Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

by Clare Mac Cumhaill

A human individual, Aristotle had argued, is a kind of organised body.41 Not mind plus matter, but matter organised according to a form. Humans are not the only kind of organised body – cats and turnips are organised bodies too. Indeed, every living kind is matter conforming to an organising principle – an organism. Aristotle calls the organising principle a soul – so according to his philosophy, turnips have souls just as much as cats and humans. The vital operations of vegetative life – for example turnip life – include nutrition and reproduction, and these operations form the pattern, the organising principle, in the life of a plant. Individual turnips, on the whole, conform to a pattern that is characteristic of turniphood. The turnip begins as a seed, grows into a root, flowers. Unlike heaps of sand, lumps of rock and oceans, the identity of organised bodies, like turnips, is connected to the organising principle for individuals of that kind.