De partibus animalium

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De partibus animalium ( Gr. Περὶ ζῴων μορίων, about the parts of animals ) is a 4th century BC. Aristotle's scientific writing that originated in the 3rd century BC and deals with the parts of animals and their functions in the context of his zoology . By “sharing” he does not only mean limbs and organs, but all components and products of the body, including blood, semen and milk, for example.

content

The writing is based on the Historia animalium and requires the reader to be familiar with it. After examining the material in the earlier work, the main focus is now on discussing the causes of the phenomena. The final cause is in the foreground, since Aristotle thinks teleologically .

The work consists of four books. Book I justifies zoology as an independent science and discusses in detail the method of zoological investigations, with Aristotle pleading for a holistic view of living beings. The following three books contain the concrete application of methodology, the explanation of the biological facts from their causes. Aristotle does not structure his material according to animal species, but according to body materials and organs, whereby he considers the two main groups of bloodless animals and blood animals separately.

The first book seems to have been written independently of the others. Its fifth chapter is famous, in which Aristotle explains why dealing with animals - also with lower and ugly ones - is meaningful and productive and not (as some contemporaries believed) unworthy of a philosopher.

Two basic assumptions, from which Aristotle starts here - as in other zoological works - in his search for the causes of the phenomena are:

  • Nature never produces anything unnecessary and superfluous.
  • Nature equips every species of animal as best for the species to thrive; it always selects the most expedient from the available options.

effect

After the death of Aristotle, his students almost entirely neglected the research program that he had set out and started in his zoological writings, with the exception of Theophrastus , who wrote several largely unsustainable treatises on animals. In all of antiquity, no one commented on De partibus animalium and the other zoological works. The historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertios does not name De partibus animalium among the works of Aristotle, so he did not know it. Galen was familiar with the zoological writings of Aristotle and used them by quoting certain statements partly in agreement and partly in disagreement. But even he did not do any further zoological research in the sense of the program conceived by Aristotle.

Since the 9th century, De partibus animalium had existed in an Arabic translation, which was often ascribed to al-Jahiz . This translation of De partibus animalium was part of the Kitāb al-hayawān ( Book of Animals ), which is divided into nineteen books ( maqālāt ) , in which the translator compiled three zoological writings of Aristotle: Historia animalium (books 1–10), De partibus animalium ( Book 11-14) and De generatione animalium (Book 15-19). The three components were not identified as separate units by their own headings. The famous Arab scholars Avicenna , ibn Bāǧǧa and Averroes commented on De partibus animalium in whole or in part.

Michael Scotus translated the Book of Animals from Arabic into Latin by 1220 at the latest , and so it became known to the Latin-speaking world under the title De animalibus libri XIX ( Nineteen Books on Animals ). Around 1260 Wilhelm von Moerbeke made a second Latin translation, based on the Greek text. From the 14th century onwards, the younger translation slowly supplanted the older one.

De animalibus was a basic textbook for scholastic zoology and philosophical anthropology of the late Middle Ages. Albertus Magnus wrote an extensive work De animalibus ( About the animals ) in 26 books; in books 11-14 he treated the components of the body based on Aristotle.

After 1450, the humanist Theodoros Gazes created a new Latin translation that met the requirements of the time, which was first printed in 1476 and published in 1504 by Aldus Manutius in Venice. This Latin standard text subsequently formed the basis for the scientific study of the work.

In 1882 Charles Darwin wrote in a letter referring to De partibus animalium : " Linnaeus and Cuvier were my two gods, albeit in very different ways, but compared to the old Aristotle they were only school boys."

expenditure

  • Aristotle: Parts of Animals , ed. Arthur Leslie Peck, London 1961 (Greek text and English translation)

Translations (medieval)

  • Remke Kruk (Ed.): Aristotle. The Arabic Version of Aristotle's Parts of Animals. Book XI − XIV of the Kitāb al-Ḥayawān , North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam 1979
  • Aafke MI van Oppenraaij (Ed.): Aristotle, De animalibus. Michael Scot's Arabic-Latin Translation , Part 2: Books XI – XIV: Parts of Animals , Brill, Leiden 1998

Translations (modern)

  • Aristotle: About the parts of living beings , translated and explained by Wolfgang Kullmann , Berlin 2007. ISBN 978-3-05-002291-8 (Works in German translation, edited by Hellmut Flashar, Vol. 17 [Zoological Writings II] Part 1 )
  • Aristoteles: About the members of the creatures , translated by Paul Gohlke, Paderborn 1959 (Aristoteles: Die Lehrschriften Vol. 8.2)
  • Aristotle: On the Parts of Animals , trans. by James G. Lennox, Oxford 2001. ISBN 0-19-875109-5 (English translation and detailed commentary)

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ De partibus animalium III.1 (661b18-32); IV 11 (691a28-b5)
  2. ↑ De animalium incessu 2 (704b12-18) and 8 (708a9-20); for use in De partibus animalium James G. Lennox: Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology , Cambridge 2001, pp. 216-218.
  3. ↑ Lennox pp. 110-127.
  4. ^ HJ Drossaart Lulofs , Preface , in: Aafke MI van Oppenraaij (Ed.): Aristotle, De animalibus. Michael Scot's Arabic-Latin Translation , Part 3: Books XV – XIX: Generation of Animals , Leiden 1992, p. VII.
  5. ↑ See also Remke Kruk: La zoologie aristotélicienne. Tradition arabe , in: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques , Supplément , Paris 2003, p. 331.
  6. ↑ Drossaart Lulofs, p. XIf.
  7. ↑ Theodor W. Köhler : Foundations of the philosophical-anthropological discourse in the thirteenth century , Leiden 2000, pp. 162–164, 237f., 247, 250, 273f., 314f., 321f., 334f.
  8. ↑ Allan Gotthelf: From Aristotle to Darwin , in: Aristotle's Animals in the Middle Ages and Renaissance , Leuven 1999, p. 397.