ABSTRACT
Because the speculations of Aristotle’s Metaphysics can be challenging in their sheer abstract complexity, it proves instructive to consider a concrete implementation of the theory developed there. In many respects, Aristotle’s treatise on living beings, De Anima, provides just such an implementation. In this work, which is clearly a mature production, Aristotle brings the full force of his hylomorphic metaphysical system to bear on problems pertaining to the nature and activities of living beings. Aristotle directs his four-causal explanatory framework first to some vexed questions about soul-body relations, and thereafter to the proper analysis of the main functions of living beings, namely nutrition, perception, and thought. The justification for his doing so is uncomplicated: the activity associated with each of these functions is a kind of change and from the Physics onwards, Aristotle models change in hylomorphic terms.
