The Human Model: Polymorphicity and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s _Parts of Animals_

In Parts of Animals II.10, Aristotle introduces an approach to studying the nonuniform parts of animals: “to speak about the human kind first” (656a10). This chapter asks why Aristotle adopts this strategy and how he goes about implementing it. I argue that he selects it because he holds that human bodies offer particularly clear illustrations of some of his scientific concepts, including the relationship between parts and the ends they are for the sake of. As a result, he thinks that beginning with the causal explanations of human parts helps us to develop such explanations for the parts of other animals, especially when it is difficult to do so.