ABSTRACT
Aristotle is the first philosopher on record to subject the meaning of life to systematic philosophical examination: he approaches the issue from logical, psychological, biological, and anthropological perspectives in some of the central passages in the Corpus Aristotelicum. In Aristotle's naturalistic view, all living things, including plants, animals, human beings, and even gods, may be rank-ordered according to their erga or functions, which are determined by a consideration of the generic features of their form of life and specific features of their way of life. Aristotle uses a pair of Greek terms that are commonly translated into English as "life": zoe and bios, from which we get the terms "zoology" and "biology". In the biological works and the Politics, Aristotle raises the possibility that a human could metamorphose from being the most perfect and divine specimen on earth into a four-footed animal, or a many-footed insect, or even a plant.
