Aristotle's Impact on Modern Science: A Conversation with James Lennox

Foreign.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of the Secular Foxhole podcast. Today, Martin and I are pleased to have a very special guest.Dr. James Lennox is here today and Dr. Lennox is professor emeritus of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published widely on the history of philosophy of biology with a focus on Aristotle, William Harvey, Charles Darwin and Darwinism.His books include Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology from Cambridge in 2001 and the translation with commentary titled Aristotle on the Parts of animals, also in 2001, and the Clarendon Aristotle series. And actually his curriculum vitae, if that's correct, is much longer than that. But we will just segue into his latest book, Aristotle on Inquiry.And I hope I pronounced this right. Arotic frameworks and domain specific norms. James, thank you for coming on.

My pleasure.

I want to say what got you interested in Aristotle's whole question driven way of doing science and how do you see that approach lining up with or diverging from how scientists work today? I imagine it's quite different. I don't know.

Yeah, it seems to me there are two quite distinct questions there, not one question.

Well, they as well.

And so I'm going to answer them as two different questions. So I guess a little bit of autobiography to deal with your first question.I've, since I was a young child, been very interested in living things, fascinated by them. As I got older, that became an interest in biology.But fairly early on I realized what I really was interested in was the way biology works, the nature of the science of biology.So pretty early on, I guess in my second or third year as an undergraduate, I shifted my interest to philosophy and pretty quickly, often this is true, due to a really good professor teaching ancient philosophy.I became very fascinated in Aristotle and I think what sort of piqued my interest in his biology was partly that this professor actually knew quite a bit about Aristotle's biological works. But I also was interested in the philosophy of Ayn Rand. At that time.She had written a review of a book by John Herman Randall, professor at Columbia, on Aristotle and she referred to Aristotle's philosophy as biocentric.And that combined with the fact that I'd already been sort of had my interest in Aristotle's biology piqued by this, a professor at York University, I started focusing on not just his philosophy, but on the way his philosophy impacted the way he studied living things. I did an honors thesis on Aristotle's De Anima and I won't go through the details, but eventually I decided to go into graduate school.And I discovered that there was a subject called philosophy of biology. I had no idea about that until I got to graduate school.There was a professor at the University of Toronto where I did graduate work, Thomas Gouge, who was one of the leading figures in the philosophy of biology at the time. And so I sort of combined an interest in the philosophy of biology and. And Aristotle. And that got me focused on Aristotle's.The relationship between Aristotle's philosophical thinking and his approach to the study of living things.That's all background to the fact that a lot of my research in the first 20 years of my academic life was focused on the relationship between Aristotle's philosophy of science, which you find in his Posterior analytics, and his biological work. At the time.This is in the 1970s and 80s, the standard view was there was no relationship between Aristotle's philosophy and his scientific work at all. The scientific work was a bunch of sort of random notes about various things. And then there was this very systematic philosophy of science.And I made it my task for the first 20 years or so to prove that that was wrong, to prove that his biological work was very much influenced by his Posterior Analytics. Now we get directly to your question. All right, the Posterior analytics has two books.Book one lays out his theory of scientific demonstration, what scientific knowledge looks like. Book two, I gradually began to realize was the primary topic was how do you achieve that goal? How do you achieve scientific knowledge?In other words, what's the nature of scientific inquiry such that it will achieve the goal of scientific knowledge. I began to think of book one as on scientific demonstration and book two as on inquiry. And that is how I started thinking.And that really didn't fully sink in until the late 1990s.You can start seeing it in the papers that I'm writing in 1998, 99, 2000, where I'm beginning to talk more and more about the norms that govern Aristotle's investigations. What are the principles that should guide your inquiry into whatever subject you're interested in?And it wasn't until about 10 years later, 2010, 11, that I started conceiving of the book that came out in 2021. And so it really was thinking of that second book of the Posterior analytics as a theory of inquiry that got me going.Now, Erotetic, which you wondered whether you had pronounced it properly or not, is based on the Greek word erotao. That's a verb meaning to ask or to question or to inquire. And problem that people have had with the Posterior Analytics.Book two is that it doesn't seem to provide substantive norms for specific inquiries.It's so abstract that that it will give you a basic framework for inquiry, but it's too abstract to give you any guidelines if you're trying to do ethics or geometry or botany or zoology or meteorology or cosmology or whatever subject you might be interested in. So I began to think of it as providing a framework of questions that need to be answered by any scientific inquiry.But it doesn't give you the domain specific norms that you need to actually know how to go about studying living things or studying arithmetic, or studying geometric figures or studying meteorology or whatever it might be.So that's the idea behind an erotic framework, a framework of questions and answers that you need to have in place compared to the substantive norms that you need to carry out a particular inquiry. That's the basic idea. Book two begins with four questions that have to be answered. What are they? Does the subject of inquiry exist?If it exists, what's its nature? What's its essence? Question 3, what properties belong to the subject of investigation?And why do those properties belong to that subject of investigation? So the examples he gives early on in the Posterior analytics, book two, one is, do eclipses exist? Do lunar eclipses exist? Let's put it that way.If so, what is a lunar eclipse? Third, does the moon, the subject of investigation, suffer eclipses? And if so, why does the moon suffer eclipse?Why does the moon disappear behind a shadow on certain occasions, but not other occasions? Another example he gives early on in the analytics is what is thunder? Does thunder exist? If so, what is it? Okay, it's a noise in the clouds.All right? So do certain noises occur in the clouds at certain times? And if so, what is the cause of those noises occurring in the clause?So you're basically getting what is it? Is it, does it exist? What is it? What properties does it have? Why does it have those properties?And those four questions are going to be asked in any subject of inquiry, whatever, but you can see how abstract that is. It's not going to give you guidance about how to study animals.And you know, it doesn't take too much imagination to realize that if you try to take the techniques that you're using in studying geometry and use them to study animals, it's not going to be very helpful.

Okay. Okay. Well, again, so the second part of the question was, are scientists today in general using that framework or do you know if that's the case?

Right. So that's, I would say any practicing scientist does have to answer those questions.And I can give you lots of examples from the history of modern biology.Where the science actually went through those stages where, if you look at genetics, Mendel first does experiments that establish that there is something that causes traits to appear in offspring in particular ways, but he didn't know what it was.And throughout the history of genetics in the early 1900s, people realized it must be something in the chromosomes, in the nuclei, because the way they divide and separate is very similar to the way in which Mendel's genes divide and separate and recombine. By the 1930s, there's a technique of identifying specific places on the chromosomes where specific genes reside.So you're getting an answer to what that factor that Mendel established existed. You're getting an initial answer to what it is. Then, of course, you move forward to 1953.And people are trying to figure out, well, chromosomes are made out of two things, proteins and ribonucleic acids. Initially, they're thinking the genes must be the proteins, because proteins are complicated and genes are complicated.Of course, we found out that wasn't true. It was the deoxyribonucleic acid that was, in fact, made up the genes.And so what you're doing is getting more and more and more specific answers to the question of what is a gene? First you get, do the genes exist? Yes. Mendel figures that out. Then you get better and better answers as to what the gene is.What about the other two questions? Well, why, first of all, do certain traits. Are certain traits caused by certain genes?You can establish that experimentally, but you don't actually know causally why it is that certain locations on certain chromosomes are responsible for certain traits. That requires a very specific kind of investigation. So I think, yes, the way scientists actually behave is very. Aristotelians, very much like.

Laid out.

What's really interesting, though, and this was part of what led me to talk about erotetic frameworks, is if you look back into philosophy of science in the 1960s and 70s, Arthur Pryor, a logician, said, you know, everybody's been developing logic as if all language was just a bunch of abstract propositions. But he said, language is much more complicated than that. And a big part of language is asking and answering questions.So he said, I'm going to develop an erotetic logic. And that's what he called it. He called it an erotetic logic. And people picked up on that.If you look to a book that was published by two professors here at the University of Pittsburgh, Anderson and Belknap, they wrote a book in the early 1970s called the Logic of Questions and Answers, and that led to a lot of people thinking about science as the answer to various kinds of questions. Wes Salmon gave an American Philosophical association presidential address in 1978, I think, called why Ask why?An Inquiry Concerning Scientific Explanation. And one of my early teachers, Bas van Frassen, wrote a book called the scientific image in 1983, and.And in chapter five, chapter five is called a Theory of why Questions.The interesting thing is, I won't go any more into the details of this, but that whole project of beginning to think of science philosophically as answering questions kind of fizzled out after 1985. You don't see anybody talking about this again, and it's really a shame, I think.

Yeah, no kidding.

There really was something there. But I think the problem is philosophy of science in the 20th century was entirely focused on explanation. We can talk about that later if you like.But I think with rare exceptions, one was Susan Hack, who wrote a book called Evidence and Inquiry, where she was arguing that there should be an epistemology of inquiry. But for the most part, epistemology and philosophy of science were focused on deductive explanations.They weren't partly it was skepticism about induction. They just didn't think there was anything interesting philosophically about how you get to hypotheses or theories.All the interest from a philosophical point of view was what is the nature of explanation and how do you test hypotheses once they've been formed? But how you achieve the theories, how you achieve the hypotheses, that was just considered not interesting as a philosophical topic.

Would that be due to the dominant philosophic trend then in the culture?

Yeah, I think so. There's a big long story to tell there we won't get into.But if you look at logical empiricism and logical positivism, which were the dominant philosophical views at that time, it really had very little interesting to say about induction insofar as they said anything about it. It was simply the theory of probability, basically. I see, yeah.

So, all right, I'm going to jump a question here. Let's see. I want to.A lot of people picture Aristotle as this rigid system builder, but your work paints him as much more of an active, flexible investigator. What do you think people tend to miss about how he actually did his work?

Yeah, well, I want to divide sort of the way you put that. He is definitely a systematic thinker, there's no question about that.I could go into great detail about how his view of the four causes influences his scientific work. How his view of substances as constituted of matter and form inform his scientific work.

You've probably written about those things, I would imagine.

I have indeed. So there's. He's definitely a systematic thinker, but. And he's rigid about certain things. He's definitely rigid about the law of non contradiction.He's quite rigid about his metaphysical views, the four causes and so on. So what I think you're getting at, because you used the word active at one point, is that he's open minded.For him, perceptual evidence is the basis of all knowledge. So he's not rationalistic, he's not an a priori thinker.In many, many places throughout his scientific work he stresses that in fact, I'll read you one passage quickly from the generation of animals he's just gone through how he understands reproduction in honeybees.

Wow, okay.

Which is incredibly complicated, as you probably know.He then says this then appears to be the state of affairs with regard to the generation of bees so far as theory can take us, supplemented by what are thought to be the facts about bee behavior. But the facts have not been sufficiently ascertained.And if at any future time they are ascertained, then credence must be given to the direct evidence of the senses more than to theories. And to theories too, provided that their results. Sorry, that the results which they show agree with what is observed.And that's a statement within one of his scientific treatises.But if you look at the posterior analytics, especially the last chapter, he stresses how you start with observation of particular things, you see similarities among the things you observe, you then form first level generalizations and then you form higher level generalizations based on those. And eventually that leads you inductively to the discovery of causes and essences.So if that's the case, then what he is not is a rationalistic a priori thinker. He goes where the evidence takes him. And so in that sense he's not rigid.And I think the people that talk about Aristotle that way probably haven't read him carefully.And they're probably dependent on the view of scholastic Aristotelianism in the Renaissance that was criticized by people like Francis bacon and other 17th century and Galileo, but they were criticizing the scholasticism of the professors at the universities. Most of the founders of the scientific revolution did not work in universities.Newton eventually did because he was given the chair of mathematics at one point. Boyle never was Hooke, never was Galileo. Well, sort of. But as you know, he was eventually Subject to the Inquisition.And so what they were fighting against was a very ossified, scholastic, rationalistic form of Aristotelianism where what Aristotle said in the treatises that he wrote was more important than what you observed.

Okay, so again, weren't criticizing Aristotle.

This is not Aristotle.

Yeah, they were criticizing the scholastic interpretation, I guess.

Yeah.

Jim and Blair, I have a short comment here.I really see that you have to promise to be, how would you say, returning guest because this is so fascinating and my comment here, my 2 cents is I watched BBC documentary several years ago on Aristotle in Lesbos. Have you?

Yes.

Have you watched that one?

Oh yeah.

I think it was Harry Bin Swing List that.

No, I'm good friends with Armand Leroy,.

In fact and it was for me as a layman it was so fascinating and one day I want to visit, of course Athens and Greece, but also Lesbos when it's safe to go there. But it was so fascinating to see his story there. And do you have any reflection comment on that?And then Blair will continue with all the great questions.

Yeah, I think Armand's book based on that documentary, Aristotle's Lagoon is I think a wonderfully inspiring introduction to Aristotle. Now he is not a Greek philosophy scholar, he's a developmental biologist. As a matter of fact, a quite well known developmental biologist.But what he saw when he first read Aristotle was somebody who really understood the nature of biology, the nature of studying living things. And I think he conveys with his excitement. It's a wonderful introduction to Aristotle's study of living things.

Thank you for that. It's been a long time since I saw that and I have the book as well and I'd love to find it again on video or DVT or something.

No, it's readily available on YouTube.

Oh, very good then I don't have to spend money, I hope.

Back to that player also value for value. But I guess what you're saying that's true.

Well here, given the tools that he had, James, Aristotle still puts huge emphasis on observation.

Yeah.

How does he pull that off? What strategies does he use to work around the limits of his time? If that.I mean Obviously it's 2,000 years ago and there's obviously much more available today, I guess.

Yeah. But again, yeah, so I sort of thought that's what you had in mind.He, he didn't have electron scanning microscopes and he didn't have radio astronomy and.

So on Radio Shack wasn't.

So look, what are those things? Those are tools for putting us in observational contact with Things that we can't see with the naked eye, if you like, or the naked ear or whatever.

Right. Okay. Yes.

So really, those are tools for aiding us in observation. That's what they are. Now, Aristotle is very aware of the limitations he has in certain areas of study.And again, I want to read you a passage where he's contrasting the study of the heavens with the study of living things. And this is something. When you look at his De Ca.Which is his work of cosmology, he's constantly apologizing for the fact that he has very limited perceptual contact with the objects that he's talking about. They're a long way away. He can't touch them. He can see these points of light moving around, but he has no idea what they really are.He's aware of the fact that it's speculative in a way that he doesn't particularly like to do. But he says other people have already done it. The Pythagoreans have done it. Plato has done it.I can do it better than they can, so I'm going to do it. But here's what he says in the parts of this is in chapter five of book one of the Parts of Animals, near the end of the first book.Among the substantial things constituted by nature. So he's talking about natural things. Some are ungenerated and imperishable through all eternity.That's what he thinks about the heavenly bodies, while others partake of generation and perishing. There he's thinking of animals and plants.Yet it has turned out that our studies of the former, that is, the heavenly bodies, though they are valuable and divine, are few.For as regards both those things on the basis of which one would examine them and those things about them which we would long to know, the perceptual phenomena are altogether few. We are, however, much better provided in regard to knowledge about the perishable plants and animals, because we live among them.For anyone wishing to labor sufficiently can grasp many things about each kind of animal or plant. Each study, of course, has its attractions. Even if our contact with eternal beings is slightly, nonetheless, because of surpassing value.This knowledge is a greater pleasure than our knowledge of everything around us. Even as a chance. I love this.Even as a chance brief glimpse of the ones we love is a greater pleasure than seeing accurately many other and great things. Perishable beings, however, take the prize with respect to our understanding because we know more of them and we know them more fully.Further, because they are nearer to us and more of our nature, they provide A certain compensation compared with the philosophy concerned with divine things.And he then goes on to argue that if you study living things, even humble living things like grubs and ants and so on, with a proper philosophical approach, searching for causes and essences, when you study them, it actually is as noble an enterprise as the study of the heavens is. So he's very aware of these differences when he's studying living things.He's aware of the fact that, for example, studying generation, well, most of the generation of what he calls live bearing animals takes place in the womb inside the female animal. Well, how are you going to study that? It's not directly observable. And what about studying the development of living things inside eggs? Not directly.A billion. So what does he do? Well, he's a huge dissectionist. He dissects like mad. You can't dissect human beings.In Greek city states, it was considered defiling corpses, and they wouldn't allow it.One of the reasons why medicine takes off big time in Alexandria in Egypt is, of course, they've been dissecting and embalming corpses for years, thousands of years by the time the Greeks get there. And so basically, Greek medicine shifts from Athens to Alexandria in the generation right after Aristotle.And some of his students are the people that start studying medicine there.But what he did was study all kinds of other animals by dissecting them at various stages of development and studying what happened at each stage of development in these various kinds of things. One of the most interesting cases is his study of the development of the chick egg. He does an experiment. He starts 24.He knows that most chicks will hatch between 20 and 23 days. So he starts 24 eggs, and he opens one each day.

Oh, wow.

But he doesn't just destroy it. He very carefully peels the shell off because he knows there's a layer of skin around that you can actually see through.And he describes, he describes.He says it's on the third day that you can see this little drop of blood that will appear and then disappear, Appear and then disappear, Appear and then disappear. And he's realizing this is the first observation of the heart beating.

Wow.

And then he talks about, you go along a little bit further and the head develops, but the body is much smaller. And if you've ever seen the development of embryos, you'll recognize it describes it in incredible detail.And in fact, William harvey in the 17th century, writes a book called on the generation of Animals modeled on Aristotle's. And he starts to describe the development of the chick egg. And then he starts quoting Aristotle and he says, I can't say it any better.And so he's aware of the fact there are things you can't observe and sometimes there are tools you can use like proper dissection. And he's got a lot of discussion about how you dissect so that you can actually see the organs inside.Because if you don't dissect properly, they everything collapses, blood gets all over everything and it's just you can't observe it. So he talks a lot about how to dissect so that you can actually make proper observations. And yeah, he had limitations.He didn't have a microscope, he didn't have a telescope, he didn't have MRIs, he didn't have CT scans, but he did his best to aid observation of things that he couldn't see directly.

Okay, now you've already written a book on Aristotle's philosophy of biology. And how does this new book, does this new book expand on it?

Yeah, I think I can go back to what I said earlier and make short shift of that question. Basically the essays in Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology were all published between 1982 and 19. I think the latest one was 1997.So they are sort of the first 20 years of Lennox's Aristotle work.

Okay.

Then it was right around the time that that was published that I started to have this self conscious realization that what I'm really interested in is Aristotle's modes of inquiry. I'd always been more focused on the second book of the Posterior analytics than the first book, but it really wasn't until around.And part of the reason for that was I had become good friends with David Charles at Oxford University and he had written a book in 2000 that was primarily focused on book two of the Posterior Analytics. There's lots of things about his approach to it that I disagree with.But it was the first book that did a very careful chapter by chapter study of the development of the argument in book two. And it made me realize there really is a systematic argument in book two to.And the systematic argument is those four questions that I mentioned turn out to be very interestingly intertwined in Aristotle's way of understanding things. Give you one example. To answer the what is it?Question, which is, you know, trying to get a handle on the nature or essence of the thing you're studying. It turns out that once you figure that out, you also have the causal explanation for all of the non essential attributes that belong to that thing.Because what the essence Is. Is that which explains all of the other properties of the thing.

Okay.

Yes. So once you get an answer, a good answer to the what is it?Question, you also have an answer to the question of why does it have these properties that it has. So if you. Here's an example from book two of the Parts of Animals. Are there elephants?Well, thanks to Alexander the Great and his expeditions, Aristotle knows there are elephants. What is an elephant? Well, Aristotle has, in chapter 16 of book 2, a long discussion of the elephant's bizarre nose, which we call a trunk.

Trunk, yeah.

And he talks about all of the different things. It can be used as a hand. It can be used to bring food and liquid to the mouth.It can be used when it's in the water as a kind of breathing device to stick out of the water while it's underwater, so that it can breathe while it's underwater. All of which is true.And basically, he says that because of the nature of the elephant, and he goes into great detail about why, you know, a lot of mammals, right, have front paws that they can use for feeding or hunting or whatever. Well, if you look at the feet of an elephant, it's quite clear it can't do that. It's basically, there are toes, but they really aren't toes.And he explains that because of the huge mass of this thing, that's the kind of legs and feet that elephant have to have.But if they have those kinds of legs and feet, they can't use their feet the way other mammals do to hunt things down with claws or to bring food to their mouths and so on. How do they do it? And it's even hard for them to kneel down and get down on the ground.So they had this long instrument that they can use as a feeding instrument. So if you know the nature of elephants, it's going to explain why they have this weird trunk. So there's a concrete example of what I'm talking about.Yeah, right.

A moment ago, you mentioned the word keyword essence. And I think that is. Let's segue to. I think Aristotle's and Ayn Rand's view of that word is different to Jung. Can you extrapolate on that a little?

Yes, I can. Although I don't think it's as different as Ayn Rand thought it was. She had, I think, a very standard view at the time.She was writing of Aristotle as having a kind of view of an intuitive grasp of the essence of things. Just a more rationalistic view of him than I think is correct. But I Think. Nevertheless, there is a basic difference.I think Aristotle thinks that essences are fixed properties of things, of kinds of things. And there is a process of inquiry, which I've been describing, that gets you to a knowledge of what those are. It's not an intuitive grasp.There is a perception, you know, a move from perception through stages of inquiry. Nevertheless, her view of essences is that essences are epistemological.As she puts it, the essence of a thing is within a particular context of knowledge, what explains most or all of the other attributes of the thing you're inquiring into. But that will change as the context of knowledge widens. Or it may. It may or may not, but it may.I gave you an example earlier of how our knowledge of what the gene is kept changing over time, and it's still changing. Oh, certainly, certainly.And as it does, what you might think is the most fundamental or explanatory feature of the reproductive machinery of organisms will change.And so which attribute you'll think is the most fundamental or essential Will change with the growth and expansion of knowledge or may change with the growth and expansion of knowledge. I don't think Aristotle sees that. He does have a view that the answer to the what is it?Question goes through various stages of inquiry, but he definitely thinks there's one right answer at the end of the inquiry. I mean, an example he gives in.Well, I can give you a lot of different examples from his actual biological work, where you may start out thinking, what's thunder? It's noise in the clouds. Well, but then you want to ask, well, yeah, but any noise in the clouds?You know, there could be lots of different noises in the clouds. And this noise in the clouds seems to be connected to bright flashes of light in the clouds, too.So isn't there something more to it than just saying noise in the clouds? And Aristotle says, well, yes, the example. It's not necessarily his example, but the example he gives is quenching of fire in the clouds.And that's what causes. You know, when you throw water on the fire, Right. You get both a burst, a flash of light, and a big noise.So he's imagining that thunder is a noise in the clouds due to a quenching of fire in the clouds.

Okay.

And so that's a development in our knowledge. Certainly they're both answers to what is it? Questions.But one of them is a more fundamental answer because it gives you the cause of the first answer, if you like.

Disagree. I have just a couple more questions, if you don't mind. Yeah, let's say Aristotle is around today.What do you think he would try to find this supreme interest for himself?

Yeah,.

Stick with minds.

It's one of those questions that everybody asks, but there's nothing but speculation. But I mean, there are certain things I can say. One is Aristotle is an incredibly systematic polymath.I don't know any other figure in the history of knowledge that is one of the greatest metaphysicians of all time, one of the greatest epistemologists of all time, one of the greatest biologists of all time, one of the greatest ethicists of all time. I mean, you can just go on and on and on.So it's hard to say what he might find more interesting in the 21st century, but he certainly would be fascinated by the biology of the 21st century.His knowledge of living things was limited to basically around the Mediterranean and a few other spots that he got some indirect knowledge of, probably due to Alexander the Great's expeditions.More than anything else, to know that there were all of these different environments all over the world and these millions of animals adapted in an infinite number of ways to these many, many, many different environments would have absolutely fascinated him, I'm sure of that.And I think he would have been instantly convinced by on the Origin of Species that the explanation for all these adaptations and the intricate relationships between all these organisms had to be a genealogical explanation like Darwin's. So I don't think there would be any worries about him becoming an evolutionist if he knew what Darwin knew.I will say that there's a Neo Aristotelian movement in the philosophy of biology going on right now.

That's good to hear.

I'll mention one, one book in particular, and the reason for this is the evolutionary biology that developed in the 1920s and 30s and 40s, the so called evolutionary synthesis, Neo Darwinian synthesis was very gene centered, shall we say, and very reductionistic to the point where lots of people were saying biology doesn't study organisms anymore, it studies genes. Dawkins famously said organisms are just the vehicles that the genes drive around. Basically that it's the genes that are in the driver's seat.And but once developmental biology started to take off in the 20th, 20, around 1990, from that point on, people began to realize that the genes aren't in the driver's seat. Epigenetics develops.People begin to realize that there's things going on at higher levels of organization that are turning on and turning off the genes that are correcting genetic errors, that are doing all Kinds of things to keep the genes doing what they're doing and doing what they're doing at the right times and in the right places and so on. And so people began to take a more organismic, whole organism view of living things and a good. Oh, this is an advertisement for a friend of mine.How do I. Here we go. So that's the book. Dennis Walf, Organisms, Agency and Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 2015, I think.

Okay, great, great.

And I wanted to contribute to this. So I have published a paper in, I think it was 2017. It's called an Aristotelian Philosophy of Form, Function and Development.And I can send you the link at some point and post it.And what I'm trying to do there is argue that if you're going to develop a neo Aristotelian philosophy of biology, here are some things that you can learn from Aristotle that are just as relevant today as they were 2,400 years ago.

Great.

And I'm very proud of that paper. It's a paper that I like to tell people about and have lots of people read.

Is it in that book or is it just standalone?

Nope, it's in a journal called Acta Philosophica. It's a European journal.It was a special issue of the journal where five different people were invited with different views on what the future of philosophy of biology should look like. And so I was invited to contribute to it.

Do you recommend or do you know of any other. I think there is certainly a revival of Aristotelianism that seems to be happening today.Yeah, obviously Ms. Rand, I think hopefully is the catalyst for that.

She certainly helped. I mean, think about me, Alan Godhelf, lots of people who learned to study Aristotle because they read her.Undying respect and veneration for Aristotle. So she certainly, I think, helped because what then happened was I'm not just an Aristotelian scholar, I'm a historian and philosopher of biology.If you read Dennis Walsh's book, you'll see footnotes to me quite often. We had an influence on people doing philosophy of biology and philosophy of science. So, yeah, there's certainly an impact.

I tip my hat to you. Believe me, again, we are.We've just passed the hour mark, and I hate for this to end, but ladies and gentlemen, today we've had a wonderful guest, Professor James Lennox, Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. James, thanks for manning the foxhole with us.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

To have you back soon.

Yeah. You have to be a returning guest and thanks again for signing up and joining TrueFans FM so we could add you to the split here in the future, Jim.And please follow our podcast there.

I'm signing off.

Very good. Thank you, James.