Aristotle on sexual difference: metaphysics, biology, politics Aristotle on sexual difference: metaphysics, biology, politics , by Marguerite Deslauriers, New York, Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. xvi + 354, $110.00 (hb), ISBN: 978-0-19-760618-6

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgementsThanks to Sukaina Hirji for reading a draft of this review.Notes1 See also Nielsen, “Private Parts of Animals” (378), developing Witt, “Form, Normativity, and Gender”.2 I agree with Gelber that we need a distinction between being “defective with respect to the ability to concoct” and “being defective results of the generative process” (“Females in Aristotle’s Embryology”, 175); my question is (in the first instance) about the latter.3 As Charles (“Aristotle on Agency”, n. 24) notes; see Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action (24n14: “[t]he other conditional capacities it possesses, e.g. to ψ if partially impeded, will be realisations of the same capacity under differing circumstances”) and Kress, “Aristotle on Spontaneous Generation” (185–6). See also Makin, Aristotle: Metaphysics Book θ, on views that “identif[y] the content of a capacity with what its bearer does under ideal circumstances” (105; see 122 on De Caelo).4 One thus might resist by arguing that to fully concoct is to hit a ‘threshold’ – but then we need a further account of the relevant standard for (further) perfection, if it does not come from the capacity and is yet a standard for the process and not its result (see n. 2).5 Hirj: “the art of shoemaking has, internal to it, a certain kind of normative standard: its fullest expression is not just in producing shoes, but in produing [sic] excellent shoes” (“External Goods”, 47). When a shoemaker “produces a mediocre shoe, even if it is the best shoe she could produce given the limited materials available”, she “falls short” (47).