The first and most important step into the Peripatetic study of living beings is the observation that life takes many forms. In the sublunary world, it takes the form of plant and animal life (with human life as a special kind of animal life). When Aristotle and Theophrastus speak of animals and plants, they never assume that they are a single form of life. This is confirmed by what we read at the outset of the Meteorology, where Aristotle outlines an ambitious research program that ends with separate yet coordinated studies of “animals and plants.” Whether there is unity, and how much unity there is, in these two studies remains an open question at the outset of the Meteorology. But when we look at the two corpora of writings that Aristotle and Theophrastus have left on the topic of animals and plants, we see that the unity they are able secure is limited. Last but not least, this chapter shows that the study of the nutritive soul advanced in Aristotle’s De anima cannot secure unity within the study of animals and plants.

A positive online presence is indispensable in modern life, but establishing one requires thought and strategy. This chapter explores how to use social media to your advantage, with an appealing bio, techniques for posting that attract attention and admiration, which platforms to choose, the power of blogging, the effective use of artificial intelligence, and how to create and incorporate photos and videos to help make an impact online.

Aristotle’s biology and contemporary evolutionary biology appear to be fundamentally at odds. Any comparative biology seeks to explain the fit and diversity of organismal form, but Aristotelian and contemporary biology do so in very different, evidently incompatible, ways. In this chapter, I argue for a reconciliation between the two biologies. Recent advances in evolutionary thinking suggest that the form of population thinking pursued by twentieth-century evolutionary biology must be augmented by an understanding of the ways in which organisms as adaptive, purposive entities contribute to adaptive evolution. Moreover, the phenomenon of adaptation cannot adequately be understood unless we take into account the ways in which an organism’s “way of life” structures its experience of its conditions of existence. The active role that organisms play in evolution is nicely captured in Aristotle’s concept of bios – way of life.