The Difference Sexual Difference Makes in Aristotle’s Corpus

Abstract

In Aristotle on Sexual Difference, Marguerite Deslauriers showcases the ways that the biological treatises invite consideration of major themes and debates in Aristotle scholarship: the relation of the theoretical to the practical texts, of the soul to the body, of eidos to morphē, of the status and operation of species form, of material’s ability to affect form, of the directionality of influence of the psychological and the physiological, of the structure of deliberation, the extent to which practical reason can be divided from choice and action, and more. Many scholars of Aristotle treat both Politics and Generation of Animals as minor works that shouldn’t be consulted for insight into the central questions of Aristotle’s corpus. This book makes the emphatic case that both texts are indeed fertile domains for investigating concerns that pervade his work – a case that Deslauriers supports with wide-ranging references including but not limited to Posterior Analytics, De Anima, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric. More than drawing together particular pieces of her reading of Aristotle’s view of sexual difference and its place in political life that she has made in other work (for example, that sexual difference is in the matter, not the form), Deslauriers argue for a coherent case of Aristotle’s treatment of female animals and of women citizens across his corpus. This monograph is the work of a scholar who has been thinking over these matters for decades, and it shows. The book is precise in its argumentation and its self-understanding of the stakes: to defend the importance of sexual difference for Aristotle. Deslauriers foresees objections and has replies grounded in specific passages that are not