Los límites de los monstruos. La ontología teratológica aristotélica

Abstract

Aristotle gives us one of the most important discussions of antiquity about monsters. His first references to engage in the discussion were the cosmogony and the zoogony of Empedocles, who had held the existence of monsters formed by parts of unequal bodies, such as oxen with human faces. For Aristotle, the monstrosity was not against nature (φύσις) per se , but simply against what generally happened in it, and the procreation of monsters has its limits: the nature of the sperm that generates it and the characteristics of its species. The development of Aristotelian theories of monsters goes together with the concepts of random, material, formal and final causes, as well as his deduction about the seed that resides exclusively in males of the species, which in turn contain the power of reproduction in their semen, which has even led to estagirite to support, inclusive, that somehow the offspring of a woman is a detour of nature, and therefore it is a monster. On the other hand, the Aristotelian assertion that “nature does nothing in vain” although sometimes it does not achieve the intended objective, deserves explanation that, in our view, is scattered mainly in Physica and in the biological works. Consequently, we believe that to understand the concept of monstrosity in Aristotle it is necessary to relate this to what happens in general and regularly (ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ) in nature (φύσις) and that somehow is established as the normal, and to that extent as which is norm.