Respondent: Emmanuel Auerbach 

 
Abstract:  

 
In this talk, I take up a problem that has been discussed by modern scholars of Aristotle in terms of “cosmic teleology.” Aristotle held that all living beings are unified wholes oriented towards what is good for them—survival, but also, more generously, flourishing. He also paid considerable attention to how living beings live in relation to each other and other natural bodies. But what is the cause of this larger structure? Is the cosmos itself a living being, with its end? If not, how does Aristotle account for the community of natures as a whole?

In this paper, I argue that Aristotle responded to this question from two perspectives. As much as possible, he sought to describe living beings’ relationship to the things they need to live in terms of what is oikeios: what is one’s own or akin. But he also recognized the limits of an individual nature to organize its world. On a couple occasions in the Politics and the Metaphysics, we see him speculating about the larger structure of the world by appealing to the model of the household (oikos, oikia): that is, the very community that establishes what is akin to each member. By reading these passages closely, I show how the relations of interdependence and hierarchy that define the “natural” communities of the household for Aristotle—namely, the male-female relation and the master-slave relation—were extended by Aristotle into the structure of the cosmos understood as "the whole.” The problem of “cosmic teleology,” I argue, shows us how Aristotle’s commitments to hierarchies of sex/gender, enslavement, and the instrumentalization of nonhuman animals lie at the heart of his cosmology.

 
Bio:

Brooke Holmes is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where she also directs the Gauss Seminars in Criticism and previously directed the Interdisciplinary Program in Humanistic Studies (IHUM). She is the author of The Symptom and The Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece and Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy.  Her book Tissue of the World: The Nature of Ancient Sympathy will be published by The University of Chicago Press in the spring of 2027.