The Ancient Non-Human

Roman philosophers have consistently been brought into broad philosophical debates about hybridity and animality (e.g. Sorabji 1993; Tutrone 2012) and are well represented in collections of sources about animals in antiquity (e.g. Newmayer 2011). Nonetheless, there has been little discussion of there being a focused dialogue between Roman philosophers on these related topics.

Recent work at the intersection of philosophy and the life sciences has pointed to a “naturalistic turn in the human image” as the neural mechanisms of cognition are identified (Metzinger 2009: 3, 214-17, 233-40). Empathy has been redescribed in light of the discovery of the mirror neuron system as a “mandatory, automatic, nonconscious, prerational, nonintrospectionist process” (Gallese in Metzinger 2009: 176), rather than an inferential reconstruction of intentions in a two-stage process of observation and reflection.

In this paper, I argue that a reconsideration of Aristotle’s teleological approach to human and non-human phenomena alike may be useful for the contemporary turn to concepts of the posthuman and nonhuman. In particular, the renewed interest in matter and “materialism” on the part of feminist scholars (see, e.g., Alaimo and Hekman, 2008) may be enriched by an in-depth consideration of the notion of hulê as material cause in Aristotle’s philosophical and biological writings.

This paper considers objects in the Iliad as an important but often overlooked category of the nonhuman, drawing on recent theoretical work in the field of New or Vibrant Materialism. Vibrant Materialism has stressed the autonomy and agency of the material world and seeks to demolish the binary of human agent vs. inert object in favor of a more co-operative and dynamic interaction between nonhuman and human.