotle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887.
Nielsen, Karen Margrethe. “Economy and Private Property.” In The Cambridge Companion to
Aristotle’s Politics, edited by Marguerite Deslauriers and Pierre Destrée, 67–91. Cambridge:
Nielsen, Karen Margrethe. “The Constitution of the Soul: Aristotle on Lack of Deliberative
Authority.” Classical Quarterly 65, no. 2 (2015): 572–86.
Nielsen, Karen M. “The Private Parts of Animals: Aristotle on the Teleology of Sexual Difference.”
Phronesis 53, nos. 4–5 (2008): 373–405.
Nussbaum, Martha C. “Nature, Function, and Capability: Aristotle on Political Distribution.” Oxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. (1988): 145–84.
Nussbaum, Martha C. “Reply to David Charles.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl.
(1988): 207–14.
Nussbaum, Martha C. “The Sumphuton Pneuma and the De Motu Animalium’s Account of Soul and
Body.” In Aristotle, Aristotle’s “De Motu Animalium,” translated by Martha C. Nussbaum, 143–
64. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Nuyens François. L’évolution de la psychologie d’Aristote. Leuven: Institut supérieur de philosophie,
1948.
O’Brien, Denis. Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle: A Reconstruction from the Fragments and Secondary
Sources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Okin Susan Moller. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1979.
Okin, Susan Moller. “Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on the Family.” Philosophy and
Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (1977): 345–69.
Osborne, Catherine. “Empedocles Recycled,” Classical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1987): 24–50.
Osborne, Catherine. Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and the Presocratics.
London: Duckworth, 1987.
Padel, Ruth. “Women: Model for Possession by Greek Daemons.” In Images of Women in Antiquity,
edited by Averil Cameron and Amélie Kuhrt, 3–19. London: Routledge, 1983.
Park, Katherine, and Robert A. Nye. “Destiny Is Anatomy.” New Republic, 18 February 1991, 53–57.
Pearson, Giles. Aristotle on Desire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Peck, A. L. “Authenticity.” In Aristotle, History of Animals, Books 1–3, translated by A. L. Peck, lv–
lvii. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Pellegrin, Pierre. “Natural Slavery.” Translated by E. Zoli Filotas. In The Cambridge Companion to
Aristotle’s Politics, edited by Marguerite Deslauriers and Pierre Destrée, 92–116. Cambridge:
Philip, James A. “Aristotle’s Sources for Pythagorean Doctrine.” Phoenix 17, no. 4 (1963): 251–65.
Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves. New York: Shocken Books, 1975.
Primavesi, Oliver. “Aristotle on the ‘So-Called Pythagoreans’: From Lore to Principles.” In A
History of Pythagoreanism, edited by Carl A. Huffman, 243–44. Cambridge: Cambridge
Primavesi, Oliver. “Second Thoughts on Some Presocratics (Metaphysics A 8, 989a18–990a32).” In
Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” Alpha: Symposium Aristotelicum, edited by Carlos Steel and Oliver
Primavesi, 225–63. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Reeve. C. D. C. “Aristotle on Women: Diminished Deliberation and Divine Male Rule.” Revue
Roumaine de Philosophie 64, no. 1 (2020): 3–38.
Rhodes, P. J. A Commentary on the Aristotelian “Athenaion Politeia.” Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1981.
Riesbeck, David J. “Aristotle on the Politics of Marriage: ‘Marital Rule’ in the Politics.” The
Classical Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2015): 134–52.
Rist, John M. The Mind of Aristotle: A Study in Philosophical Growth. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1989.
Ross, G. R. T. Aristotle, De Sensu and De Memoria: Text and Translation with Introduction and
Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906.
Rousselle, Aline. “Observation feminine et idéologie masculine: Le corps de la femme d’après les
médecins grecs.” Annales 35, no. 5 (1980): 1089–1115.
Rousselle, Aline. Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
Saïd, Suzanne. “Féminin, femme et femelle dans les grands traités biologiques d’Aristote.” In La
femme dans les sociétés antiques, edited by Edmond Lévy, 93–117. Strasbourg: Université des
sciences humaines de Strasbourg, 1983.
Samaras, Thanassis. “Aristotle on Gender in Politics I.” History of Political Thought 37, no. 4
(2016): 595–605.Saunders, Trevor J. “Plato on Women in the Laws.” In The Greek World, edited
by Anton Powell, 591–609. London: Routledge, 1995.
Saxonhouse, Arlene W. “The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato.” Political
Theory 4, no. 2 (1976): 195–212.
Scaltsas, Theodore, David Charles, and Mary Louise Gill, eds. Unity, Identity, and Explanation in
Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Schofield, Malcolm. “Ideology and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Theory of Slavery.” In Aristoteles’
“Politik”: Akten des XI Symposium Aristotelicum, edited by Günther Patzig, 12–15. Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990.
Schofield, Malcolm. Plato: Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Schofield, Malcolm. “Pythagoreanism: Emerging from the Presocratic Fog (Metaphysics A 5).” In
Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” Alpha: Symposium Aristotelicum, edited by Carlos Steel, 141–166.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Scodel, Harvey Ronald. Diaeresis and Myth in Plato’s Statesman. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1987.
Sedley, David. Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2008.
Sedley, David. “Hesiod’s Theogony and Plato’s Timaeus.” In Plato and Hesiod, edited by G. R.
Boys-Stones and J. H. Haubold, 256–57. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Shields, Christopher. “The Science of Soul in Aristotle’s Ethics.” In Bridging the Gap between
Aristotle’s Science and Ethics, edited by Devin Henry and Karen Margrethe Nielsen, 232–53.
Simpson, Peter. “Aristotle’s Criticisms of Socrates’ Communism of Wives and Children.” Apeiron
24, no. 2 (1991): 100–103.
Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the Mind. New York: Dover, 1953.
Solmsen, Friedrich. Intellectual Experiments of the Greek Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Sparshott, Francis. “Aristotle on Women.” Philosophical Inquiry 7, no. 3 (1985): 177–200.
Spelman, Elizabeth. “Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul.” In Discovering Reality: Feminist
Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, edited by
Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, 2nd ed., 17–30. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003.
Stalley, R. F. An Introduction to Plato’s “Laws.” Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
Stein, Heinrich. Empedocles Agrigentinus Fragmenta. Bonn: Marcus, 1852.
Strauss, Leo. The City and Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Swanson, Judith A. The Public and the Private in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1992.
Trépanier, Simon. “Empedocles on the Ultimate Symmetry of the World.” Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy 24 (2003): 1–57.
Tress, Daryl McGowan. “The Metaphysical Science of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and Its
Feminist Critics.” Review of Metaphysics 46, no. 2 (1992): 307–41.
Trott, Adriel M. Aristotle on the Nature of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014.
van der Eijk, Philip J. “On Sterility (‘HA X’), a Medical Work by Aristotle?” Classical Quarterly 49,
no. 2 (1999): 490–502.
van der Eijk, Philip J. “The Matter of Mind: Aristotle on the Biology of ‘Psychic’ Processes and the
Bodily Aspects of Thinking.” In Aristotelische Biologie: Intentionen, Methoden, Ergebnisse,
edited by Wolfgang Kullman and Sabine Föllinger, 231–57. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997.
van der Eijk, Philip. “The Matter of Mind.” In Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity:
Doctors and Philosophers on Nature, Soul, Health and Disease, 206–37. Cambridge: Cambridge
Veloso, Claudio William. “Aristote, ses commentateurs et les déficiences délibératives de l’esclave et
de la femme.” Les études philosophiques 107 (2013–14): 513–34.
Verbeke, G. “Doctrine du pneuma et entéléchisme chez Aristote.” In Aristotle on Mind and the
Senses: Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium Aristotelicum, edited by G. E. R. Lloyd and G. E.
L. Owen, 191–214. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. “Hestia-Hermes: Sur l’expression religieuse de l’espace et du movement chez
les Grecs.” L’homme 3, no. 3 (1963): 12–50.
Vidal-Naquet Pierre. “Plato’s Myth of the Statesman, the Ambiguities of the Golden Age and of
History.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 98 (November 1978): 132–41.
Vlastos, Gregory. “Was Plato a Feminist?” In Feminist Interpretations of Plato, edited by Nancy
Tuana, 11–23. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.
Wehrli, Claude. “Les gynéconomes.” Museum Helveticum 19, no. 1 (1962): 33–38.
Weil, Raymond. Aristote et l’histoire: Essai sur la “Politique.” Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1960.
Witt, Charlotte. “Aristotle on Deformed Animal Kinds.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 43
(2012): 83–106.
Witt, Charlotte. “Teleology in Aristotelian Science and Metaphysics.” In Method in Ancient
Philosophy, edited by Jyl Gentzler, 253–69. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Woodbury, Leonard. “The Gratitude of the Locrian Maiden: Pindar, Pyth. 2.18–20.” Transactions of
the American Philological Association 108 (1878): 285–99.
Wright, M. R. Empedocles: The Extant Fragments. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
Index Locorum
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.
Aeschylus
Eumenides
655–65, 12
658–61, 37
Aetius
V 5.1, 37–38
V 19.5, 15, 16
Aristophanes
Ekkl.—Assemblywomen [Ecclesiazousae]
206–12, 48
206–40, 48
210–12, 57
441–59, 48
597–600, 48–49
611–18, 49
635–37, 49
Eq.—The Knights [Hippeis]

95–96, 27–28
Wasps
1265, 31
Aristotle
A. Po.—Posterior Analytics [Analytica posteriora]

1.4 73a34–37, 66
1.4 73a34–b24, 66
1.4 73a37–b5, 66
1.4 73b16–24, 66
2.11 94b37–95a3, 122
2.19 99b36, 225
2.19 100a1–10, 226
Top.—Topics [Topica]
1.5 102a18–19, 66
Phys.—Physics [Physica]
2.1 192b10–33, 163
2.2 194a27–29, 165
2.3 194b33, 3–4
2.8 198b29–33, 17
2.9, 125
2.9 200a2–3, 123–24
2.9 200a8, 122–23
2.9 200a11–13, 123–24
DC—On the Heavens [De caelo]

2.2 284b21–25, 30
3.1 298b6, 82–83
GC—Generation and Corruption [De generatione et corruptione]

2.2 329b19–30, 91
2.2 329b26–30, 84
2.2 329b31–33, 28, 84–85
2.3 330a30–b5, 91
2.11 338a1–5, 122–23
Meteor.—Meteorology [Meteorologica]
4.1, 91
4.1 378b10–14, 84
4.1 379a1–4, 84
4.2 379b13–14, 84
4.2 379b17–25, 83
4.2 379b25–32, 87–88, 133–34
4.2 379b32–34, 84
4.2 379b33, 84–85
DA—On the Soul [De anima]

1.1 403a16–19, 403b18, 232
1.1 403a26–b1, 234–35
2.2 413a21–414a4, 71
2.2 413b2–5, 71
2.3 414b1–2, 234–35
2.3 414b21–22, 144
2.3 414b28–32, 101, 144
2.3 414b29–415a11, 212
2.3 414b29–415a13, 71
2.4 415a23–27, 119–20
2.4 415a23–b7, 212
2.4 416b9–20, 96
2.4 416b24, 105, 136
2.9 421a20–26, 223–24
3.9 432a15–22, 170
3.10 433a9–13, 228
3.10 433a18–21, 170
3.10 433a21, 170
3.10 433b10–11, 170
3.10 433b18, 106
3.10 433b27–30, 228–29
Mem.—On Memory and Recollection [De memoria et reminiscentia]

1 449b6–9, 228
1 449b24–25, 225
1 450a13–17, 225, 227–28
1 450a14–16, 225
1 450a20–25, 225, 227–28
1 450a28–b12, 227
1 450b10, 228
Somn.—On Sleep and Waking [De somno et vigilia]

3 458a13–20, 222–23
Juv.—On Youth and Old Age, Life and Death [De juventute et senectute, De vita et morte]
3 469a5, 182
3 469a10, 219
3 469a10–21, 79
3–4 468b32–469a27, 80–81
4 469b8–9, 78
4 469b8–14, 77
26(20) 480a3–11, 89–90
HA—History of Animals [Historia animalium]
1.1 488a7–10, 160
1.16 494b27–29, 222–23
2.19 521a21–22, 224–25
3.19 521a2–5, 219–20
4.11 538b7–10, 224–25
7.3 583b3–5, 29
9.1 608a19–b18, 228, 236–37
9.1 608a33–34, 233, 237–38
9.1 608a33–b18, 241, 243
9.1 608b1–19, 33
10.2 634b30–39, 38
PA—On the Parts of Animals [De partibus animalium]

1.1 641a15–33, 210–11
1.1 641a27, 210–11
1.1 642a2–14, 124
1.1 642a33–642b4, 125
1.1 642a34–35, 122–23
1.1.642a35, 3–4
2, 222–23
2.1 646a24–b2, 211
2.1 647b5, 85–86
2.2 648a2–14, 221, 231–32
2.2 648a9–11, 231–32
2.2 648a9–13, 31
2.2 648a30–33, 28–29
2.4 650b19–22, 220
2.4 650b33–651a5, 222–23, 232
2.4 651a1–5, 235–36
2.4 651a12–16, 219
2.7 652b30–33, 219–20
2.7 653a27–37, 222–23
2.10 646b24, 219
2.10 655b36–656a1, 77
2.10 656b3–6, 222
2.16 660a12–15, 223–24
3.1 661b33–37, 78–79
3.4 666a10–11, 79
3.4 666a11–12, 219
3.4 666a20–22, 80–81
3.4 666a34–37, 79, 219
3.4 666b6–10, 29
3.4 667a1–6, 222–23
3.4 667a13–15, 223–24
3.6 669b25, 85–86
3.7 670a20, 85–86
3.7 670b18–23, 30
3.9 672a2–6, 219–20
3.12 674a9, 85–86
4.2 677a17, 131
4.2 677a17–31, 130
4.2 677a20–31, 220–21
4.8 684a27–28, 31
4.10 689a4–6, 85–86
MA—Movement of Animals [De motu animalium]

2 698b7, 174–75
7 701a34–36, 229
10 703a10, 106
10 703a20–21, 106
IA—Progression of Animals [De incessu animalium]

4 705b13, 31
4 706a19, 30–31
4 706a21–22, 30–31
6 706b25, 31
19 714b8–16, 30
GA—Generation of Animals [De generatione animalium]

1.2 716a4–8, 125–26
1.2 716a4–18, 70, 72–73, 125–26
1.2 716a6–7, 71–72
1.2 716a11–14, 82
1.2 716a20–b15, 109–10
1.2 716a23–26, 211
1.2 716a23–32, 76
1.2 716a24–28, 211
1.2 716a32–34, 76–77
1.3 716b33–34, 76–77
1.5 717b23–26, 85–86
1.6 718a5–10, 85–86
1.12 719b2, 85–86
1.17 721b6–12, 37
1.17 721b10–12, 39
1.18 722b4ff., 74–75
1.18 724a8–12, 39
1.18 725a18, 85–86
1.18 725b4, 86
1.18 725b7–9, 85–86
1.18 726a26–28, 85
1.19 726b31–727a4, 73–74, 86–87
1.20 728a26, 82
1.20 728a26–27, 87, 219–20
1.20 728b34–35, 89
1.21 730a30–33, 96–97
1.22 730b7–23, 98, 104, 107–8, 121
1.22 730b12–15, 106–7
1.22 730b19–23, 107–8
1.23 731a16, 100
2.1, 124, 125–26, 128–29
2.1 731b20–24, 126, 129
2.1 731b32–732a1, 126–27
2.1 732a2–4, 126–27
2.1 732a5–9, 30
2.1 732a7–10, 127
2.1 732b32–33, 30–31
2.1 733b20–23, 100
2.1 733b21, 100
2.1 733b23–24, 91
2.1 733b32–734a2, 92
2.1 734a1, 82
2.1 734a16–19, 111
2.1 734a21–23, 111
2.1 734a30–33, 111
2.1 734b24–25, 111
2.1 734b31–34, 112
2.1 734b34, 105
2.1 734b36–735a5, 108–9
2.1 735a5–12, 92–93
2.1 735a9–12, 92–93
2.1 735a12–26, 111
2.2 736a1–3, 82–83
2.3 736a32–b5, 95
2.3 736a33–35, 95
2.3 736b1–5, 112, 114
2.3 736b4–5, 146
2.3 736b5–8, 146
2.3 736b13–16, 147
2.3 736b17–21, 147–48
2.3 736b21–29, 147
2.3 736b30–737a1, 98
2.3 736b30–737a8, 89–90
2.3 736b34, 82–83
2.3 736b34–35, 106
2.3 736b38–737a1, 82–83
2.3 737a9–12, 148
2.3 737a17–19, 95
2.3 737a18–20, 89–90, 105
2.3 737a18–30, 110–11
2.3 737a21–22, 100
2.3 737a23–25, 110–11
2.3 737a27–28, 134–35
2.4 737b28–31, 85–86
2.4 738a10–b4, 85–86
2.4 738a34–b4, 130–31
2.4 738b11–15, 105
2.4 738b20–27, 71, 72–73
2.4 739a7–8, 100
2.4 739b21–31, 98, 103
2.4 739b23–25, 108
2.4 740b29–741a4, 71–72, 100–1, 107
2.5 741a5–9, 93
2.5 741a6–30, 93–94
2.5 741a10–13, 143
2.5 741a10–14, 101
2.5 741a15–17, 71, 92, 101
2.5 741a23–25, 96
2.5 741b2–7, 92
2.5 741b6–9, 100
2.6 741b37, 82–83, 106–7
2.6 742a15–16, 106
2.6 742a16–37, 138–39
2.6 743a4–6, 82–83
2.6 743a4–16, 28
2.6 743a5–6, 106
2.6 743b25, 219
2.6 744a20–25, 100
2.6 744a27–32, 220
2.6 744a28–32, 222–23
2.6 744b12–16, 222
3.1 749b30–35, 222–23
3.1 750b1, 82
3.1 750b3–751a13, 93, 100–1
3.1 750b17–27, 94
3.2 737a28–30, 97–98
3.2 737a29–30, 145–46
3.4 755a19–20, 108
3.4 755a22–26, 108
3.11 762a21, 82–83
3.11 762b12–18, 82–83
4.1 763b30–33, 42
4.1 763b30–764a1, 37, 43–44
4.1 763b34–764a1, 29
4.1 764a1–23, 39
4.1 764a2–7, 42–43
4.1 764a7–12, 41–42
4.1 764a8–12, 44
4.1 764a12–20, 42–43, 78
4.1 764b4ff, 74–75
4.1 764b19–21, 41–42
4.1 764b21–26, 118–19
4.1 764b28–765a3, 119
4.1 765a12–17, 29
4.1 765a25, 43–44
4.1 765a35–b5, 28
4.1 765a36, 29
4.1 765b9–15, 72–73, 74, 82
4.1 765b17–22, 28
4.1 765b36–766a2, 73–74
4.1 766a4–5, 78
4.1 766a23–24, 76
4.1 766a31–37, 73, 78
4.1 766a32–37, 78
4.1 766a35–37, 73
4.1 766b3–8, 76, 112–13
4.1 766b5–6., 78
4.1 766b7–12, 85–86
4.1–2, 109–10
4.3 767a36–b27, 142
4.3 767b3–18, 121, 129, 134–35
4.3 767b6–8, 136
4.3 767b7–8, 120, 134–35, 138
4.3 767b7–10, 135
4.3 767b8–9, 120–21
4.3 767b13–15, 134–35
4.3 767b16–21, 101–2, 104–5
4.3 767b16–23, 118
4.3 767b23–24, 105–6
4.3 767b23–26, 117
4.3 767b36–38, 105–6
4.3 767b36–768a9, 116
4.3 767b36–768a15, 117
4.3 767b37, 113–14
4.3 768a11–14, 82, 113, 117
4.3 768a14, 117
4.3 768a16, 105–6
4.3 768a22–24, 114
4.3 768b26–28, 116
4.4 770b9–19, 142
4.4 770b9–27, 142–43
4.4 770b14–15, 142
4.4 772b15–16, 100
4.6 775a14–16, 73–74
4.6 775a15–16, 61, 134–35
4.6 775a15–17, 135
4.6 775a15f, 142–43
4.8 776b11–15, 78
5.1 780b12–18, 223–24
5.7 787b11, 224–25
5.8 789b8–9, 106–7, 108
6.4 775a15–16, 1
Physiog.—Physiognomics [Physiognomica]
2 806b32–34, 224–25
5 809b4–12, 224–25
Prob.—Problems [Problemata]
4.25 879a32–35, 32–33
4.25 879a33–34, 28
10.36 894b26, 78–79
Met.—Metaphysics [Metaphysica]
1.1 980a27–b2, 225
1.1 980b26–981a7, 226
1.5 986a23–28, 24
5.1 1013a9–14, 154–55
5.5 1015a33–34, 122–23
5.5 1015b11–15, 122–23
5.6 1016b11–16, 181
5.10 1018a22–24, 64
5.10 1018a25–32, 64
5.10 1018a29–30, 65
5.10 1018a29–31, 65
7.5 1030b25–27, 66
7.17, 144
8.4 1044a39–b3, 145
8.6 1045a23–34, 145
9.1 1046a19–28, 91
10.3 1054a23–26, 64
10.9, 68, 115, 135, 141
10.9 1058a29ff, 63–64
10.9 1058a37–b3, 61, 67
10.9 1058b5–6, 67
10.9 1058b23–24, 67–68
13.3 1078a7, 68
13.3 1078a7–8, 64–65
14.5 1092b10, 25
EN—Nicomachean Ethics [Ethica Nicomachea]

1.5 1095b18–20, 253–54
1.13 1102b28–33, 169
3.1 1111b2–4, 235–36
3.2 1111b17, 234–35
3.4 1113a15–16, 234–35
3.7 1116a10–15, 237
3.8 1116b24–27, 241–42
3.8 1116b29–34, 242
3.8 1117a4–8, 242
3.11 1118b20–21, 253–54
4.4 1124b31–1125a2, 253–54
4.5 1126a7–8, 253–54
4.8 1128a20–22, 253–54
5.5 1132b31–1133a18, 198
5.5 1132b32, 190–91
5.5 1133a17–b16, 190–91
5.6 1134a26–7, 189–90
5.6 1134b9–13, 182
5.8 1135b26, 242–43
5.8 1135b26–27, 242
6.1 1139a5–14, 168
6.1 1139a5–15, 217–18
6.5 1140b20–21, 166–67
6.5 1140b20–22, 217–18
6.5 1140b25–29, 217–18
6.10 1143a–10, 184
6.10 1143a13–16, 184–85
6.13 1144b30–32, 168
7.1 1145b19–20, 240
7.4 1147b21–23, 237
7.4 1147b24–31, 234–35
7.4 1148b2–13, 240
7.5 1149a2–5, 240
7.6 1149a24–31, 236
7.6 1149a32–34, 240–41
7.6 1149a34–b8, 240
7.6 1149b1–4, 240–41
7.6 1149b13–26, 242–43
7.6 1149b14–26, 240
7.7 1150a9–15, 236–37
7.7 1150a32–b16, 173, 237
7.9 1151b15, 174–75
8.1 1155a27–29, 243
8.4 1157a3–10, 198–99
8.6 1158b1–3, 198–99
8.9 1160a9–11, 189–90
8.10 1160b22–1161a9, 178
8.10 1160b32–1161a1, 178
8.10 1160b33–35, 175–76
8.11 1161a20–21, 198–99
8.11 1161a22–25, 194–95
8.12 1162a17–27, 199
8.12 1162a19–22, 212
8.12 1162a25–27, 193
9.6 1167a26–28, 194
10.9 1179b20–21, 172
10.9 1179b23–28, 171–72
EE—Eudemian Ethics [Ethica Eudemia]

1.5 1215b34–1216a1, 253–54
2.5 1222a41–b4, 241, 253
2.7 1223b5–30, 235–36
2.7 1223b28–30, 235–36
3.1 1229a21-28, 235–36
3.3 1231b5–16, 238
3.3 1231b5–26, 244, 253
3.3 1231b9–20, 253–54
3.3 1231b10, 253
3.3 1231b24-25, 241
7.9 1241b17–22, 182
7.10 1242b18–20, 191
Vir.—Virtues and Vices [De virtutibus et vitiis libellus]

7 1251b11–12, 253–54
Pol.—Politics [Politica]
1.1 1252a9–17, 156
1.1 1252a12–13, 197–98
1.1 1252a17–1.2 1252a26, 156
1.1 1252a22, 157–58
1.2 1252a26–27, 156–57
1.2 1252a27–28, 140–41
1.2 1252a28, 212
1.2 1252a30–32, 166
1.2 1252a35, 253–54
1.2 1252b4–6, 186
1.2 1252b5–9, 252
1.2 1252b10–30, 162–63
1.2 1252b29–30, 212
1.2 1252b30–32, 5, 156
1.2 1253a1–2, 163
1.2 1253a8–10, 160, 163
1.2 1253a9–19, 229
1.2 1253a15–18, 190
1.2 1253a19–27, 161–62
1.2 1253b1, 156–57
1.3 1253b1–2, 156–57
1.3 1253b5–7, 155
1.4 1254a8–11, 181
1.4 1254a14–16, 181
1.4–7, 157–58
1.5, 161–62, 173, 175–76, 182
1.5 1254a20–b20, 159–60, 163, 165–66
1.5 1254a24–b16, 180–81
1.5 1254a27–28, 181
1.5 1254b5–6, 176–77
1.5 1254b21–3, 251
1.5 1254b27–32, 251
1.6 1255a27–30, 252
1.6 1255b11–12, 181
1.12 1259a37–b4, 155–56
1.12 1259a37–b9, 176
1.12 1259b3–9, 192
1.12 1259b8–9, 177
1.12 1259b10–11, 177–78
1.13, 140–41, 157–58, 172–74, 205–6, 230
1.13 1259b31ff., 201
1.13 1260a2–4, 168–69
1.13 1260a7–14, 167
1.13 1260a8–10, 186
1.13 1260a12, 251
1.13 1260a13, 174–75
1.13 1260a14, 1
1.13 1260a31–3, 170
1.13 1260b3–7, 171
2, 56
2.1 1261a8–9, 187
2.1 1261a10–12, 187
2.1 1261a13–14, 188
2.2 1261a22–30, 192
2.2 1261a29–b5, 198
2.2 1261b10–15, 196
2.3 1261b30–32, 193–94
2.4 1262b7–14, 193
2.4 1262b12–15, 196
2.5 1263b4–14, 196
2.5 1263b29–37, 196
2.5 1263b31–32, 193
2.5 1264a16–22, 201
2.5 1264b1–6, 188
2.6 1265a1–6, 51
2.6 1265b18–21, 201
2.9 1271a26–35, 203
2.11 1272b32–33, 203
3.4 1276b20–31, 202
3.4 1277a23, 202
3.4 1277a24, 183–84
3.4 1277b6–9, 183
3.4 1277b17–25, 169
3.4 1277b18–21, 184
3.4 1277b21–30, 179
3.4 1277b25–26, 169–70
3.4 1277b25–30, 179
3.9 1280a9–25, 200–1
3.9 1280a31–34, 190
3.9 1280b38–39, 190
3.9 1281a3, 190
3.11 1282a16–17, 253–54
3.14 1285a18–20, 253–54
3.14 1285b19–20, 252
3.16 1287a29–32, 245–46
3.16 1287a29–34, 235–36, 245
4.4 1291a10–19, 197
4.11 1295b34–1296a17, 200–1
5.3 1303a24–b7, 200–1
5.11 1313b9, 253–54
7.7 1327b18–38, 244–45, 252
7.7 1327b19, 245–46
7.7 1327b19–38, 234
7.7 1327b36–39, 242
7.7 1327b36–1328a16, 243–44
7.7 1327b38–39, 238–39
7.7 1327b38–1328a16, 238–39
7.7 1328a5–7, 244, 247
7.7 1328a8–9, 243–44
7.13 1332a40–b6, 171
7.13 1332b6–8, 171
7.14 1332b12, 190–91
7.14 1333a16–25, 217–18
7.14 1333a16–30, 168
7.15 1334b22, 232
7.15 1334b22–23, 235–36
7.17 1336b11–12, 253–54
Rhet.—Rhetoric [Rhetorica]
1.15 1376b12, 1.15 1376b27, 174–75
2.6 1383b16–18, 170
2.9 1387b15–17, 253–54
Censorinus
De die nat.—The Natal Day [De die natali]

5.4, 37–38, 272–73n.89
Democritus
DK A141, 274n.95
DK A143, 274n.95
Diogenes of Apollonia
DK A19, 27–28
Empedocles
DK B21, 15
DK B57-58, 15
DK B59, 15
DK B61, 15, 17
DK B62, 15–16
DK B64, 16
DK B65, 17, 274–75n.103
DK B67, 17, 42–43
DK B92, 15
DK B96, 15
DK B98, 15
Martin & Primavesi 294, 15
Martin & Primavesi 297, 16
Euripides
Orestes
552–54, 12
Galen
Epid.—On Hippocr. Epid. [In Hippocratis de Morbis Vulgaribus, Commentarii]

CMG V 10.2.2 119, 42–43
CMG VI 48, 29, 42–43
Heraclitus
DK B117, 27–28
DK B118, 27–28
Herodotus
The Histories
2.35, 33–34
2.172, 177
3.81, 278n.129
Hesiod
Theogony
50, 13–14
123–25, 22
211–25, 22
535-84, 13–14
582–88, 14
585, 14
591, 13–14
603–607, 14
607-610, 14
Works and Days
61–63, 13
67, 13
89, 13
107–76, 13
109–19, 20–21
582–88, 32–33
Hippocrates
Aph.—Aphorisms [Aphorismata]
5.48, 29
Epid.—Epidemics [Epidemiae]
6.4.21, 43–44
Genit.—Generation [De semine/ De genitura]

1.1, 38–39
1.3, 38
1.4, 37–38, 40
1.6, 44
1.8, 38–39, 44–45
3, 37–38
6, 44–45
6–8, 40–41
Gland.—Glands [De glandulis]

124, 35
Mul.—Diseases of Women [De morbis mulierum]

1, 32–33
1.1, 36
1.24, 40–41
2.133, 34–35
Nat. Puer.—Nature of the Child [De natura pueri]

4, 35
15, 36
17, 40–41
Steril.—Sterility/ Barrenness [De sterilibus]

216, 36
Superf.—Superfetation [De superfetatione]

1, 34–35
31, 43–44
Vict.—Regimen [De diaeta/ De victu]

1. 27, 27–28, 38, 43, 44–45
1. 33, 27–29
1. 34, 35, 36
Hippolytus
Ref.–Refutation of All Heresies [Refutatio omnium haeresium]

7.30.3–4, 21
Homer
II.—Iliad
i 597, 31
vii 181, 31
xiv 165, 27–28
xxiv 315–21, 31
Od.—Odyssey
ii 146–54, 31
Parmenides
DK B17, 29, 275n.106
Plato
Criti.—Critias
109c5-d12, 19
109–112, 19
110b5–c3, 49
113c1–114b2, 19
121a9–b1, 19, 21–22
Laws
6 764c5–d3, 50
6 781a2–b3, 54
6 780d5–781d5, 50
7 805a3–d4, 50
7 794a7–b5, 50
7 804d1–e4, 50
7 804d7–805b1, 50
7 805c2–d1, 50
7 807b3–c2, 51
7 813e4–814c6, 50
Meno
72d4–73c5, 56–57
73a5–b1, 57
73b5–7, 56–57
Phaedrus
239c, 33–34
Polit.—Statesman
259b, 279n.144
271a1–4, 18–19
271a5–6, 18
271b4–c2, 18
272a2–3, 18
272b6–c7, 23
273a4–b6, 21–22
273b4–6, 21–22
274a2–5, 18–19
274b5–c5, 18–19
Rep.—Republic
3 395d5–e4, 54
4 431b4–c4, 54
5, 45–46, 47–48, 49, 50–57, 58–59, 186–87, 257
5 451d–e, 189
5 464a1–b5, 49
5 469d5–e1, 54
10 605c10–e8, 54
Smp.—Symposium
189d5–e6, 17–18
189e6–190b6, 17–18
190b6–d8, 17–18
191a8, 17–18
191a–b, 193
191b8–9, 17–18
191c1–3, 17–18
206a4–e7, 22–23
206e8–207a4, 22–23
208e3–209b5, 22–23
209c5–7, 22–23
223c, 31
Tht.—Theaetetus
148e1–151d, 23
Ti.—Timaeus
42a1–2, 16
49–51, 26–27
90d9–e2, 19–20
90e6–91a5, 19–20, 54–55
91c1–8, 32–33
91d6–7, 54–55
Semonides of Amorgos
1-2, 14
94-98, 14
Sophocles
Ajax
1225, 31
Xenophon
Economics
7.2, 7.30–31, 33–34
Memorabilia
3.4.6, 57–58
General Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.
Aeschylus, 12, 37
Aetius, 15, 21
akrasia (weakness of will), 2–3, 236–37
Amasis, 176–78, 308n.42
Anaxagoras, 29, 37, 42, 43–44
androgyny, 17–18
anger. See also thumos, 234–36, 237–39, 241, 242–44
Aristophanes
on the left-right division of the body, 31
on moisture and the intellect, 27–28
on women’s role in political life, 6–7, 10, 47–49, 51–54, 56–57, 205
Aristotle. See specific works
Assemblywomen (Aristophanes), 47–49, 51–54, 56–57
Athens, 19, 45–47, 49, 167–68
Atlantis, 19, 21–22
blood
concoction and, 73, 80–81, 86–87, 215, 248
courage and, 221, 231–32
the heart, 77–81, 219, 220–21, 222–24, 227–28
heat and, 217, 218–24, 227–28, 232–34, 239–40, 252
intelligence and, 220–21, 231–32
moisture in, 220
nourishment and, 119–20, 219
parts of the body and, 221, 222–23
phronêsis and, 221
purity of, 219–25
sensation and, 218–20, 221–25
sexual difference and, 208, 217, 221, 222–25, 230–32, 234, 239, 248–49, 254–56
sperma (seed) and, 77–78, 80–81, 83–86, 88, 213–14
thumos and, 232–33, 234, 239–40
bouleutikon (deliberative faculty), 217–18, 231, 251–53, 259
Categories (Aristotle), 63–65, 139

causation
efficient (moving), 4, 70–71, 74–75, 83–85, 92, 94–98, 99–100, 105, 109, 111, 117, 121–22, 127–
29, 132–33, 136–37, 140, 142–43, 145, 149–50, 152, 155, 210–11, 213–14, 216
final. See also telos. 3–4, 58, 61–62, 75, 83–85, 106–7, 108–9, 121, 123–25, 126–27, 128–29,
132–33, 134–35, 145, 165, 166, 187, 210–14, 216
formal. See also eidos (species form). 70–71, 72–73, 74–75, 128, 143, 145, 211, 213–14, 257–58
material, 4–5, 61, 70–71, 74–75, 92, 98, 99–100, 102, 121–22, 123–25, 126, 127–29, 132, 136–37,
140, 145, 149–50, 152, 210–11, 213–14, 257–58
children
deliberation and, 166–67, 183
desire among, 170
the household and, 155, 157, 162–63, 183
natural rule of fathers over, 153–54, 155–56, 157, 162–63, 167, 181
thumos and, 232, 235–36
virtue among, 170
women making decisions for, 255
climate, 234, 244–45, 252–53
Code, Alan, 98, 292n.83
community. See koinônia
comprehension (sunesis), 184–85
conception, embryological
craftsmanship compared to, 103–4, 107–9
curdling of milk compared to, 102–3, 108
fetation and, 100–1
final causation and, 108–9
katamênia and, 100, 101–3, 104, 109, 257–58
nutritive soul and, 100–2
organ formation and, 101–3, 104
semen and, 100–6, 108–9, 257–58
sensitive soul and, 100–2
telos and, 108–9
the uterus and, 103
concoction. See also sperma (seed)
blood and, 73, 80–81, 86–87, 215, 248
dryness and, 84–85
heat and, 73–74, 77–79, 83–85, 86, 89, 209, 213–15, 248
nourishment and, 85–86
pneuma and, 83, 86, 287n.57
sexual difference and, 73–75, 78–79, 81, 86–89, 139, 149, 209, 213–16
sexual organs and, 76
of sperma, 85–88
telos of, 83–85, 88–89, 136–39, 141
Constitution of Athens (Aristotle), 174–75
courage. See also thumos, 217, 221, 231–32, 236–37, 241–44, 247
Critias (Plato), 19–22, 49
De Anima/On the Soul (Aristotle)

on desire and movement, 170, 228–29
on desire and thumos, 234–35
hierarchy of soul faculties in, 71
on imagination, 228
on nourishment versus growth, 96
on pneuma, 106
on reproduction and telos, 136
deliberation. See also rational soul
authority and, 81, 148, 167–68, 169, 171, 172–76, 178, 180–86, 204, 205–6, 207–9, 217–18, 230,
237, 246–51, 254–55, 259
bouleutikon and, 217–18, 231, 251–53, 259
children and, 166–67, 183
courage and, 242
desire and, 173
heat and, 218–19, 258–59
imagination and, 230
memory and, 218–19
men and, 2–3, 81, 152–54, 158, 167, 172–76, 178, 180, 185–86, 204, 205–6, 221, 231–32
phronêsis and, 166–67, 185–86, 217–18
physiology and, 2, 208–10
sensation and, 7, 225–30
natural slaves and, 166–67, 183, 185–86, 190, 244, 251–52, 253–54
thumos and, 217, 242, 253
women and, 1, 2–3, 6, 7, 152, 166–68, 169, 172–75, 178, 180–86, 204, 205–6, 207–10, 213–18,
230, 237, 246–51, 253–55, 258–59
deliberative faculty. See bouleutikon; rational soul
Democritus, 10, 37–42, 44, 74–75
desire
action and, 170
deliberation and, 173
imagination and, 229, 234
intercourse and, 16–17
men and, 32–33, 173–74
moisture and, 32–33
rationality and, 170, 173, 176–77, 213
sexual difference and, 213, 236–37
sōphrosynē and, 32–33, 54–55, 57–58, 161
thumos and, 234–37, 239–41, 242–43
women and, 16–17, 19–20, 32–33, 54, 170, 173–74, 237
divorce, 46–47, 167–68
Dobbs, Darrell, 173–74, 313–14n.3
dryness
concoction and, 84–85
the heart and, 29, 227–28
men and, 27–28, 36
eidos (species form). See also form; morphê. 133–34, 137–38, 149
the embryo. See also fetation
the heart and, 80–81, 111–12
nutritive soul and, 95–96, 101, 107
organ formation in, 28, 89, 111–13
pneuma’s role in forming, 106–7, 108, 109
rational soul and, 146–47
sensitive soul and, 101, 112
sex determination in, 7, 10, 41–45, 59, 60, 62, 109–11, 113, 116–18, 133–34, 136, 209, 215–16
telos of, 101, 121–22
thumos and, 209
emotion, 33, 54–56, 160, 171–72, 238. See also specific emotions
Empedocles
on offsprings’ resemblance to parents, 40–41
on the origins of sexual difference, 14–17, 20–21, 23, 119
on reproduction, 10, 16–17, 21–22, 39
on sexual determination in utero, 41–43
on sperma, 37–39, 74–75
on women and coldness, 28–29, 35–36
Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle), 181–82, 190–91, 235–36, 244, 253
Euripides, 12
Eurytus, 25
female. See also male; men; sexual difference; women

definition of, 69–86
coldness and, 1, 4, 7, 17, 27–29, 31–32, 35–36, 43, 73–74, 86–87, 131, 145–46, 210, 213–15, 217,
230–31, 234, 237–38, 239, 246, 248, 255–56, 257–59
as deformity or monstrosity, 1, 61–62, 73–74, 120–22, 129, 130–31, 134–43, 216, 299–300n.131
as necessary, 128–34
telos of, 132–36, 140–41, 149–50, 213–17, 257–58
value of, 3–6, 7–8, 9–11, 58–59, 60, 62, 154, 257–60
fertile residue. See gonê; katamênia (menses); semen; sperma
fetation. See also the embryo
capacities of, 95–97
conception and, 100–1
definition of, 89
female seed and, 84–85
living status of, 89, 95
nutritive soul and, 95–96
organic differentiation and, 89
semen and, 104
sensitive soul and, 95, 96–97
form, species. See also causation, formal; eidos. 61–62, 82, 89, 96–97
115, 120–22, 131–41, 149, 157, 214–16, 257–58
friendship, 194–95, 199, 238–39, 243–44, 247
Galen, 42–44
Generation/Nature of the Child (Hippocratic text), 34, 37–41, 44, 82
Generation of Animals (Aristotle)
on animal body types and heat, 232–33
on concoction, 73, 78, 85–88
on conditional necessity and material necessity, 124–25, 130–31
definitions of male and female in, 70–71, 74
on katamênia, 37, 82
on the nutritive soul, 71–72
on organ formation in the embryo, 109–10, 111
on pneuma, 106–7
on reproduction, 70–73
on semen, 82, 105–6
on sex determination, 10, 60, 109–11, 116–17
on sexual difference, 61, 62–63, 69–73, 78–79, 125–26, 149, 207
on sexual organs, 76, 211
on sperma, 70
on transmission of the soul, 61
on female as deformity, 1, 61, 73–74, 134–35, 136, 138–39, 142
gonê (semen). See also semen; sperma, 113–14, 137–38
the heart
blood and, 77–81, 219, 220–21, 222–24, 227–28
dryness and, 29, 227–28
the embryo and, 80–81, 111–12
heat and, 29, 73, 77–79, 80–81, 86, 138–39, 219, 220–21, 287n.57
imagination and, 227–28
nutritive soul and, 80
sensation and, 79–81, 219, 222–24, 227–28
sensitive soul and, 80, 112
sexual difference and, 78–79, 81, 118, 138–39, 219, 284n.33
sexual organs and, 77–81, 118–19, 138–39
heat
animals and, 30–31
blood and, 217, 218–24, 227–28, 232–34, 239–40, 252
concoction and, 73–74, 77–79, 83–85, 86, 89, 209, 213–15, 248
courage and, 231–32
deliberation and, 218–19, 258–59
females’ lower levels of, 1, 4, 7, 17, 27–29, 31–32, 35–36, 43, 73–74, 86–87, 131, 145–46, 210,
213–15, 217, 230–31, 234, 237–38, 239, 246, 248, 255–56, 257–59
the heart and, 29, 73, 77–79, 80–81, 86, 138–39, 219, 220–21, 287n.57
katamênia and, 86–87, 89, 209–10
males and, 17, 27–28, 36, 43, 78–79, 90, 208–9, 222–23, 231–32, 233–34, 237–38, 239
phronêsis and, 218–19
soul heat (pneuma) and, 82–83, 86–87, 89–90
sperma and, 73, 90, 98
thumos and, 208–9, 217, 232–34, 237–38, 239, 246
Heath, Malcom, 321n.50
Heraclitus, 27–28
Herodotus, 33–34, 177
Hesiod
on the origins of sexual difference, 13–14, 20–21, 23
on Pandora, 13–14, 20–21
women viewed as punishment by, 12, 22
Hippocratic texts
Generation, 34, 37–41, 44, 82
The Nature of the Child, 34, 36, 40–42, 82
Regimen, 34, 36, 43, 44–45
Superfetation, 34, 43–44
History of Animals (Aristotle), 33, 37–38, 228, 233, 236–37, 241
Homer, 10, 27–28, 31–33, 232
honor, 190–91, 198–99, 234–35, 237–43, 245–46
the household (oikos)
acquisition versus preservation in, 179–80, 202–3
affection (philia) and, 190, 193
children and, 155, 157, 162–63, 183
as community, 189–91
exchange and, 190–91, 194–95
men and, 152–53, 179–80, 183, 256, 258
moral versus material aims in, 203
natural rule of men over women in, 1, 152–53, 155–57, 158–59, 162–63, 164–65, 173–74, 179–80,
204
natural slaves and, 155, 157, 162–63, 183
natural status of, 158–59, 163–64, 203
polis and, 152–53, 156–57, 161–63, 165, 188–89, 202
self-sufficiency and, 162–63, 196, 199–200
sexual difference and, 2–3, 7, 154, 186, 188–90, 191–92, 193, 200, 202–4, 208–9
telos of, 158–59, 163–64, 180
unity of, 192–93, 194–95
virtue and, 172
whole-part relationships in, 181–83
women and, 11, 33–34, 57, 59, 152–54, 179–80, 183, 185, 247, 255, 258–59, 271n.73
imagination
deliberation and, 230
desire and, 229, 234
the heart and, 227–28
as highest soul faculty in most animals, 212
memory and, 225
rationality and, 213, 225, 228–29
sensation and, 213, 225, 228–29
sexual difference and, 208, 213, 217
thumos and, 213, 234, 240–41
intelligence
appetite and, 160
blood and, 220–21, 231–32
dryness and, 27–28
experience and, 226–27
judgments and, 227–28
memory and, 225–26, 227–28
men and, 231–32
rule and, 250
sensation and, 223–24, 249, 259
thumos and, 217, 244–46
women and, 249–50, 254–55, 259
intercourse. See also reproduction
desire and, 16–17
female seed and, 39–40
marriage in Athens and, 46
pleasure and, 39–40, 49, 51–52, 53
sperma and, 39–40
katamênia (menses)
capacities and potentiality of, 92–94, 107, 110–11, 145–46, 148–49
conception and, 100, 101–3, 104, 109, 257–58
fertility and, 87–88
heat and, 86–87, 89, 209–10
material versus conditional necessity of, 4, 131–32
moisture and, 36, 91, 106
movements of, 105–6, 113–14, 117–18, 120, 210, 294n.95
nutritive soul and, 41, 71, 74–75, 90, 91, 92–94, 95–96, 97–98, 101–2, 107, 110–11, 117, 144–45,
148–49
passive nature of, 98, 102, 146, 149–50
pneuma and, 106–7
semen and, 73–74, 82, 89, 91, 282n.20
sensitive soul and, 71, 74–75, 90, 92–94, 95–96, 97–98, 101–2, 107, 117, 144–45, 148–49,
288n.64, 291n.75
sex determination of offspring and, 43, 81, 116–18, 120, 129–30, 209, 215
telos of, 131
the uterus and, 78
women’s temperature and, 28–29, 35–36, 42–43
koinônia (community), 52, 163–64, 189–90, 199, 203, 238–39
Kronos, era of, 18–21, 23, 265n.27
Laws (Plato), 50–51, 52–55, 201, 277n.125, 278n.133

Lennox, James G., 316n.17
Leunissen, Mariska, 132–33
Lloyd, Geoffrey, 24, 42–43
male. See also female; men; sexual difference; women

definition of, 69–86
dryness and, 27–28, 36
heat and, 17, 27–28, 36, 43, 78–79, 90, 208–9, 222–23, 231–32, 233–34, 237–38, 239
reproduction and, 10–13, 22–23, 25–26, 37–41, 60, 61–62, 70–73, 74
marriage, 21, 26–27, 46–47, 167–68
Memorabilia (Xenophon), 57–58
memory
authority and, 230
deliberation and, 218–19
experience and, 226–27
the heart and, 227–28
imagination and, 225
intelligence and, 225–26, 227–28
judgment and, 226–27
phronêsis and, 217–19
rationality and, 225
sensation and, 218–19, 225, 226–27
women and, 218, 228, 231, 236–37, 248, 254–55
men. See also female; male; sexual difference; women
authority and, 172–74, 180, 185–86
brains of, 222–23
courage and, 231–32, 241–42
deliberation and, 2–3, 81, 152–54, 158, 167, 172–76, 178, 180, 185–86, 204, 205–6, 221, 231–32
desire and, 32–33, 173–74
the household and, 152–53, 179–80, 183, 256, 258
intelligence and, 231–32
memory and, 228
phronêsis and, 221, 230, 231–32
political life and, 48, 52–53, 57, 59
Pythagorean list of opposites and, 24–26
right side of the body and, 29, 31, 43–44
telos of, 140, 149–50, 213–17, 257–58
thumos and, 208–9, 221, 236–37, 239–40
virtue and, 11, 57–59, 169, 172, 173–74
Meno (Plato), 56–57, 59
menses. See katamênia
menstruation. See katamênia (menses)
Metaphysics (Aristotle)
on memory, 226
on necessity, 122–23
on potentialities, 91
on rule, 154–55
on sensation, 225
on sex as a difference in the genus, 114, 135–36, 138–39, 149
on sexual difference in animals, 61–69, 115, 210, 214–15, 256
on the unity of the soul, 144
on wholeness, 180–81
Meteorology (Aristotle), 82–85, 87–88, 91
moisture
concoction and, 84–85, 86
desire and, 32–33
katamênia and, 36, 91, 106
women and, 27–29, 31–34, 36, 43, 54–55, 248–49, 255
Moralia (Plutarch), 25–26
morphê (shape, form). See also eidos, 133–34, 137–38, 149–50
Movement of Animals (Aristotle), 106
natural rule
aristocratic versus constitutional forms of rule and, 175–80
of fathers over children, 153–54, 155–56, 157, 162–63, 167, 181
as exercised in organic wholes, 152–53, 159–60, 161–62, 164–66, 180
force and, 164
the household and, 1, 152–53, 155–57, 158–59, 162–63, 164–65, 173–74, 179–80, 204
of masters over natural slaves, 153–54, 155–57, 159–60, 161, 162–63, 166, 167, 181
of men over women, 1, 2–3, 7, 154–56, 159–60, 161–63, 164–66, 167, 172–73, 175–81, 204
phronêsis and, 169–70, 172, 179, 181, 183–85
rationality and, 168–70
telos of, 152–54, 161–62, 164–65
whole-part relations and, 181–83
The Nature of the Child (Hippocratic treatise), 34, 36, 40–42, 82
necessity
of females and women, 9–10, 14, 87, 121–22, 128–34,
150
of katamênia, 4, 131–32
material versus conditional, 124–25, 130–31
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle)
moral psychology and, 166–67
on natural rule of men over women, 175–76, 178
on phronêsis, 217–18
on rationality and persuasion, 171–72
on reciprocal equality, 198
on shared moral perceptions, 194
on thumos, 236–37, 240
on whole-part relationship between fathers and children, 182
Nielsen, Karen, 61–62, 141
nutritive soul
capacity of, 107
the embryo and, 96–97, 101, 107
heart and, 80
heat and, 74–75
katamênia and, 41, 71, 74–75, 90, 91, 92–94, 95–96, 97–98, 101–2, 107, 110–11, 117, 144–45,
148–49
semen and, 90, 93–94, 95–96
sensitive soul and, 90, 143–44
sexual difference and, 60, 212
wind-eggs and, 71–72, 74–75, 93–94, 96–97, 100–1
obedience, 160, 169, 185, 200, 202–4

Oeconomicus (Xenophon), 57–58
offspring
eternal being and, 126–27
female seed and resemblance to mothers of, 40–42, 117, 120
katamênia and the determination of sex of, 43, 81, 116–18, 120, 129–30
legitimacy of, 46
semen and the determination of sex of, 29, 44, 81, 105–6, 113–18, 120, 129–30
sex determination in utero of, 7, 10, 41–45, 59, 60, 62, 109–11, 113, 116–18, 133–34, 136, 209,
215–16
oikos. See the household
On Generation and Corruption (Aristotle), 91
On Memory (Aristotle), 227–28
On Nature (Empedocles), 14–15
On Youth and Old Age (Aristotle), 79–81
Pandora, 13–14, 20–21

pangenesis, 38–39, 40–42, 264n.20
Parmenides, 28–29, 35–36, 37–38, 43–44
Parts of Animals (Aristotle)
on blood, 221, 222–23, 231–32
on efficient and final causes, 210–11
on embryonic development, 112
on the heart and sensation, 79
on impurities, 220–21
left-right division of the body and, 31
on material and conditional necessity, 124–25, 130, 131
on thumos, 232
perception. See sensation
Pericles, 46
Phaedrus (Plato), 33–34
phronêsis (practical wisdom)
in animals, 217–18, 226
blood and, 221
deliberation and, 166–67, 185–86, 217–18
heat and, 218–19
men and, 221, 230, 231–32
natural rulers and, 169–70, 172, 179, 181, 183–85
shame and, 170
virtue and, 168–69, 170, 172, 183–84
women and, 166–68, 169, 172, 217–18, 230
Physics (Aristotle), 3–4, 123–24, 125, 163
Physiognomics (Aristotle), 224–25
Plato. See also specific works
on desire, 32–33
left-right division of the body and, 31
on the origins of sexual difference, 17–21
on reincarnation, 16, 19–20, 54–55
on reproduction, 12–13, 17–21, 22–23
thumos and, 232
on women and “the unlimited,” 26–27
on women’s role in political life, 6–7, 45–46, 47–48, 49–56, 59, 154, 186, 193, 257
women viewed as punishment by, 19–20, 22, 257–58
Plutarch, 25–26, 275n.110
pneuma (soul heat)
capacities transferred through, 89–90, 109
concoction and, 83, 86, 287n.57
embryonic formation and, 106–7, 108, 109
katamênia and, 106–7
as soul heat, 89–90, 98–99, 106–7, 109
sperma and, 82–83, 85, 86–87, 98–99, 105–6
water and, 82–83
polis (the city)
affection (philia) and, 192–95
as community, 190
courage and, 241
differences as valuable within, 192–93, 194–95, 196–97
exchange and, 190–91, 192–93, 198–99
the household and, 152–53, 156–57, 161–63, 165, 188–89, 202
natural status of, 152–53, 158–59, 163, 165, 203
origins of, 161–62
self-sufficiency and, 162–63, 196, 197–99
sexual difference and, 153–54, 186–87, 191, 193, 194–95, 200, 205, 208–9
the ship compared to, 201–2
telos of, 5, 158–59, 162–63, 204
unity of, 191–93, 195
women and, 7, 11, 154, 168–69, 204, 255, 259
Politics (Aristotle)
on affection, 193
on authority, 175–76
on barbarians and slavery, 252
on climate and politics, 244–45
on cooperation between the sexes, 140–41
on deliberation, 166–67
on differences between rulers and subjects, 201
on different types of rule, 157–60
on the household, 1, 152–53, 155–57, 187–89
on natural rule, 1, 152–53, 154–56, 159–60, 165–66, 175–77
on phronêsis, 169–70, 179
on the polis, 156–57, 161–63, 187, 192, 201–2
on rationality and desire, 173, 176–77
on rule of the better over the worse, 166
on self-sufficiency, 196, 197–98
on sexual difference, 186–89, 207
on slavery, 166, 171
on thumos, 235–36, 243–44, 245–46, 247
on virtue, 168–69, 171–72, 173–74, 183–84, 242
on women’s role in political life, 45–46, 52–53, 56, 154
Poseidon, 19, 21–22
Posterior Analytics (Aristotle), 66–67, 122, 124–25, 226
practical wisdom. See phronêsis
preformationism, 39
Problemata (Aristotle), 28, 78–79
rational soul. See also bouleutikon, deliberation

appetite and, 161
authority and, 172–73
as capacity, 7–8, 128, 146–48, 168, 217
desire and, 170, 173, 176–77, 213
embryonic development of, 146–49
as highest soul faculty in humans, 212, 229
imagination and, 213, 225, 229
memory and, 225
men and, 6, 11, 55–56
natural rule and, 168–70
natural slaves and, 168, 171, 217–18
phronêsis (practical wisdom), 217–18
semen as agent in development of, 147–48, 150–51
sexual difference and, 208, 212–13
thumos and, 236, 239–41
virtue and, 171–72
women and, 6, 7–8, 11, 32–33, 168, 205, 213–14, 217–18, 231
Regimen (Hippocratic treatise), 34, 36, 43, 44–45
reproduction
animals and, 60, 62–63, 80–81
asexual forms of, 22–23
efficient causation and, 70–71, 74–75, 127, 140, 150, 152
final causation and, 61–62, 75
material causation and, 61–62, 70–71, 74–75, 127, 150, 152
men and, 10–13, 22–23, 25–26, 37–41, 60, 61–62, 70–73, 74
misery and evil associated with, 21–22
philosophy contrasted with, 23
preformationism and, 39
sexual difference and, 2–3, 4–5, 13, 20, 35, 37–41, 60–61, 257, 259
telos of, 61–62, 75–141, 216, 257–58
women and, 9–12, 22–23, 25–26, 37–41, 60, 61–62, 70–71, 74
The Republic (Plato)
on reproduction and the needs of the state, 23, 51–52
on women as held in common, 49–52, 56, 187–89, 193, 195–97, 200, 203–4, 205
on women’s role in political life, 45–46, 47–48, 49–56, 59, 186, 193, 257
Rhetoric (Aristotle), 170, 174–75
seed. See gonê; katamênia; semen; sperma

semen. See also sperma; gonê
active nature of, 98, 102, 146
capacities and potentiality of, 90–92, 105–6
conception and, 100–6, 108–9, 257–58
heat and, 91, 101–2, 103, 106, 108, 210
intercourse and, 78–79
katamênia and, 73–74, 82, 89, 91, 282n.20
as male seed, 40, 74
movements of, 61, 70–71, 103–8, 109–11, 113–18, 120, 129–30, 145, 148, 209–10, 294n.95
nutritive soul and, 90, 93–94, 95–96
organ formation in embryo and, 111–12, 115–16
preformationism and, 39
production of, 37–38
as proximate cause of reproduction, 70–71, 72–73
rationality’s development in utero and, 147–48, 150–51
sensitive soul and, 90–94, 95–96, 98–99, 101, 102, 109, 145, 147–48
sex determination of offspring and, 29, 44, 81, 105–6, 113–18, 120, 129–30, 215
transmission of the soul and, 61, 71–73, 89–90
Semonides of Amorgos, 10, 14
sensation
animals and, 71, 79, 80–81, 93–94, 101
blood and, 218–20, 221–25
deliberation and, 7, 225–30
the heart and, 79–81, 219, 222–24, 227–28
imagination and, 213, 225, 228–29
intelligence and, 223–24, 249, 259
memory and, 218–19, 225, 226–27
rationality and, 7, 225–30
sexual difference and, 208, 213, 222–25
women and, 217, 230–31, 248–49, 254–55, 259
sensitive soul
animals and, 71–72, 146
the embryo and, 101, 112
the heart and, 80, 112
katamênia and, 71, 74–75, 90, 92–94, 95–96, 97–98, 101–2, 107, 117, 144–45, 148–49, 288n.64,
291n.75
nutritive soul and, 90, 143–44
organ development and, 143
transmission of, 71–73, 74–75, 88–89, 90
sex determination
katamênia and, 43, 81, 116–18, 120, 129–30, 209, 215
semen and, 29, 44, 81, 105–6, 113–18, 120, 129–30, 215
sexual difference. See also female; male; men; women
in animals, 60–69
biological understandings of, 2, 3–4, 6–7, 34–36, 60, 62, 63–64
blood and, 208, 217, 221, 222–25, 230–32, 234, 239, 248–49, 254–56
desire and, 213, 236–37
the heart and, 78–79, 81, 118, 138–39, 219, 284n.33
heritability and, 113, 116, 120
the household and, 2–3, 7, 154, 186, 188–90, 191–92, 193, 200, 202–4, 208–9
imagination and, 208, 213, 217
Kronos, era of, and, 18–21, 265n.27
left-right division of the body and, 29–31, 35, 43–44, 269n.58
material vs teleological hyphothesis and, 208, 214–16
moisture and, 35–36
natural complementarity and, 173–74
natural rule and, 1, 2–3, 7, 154–56, 159–60, 161–63, 164–66, 167, 172–73, 175–81, 204
nutritive faculty and, 60, 212
origin stories regarding, 9–21
physiology and, 35–36, 69, 75–76
plant life and, 125–27
the polis and, 153–54, 186–87, 191, 193, 194–95, 200, 205, 208–9
political life and, 2–3, 6–7, 45–58, 186–204
political understandings of, 2, 3–4, 6–7
Pythagorean list of opposites and, 24, 31–32, 34, 43–44, 54
reproduction and, 2–3, 4–5, 13, 20, 35, 37–41, 60–61, 257, 259
sensation and, 208, 213, 222–25
sexual organs and, 75–77, 78–79
species unity and, 63–69
telos of, 3–5, 7, 61–62, 121–22, 125–28, 139–41, 208, 214–16
temperature and, 28–29, 35–36, 42
unity and, 191–95
value of, 2–8, 60, 125–28, 138–39, 257–59
sexual organs
blood vessels and, 119–20
concoction and, 76
determination of sex in utero and the temperature of, 42
formation in utero of, 118–21, 295–96n.103
the heart and, 77–81, 118–19, 138–39
heat and, 86
sexual difference and, 75–77, 78–79
the soul and, 211
Simplicius, 25
slaves, natural
bodies of, 251
climate and, 252–53
contrasted with slaves by law, 252–53
deliberation and, 166–67, 183, 185–86, 190, 244, 251–52, 253–54
desire among, 170–71
the household and, 155, 157, 162–63, 183
justice and, 252–53
natural rule of masters over, 153–54, 155–57, 159–60, 161, 162–63, 166, 167, 181
virtue among, 57–58, 170–71, 181–82, 200, 244
women compared to, 7–8, 161, 166, 185–86, 230, 248–55
Sophocles, 31
sōphrosynē (temperance/self-control), 32–33, 54–55, 57–58, 161
soul. See eidos; form; nutritive soul; rational soul; sensitive soul
Sparta, 45–46
sperma (seed). See also concoction; katamênia (menses); semen
blood and, 77–78, 80–81, 83–86, 88, 213–14
concoction of, 85–88
early theories of reproduction and, 37, 39
exhaustion associated with emission of, 85–86
heat and, 73, 90, 98
offsprings’ resemblance to parents and, 40–41
pangenesis and, 38–39, 42
pneuma and, 82–83, 85, 86–87, 98–99, 105–6
potentialities and capacities of, 89–99, 289n.68
sexual determination in utero and, 41–42, 115–16
sexual difference and, 37–45, 70, 73–74, 81, 86, 87, 90, 257–58, 274n.98
sexual organs and, 75–76
sexual pleasure and, 39–40
water and, 82–83, 85, 87
spirit. See thumos
spontaneous generation, 289–90n.69
Statesman (Plato), 13, 18–23
sunesis. See comprehension
Superfetation (Hippocratic treatise), 34, 43–44
Symposium (Plato), 17–18, 20–21, 22–23, 31–33, 264n.19, 266n.35
teleology. See also telos

sexual difference and, 121–22, 126–27, 128
secondary vs. primary, 88, 132–34, 299n.121, 299n.123
telos. See also causation, final
of concoction, 83–85, 88–89, 136–39, 141
of the embryo, 101, 121–22
of the female, 132–36, 140–41, 149–50, 213–17, 257–58
of the generation of animals, 126–27
of the household, 158–59, 163–64, 180
of katamênia, 131
of the male, 140, 149–50, 213–17, 257–58
of natural rule, 152–54, 161–62, 164–65
of polis, 5, 158–59, 162–63, 204
of reproduction, 61–62, 136–37, 139–41, 216, 257–58
of sexual difference, 3–5, 7, 61–62, 121–22, 125–28, 139–41, 208, 214–16
temperature. See heat
Theogony (Hesiod), 13–14, 20–22
thumos (spirit). See also anger; courage
affect and, 237–39
affection and, 238–39, 244
anger and, 234–36, 237–39, 241, 242–44
blood and, 232–33, 234, 239–40
children and, 232, 235–36
climate and, 253
courage and, 217, 231–32, 236–37, 241–44, 247
deliberation and, 217, 242, 253
desire and, 234–37, 239–41, 242–43
the embryo and, 209
friendship and, 243–44
heat and, 208–9, 217, 232–34, 237–38, 239, 246
honor and, 234–35, 237–43, 245–46
imagination and, 213, 234, 240–41
intelligence and, 217, 244–46
justice and, 242–44, 245
men and, 208–9, 221, 236–37, 239–40
military training and, 238–39
psychological differences and, 234–43
rule and, 173–74, 208–9, 217, 237, 243–48
self-control and, 240
sexual difference and, 213, 232, 233–34, 236–38, 239, 246–48
women and, 208–9, 231, 233–34, 236–37, 239, 246–50, 253–54, 255–56, 259
Timaeus (Plato), 16, 19–21, 22, 26–27, 54–55, 56–57
the uterus. See also the embryo
conception and, 103
displacements of, 32–33
fallopian tubes and, 76–77
female seed and, 38
hodos and, 34–35
katamênia and, 78
moisture and, 28
sexual pleasure and, 40
temperature of, 42–43
virtue
children and, 170
comprehension (sunesis) and, 184–85
the household and, 172
men and, 11, 57–59, 169, 172, 173–74
mildness, 241
natural rulers and, 200–2
natural slaves and, 57–58, 170–71, 181–82, 200, 244
natural subjects and, 169, 183–84
obedience and, 169
phronêsis and, 168–69, 170, 172, 183–84
sexual difference and, 195–200
thumos and, 239–43
women and, 7, 11, 57–59, 166–69, 170, 172–74, 183–84, 200, 204, 237
weakness of will. See akrasia

wind-eggs (parthenotes), 71–72, 74–75, 93–94, 96–97, 100–2, 281n.16, 291n.78
women. See also female; male; men; sexual difference
authority and, 1, 6, 167–68, 169, 172–75, 180, 204
citizenship and, 6, 46–47
deliberation and, 1, 2–3, 6, 7, 152, 166–68, 169, 172–75, 178, 180–86, 204, 205–6, 207–10, 213–
18, 230, 237, 246–51, 253–55, 258–59
desire and, 16–17, 19–20, 32–33, 54, 170, 173–74, 237
emotion and, 33, 54–56
even numbers and, 25–26, 31–32
evil and, 13–14, 21–22
flesh of, 224–25
the household and, 11, 33–34, 57, 59, 152–54, 179–80, 183, 185, 247, 255, 258–59, 271n.73
intelligence and, 249–50, 254–55, 259
left side of the body and, 29–32, 43–44
memory and, 218, 228, 231, 236–37, 248, 254–55
moisture and, 27–29, 31–34, 36, 43, 54–55, 248–49, 255
moral failure and, 31–34
natural slaves compared to, 7–8, 161, 166, 185–86, 230, 248–55
necessity of, 9–10, 14, 87, 121–22, 128–34, 150
phronêsis and, 166–68, 169, 172, 217–18, 230
political life and, 7, 9–11, 12–13, 33–34, 46–58, 154, 161, 168–69, 204, 247, 249–50, 255, 259
Pythagorean list of opposites and, 24–26
rationality and, 6, 7–8, 11, 32–33, 168, 205, 213–14, 217–18, 231
reproduction and, 9–12, 22–23, 25–26, 37–41, 60, 61–62, 70–71, 74
sensation and, 217, 230–31, 248–49, 254–55, 259
softness and, 237, 249
telos of, 132–36, 140–41, 149–50, 213–17, 257–58
thumos and, 208–9, 231, 233–34, 236–37, 239, 246–50, 253–54, 255–56, 259
timidity and, 32–34
unboundedness and, 24–29, 32–34, 55–56
value of, 3–6, 7–8, 9–11, 58–59, 60, 62, 154, 257–60
virtue and, 7, 11, 57–59, 166–69, 170, 172–74, 183–84, 200, 204, 237
Works and Days (Hesiod), 13, 20–21
Xenophon, 33–34, 57–58

Zeus, 13–14, 17–18, 27–28

Marguerite Deslauriers - Aristotle On Sexual Difference - Metaphysics, Biology, Politics

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Marguerite Deslauriers - Aristotle On Sexual Difference - Metaphysics, Biology, Politics

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Aristotle on Sexual Difference

Aristotle on Sexual Difference

Introduction: The Philosophical Problem of Sexual Difference

I would like to thank the many colleagues in ancient philosophy from

Unless otherwise noted, quotations in English from Aristotle’s works are

1.1 Why are there two sexes?

1.2 The origin of the sexes

1.2.1 Introduction to the questions

1.2.2 The origins of the two sexes

1.2.2.4 Sexual difference, sexual reproduction, and matter

1.3 The assessment of women as inferior or flawed

1.3.2 Female as even

1.3.3 Female as unlimited

1.3.4 Female as moist

1.3.5 Female as left

1.4.1 The sexed body as a biological phenomenon

1.4.2 The role of male and female in reproduction

1.4.3 The determination of sex in the embryo

On this account, then, prevalence is a question of quantity. Since both

1.5 Sexual difference in the political context

1.5.1 The legal status of women in Athens

1.5.4 Comparison of Aristophanes and Socrates

1.5.5 Interpreting the Socratic proposals

1.5.6 The question of women as a genos

2.2 Sexual difference in the Metaphysics

This passage clearly mentions contraries as καθ’αὑτό attributes in the

2.3 The definitions of male and female

In this passage Aristotle describes the female as a causal principle or origin

2.4.1 Organs and capacities

We recognize in the case of sensation that possessing the organ is a

2.4.2 Sexual organs

2.4.3 The heart as a sexual organ

2.5 The concoction of sperma in male and female

2.5.1 Concoction in the Meteorology

Concoction is natural both in the sense that it is a process initiated by the

2.5.2 Concoction of sperma in the Generation of Animals

The “bloodlike secretion which occurs in the female” is clearly menstrual

2.6 Potentialities and capacities of spermata

2.6.2 Capacities of male semen

2.6.3 Capacities of katamênia

There is no reason to suppose that the sperma in this passage refers

2.6.4 Capacities of the fetation

The wind-egg grows because it has nutritive soul at a level of potentiality

2.6.5 The value and the inferiority of the katamênia

2.7 Conception and generation of an animal

2.7.2 Two analogies with conception and embryonic development

The analogy clearly describes one aspect of embryological development:

2.7.3 The role of movements in conception and embryonic

The movement in question is that described as “the same movement as that

2.7.4 Conception and final causation

2.8 The determination of sex in the embryo

2.8.2 The formation of organs in the embryo

2.8.3 Two questions about the determination of sex

2.8.4 The different kinds of movements in the semen

2.8.5 How sex is determined in the embryo

The “faculties” in this passage are dunameis or potentialities, and Aristotle

2.8.6 The formation of sexual organs

He is discussing Empedocles and disputing preformationist theories, but for

2.9 The female as natural, necessary, and defective

2.9.2 Material and conditional necessity in biological phenomena

This example illustrates the difference between conditional necessity and

Sexual difference is good because sexual difference embodies the

2.9.4 Female animals are necessary