Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust.

Online at W.W. College London and the Lever Hume Trust, online at

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Today's episode, Classified Information, Aristotle's Biology. A short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borresse

imagines a Chinese encyclopedia entitled the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.

This fictional work suggests a division of animals into 14 kinds, namely those that belong to the Emperor,

embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous

ones, stray dogs, those included in the present classification, those that others, those that have just broken a flower vase, and those that from a long way off look like flies.

I don't know if this joke is partially meant to be at Aristotle's expense, but if not, it could have been.

Aristotle is the father of animal classification.

When we talk about the animal kingdoms being divided by genus and species, we are not only engaging in an Aristotelian project, but using Aristotelian

terminology to pursue that project.

The word genus comes from the Greek Genos, Aristotle's name for a broad type within which a division is made.

Animals were not the only thing Aristotle classified.

As I mentioned in a previous episode, he and his students collected and categorized political

constitutions of city states.

Even when he presents pre-Socratic views, Aristotle shows his classifying instincts. You might remember how, in the physics, he

divides up his predecessors in terms of how many principles they postulate to explain nature.

He learned the practice of division from his master Plato.

In two dialogues, the sophist and statesman, Plato has his characters try to reach definitions by dividing larger kinds into smaller kinds.

It is emphasized that the divisions need to be made at the natural joints, rather than chopping at random like a bad butcher.

This is the idea Borges is playing with. His imaginary Celestial Emporium

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