Production and Reproduction

In Aristotle for Everybody, Adler says we don’t talk about producing or creating when we discuss childbirth. Instead, we speak of reproducing and procreating. So though people who have sex to have children are deliberately doing something for a purpose, they aren’t making or producing something together but instead procreating and reproducing. Hence, sex for conception is not a productive art. Is it a cooperative art (analogous to farming)? It seems not. The contribution of the couple to the outcome is minimal compared to the natural process involved. Successful farming requires more skill and more intervention than successful procreating does.

Aristotle and Materials Science

Aristotle thinks of material (matter, stuff) as potentiality to become a certain kind of thing. A particular sort of entity is produced when it takes on a specific form. When this happens, the potentiality of the material to be that kind of thing is actualized. Different kinds of material can be characterized in terms of the range of types of things they can become. Wood can be made into a chair, but water (in its liquid form) cannot be. These days, materials science studies how the properties of different kinds of stuff suit it for various states, forms, and purposes.

Ancient Art & Aristotle's Four Causes

I visited the Getty Villa in Malibu recently. While there, I heard a docent talk about a piece in their collection: a Greek storage jar featuring a painting of “The Judgment of Paris” from 360 B.C. The guide’s explanation touched on each of Aristotle’s four causes: what it is (a storage jar with paintings of mythical scenes), what it is made of (terracotta, pigment, and gold), how it was made (probably progressively in an Athenian workshop by artisans with different skills), and why it was made (as an export to Kersh on the Black Sea coast of today’s southern Russia).

Understanding Human Beings

Aristotle defined human beings as rational animals. We are animals insofar as we are embodied. And our embodiment in biological organisms makes us suitable objects of study by the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology. But we are also rational, and, given a Christian perspective, spiritual animals. Can the natural sciences provide a complete explanation of our rationality and spirituality? If we are rational and spiritual in virtue of having or being immaterial souls, then the answer is “no.” If substance dualism is true, our full understanding of ourselves will have to be based on additional, non-natural human sciences.