Does It Matter? Material Nature and Vital Heat in Aristotle’s Biology

Adriel M. Trott’s “Does It Matter? Material Nature and Vital Heat in Aristotle’s Biology” questions whether the difference between form and material in Aristotle is itself a formal or material distinction. Trott, framing her investigation with a discussion of the feminist critiques of the form/matter binary, argues that form and material, rather than being mutually exclusive, are distributed on a gradient, as contraries. Aristotle’s account of vital heat shows how the two-sex model slides into a one-sex model whose difference is located on a continuum: if woman is defined in terms of distance from man, a fluidity exists between these positions, whereby the difference between them is not a difference of form or kind, but a difference in heat, one of degree. Through this reading, Trott criticizes the myth of a link between femininity of matter (without devaluing the status of either), and shows that matter is rendered always-already meaningful for Aristotle.