Adriel M. Trott, "Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation" (Edinburgh UP, 2019)
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What is the central thesis of Trott’s ‘Aristotle on the Matter of Form’?
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Carrie Figor, Robert Talise, and Alexis McLeod. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Adriel M. Trott, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Gender Studies at Wabash College. Her book, Aristotle on the Matter of Form, a feminist metaphysics of generation, is just out from Edinburgh University Press. In this book, Trott argues for understanding the relationship of matter and form in Aristotle's work on the model of a Mobius strip.
With the figure of the Mobius strip, we can identify two planes at any particular point, but taking in the figure as a whole, we have We see that those two sides are produced by a torsion of a continuous strip. Through this figure, Trott allows us to think anew, with Aristotle, not just about form and matter, but also body and soul, male and female, and much else. Informed by and responding to feminist engagements with these issues, Trott challenges binary models of these couplets to show us innovative possibilities for thinking how we come to be and what we might become. Hello, Adriel, and welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Thank you. It's good to be here. It's great to have you today. Uh will you tell us a bit about yourself, uh about your background as a philosopher and how you came to write this book on Aristotle?
Yes, so I work mainly in Aristotle. Uh my first book was on the concept of nature in Aristotle's politics. I'm particularly interested in the way that the concept of nature gets put to work in ancient thinking, but also in the history of philosophy. So I'm interested in how it's used Both in what I think of as useful ways, but also ways that can be exclusionary or that can produce hierarchies So in the first book, I think about this the way that nature has been used as what divides between more and less natural beings. In ways that are off often excluding those natural beings. And I am uh so there I'm interested in thinking about how Aristotle's accounts of uh political life could be understood as being a
open, always self grounding and so concerned with its ground and needing to think about whether it's being inclusive enough. along the lines of this conception of nature in Aristotle's physics, where he defines nature as an internal source of movement and rest. So I think that that understanding, Aristotle says that political life is natural, if you think about it in those terms, I think that you end up with a really robust and interesting conception of political life. Well when I was working on that project and I was talking to people about it after that book came out. Some of the resistance and criticism that I got was, well, maybe this notion of nature works in the politics, but it doesn't seem like it works at the level of the biology.
That is Maybe nature can work like this once you have natural substances that are concerned with their ongoing uh existence, but if you look at how they come to be, it looks a lot like artifice. It looks like you have uh a kind of imposition model where forms imposed on matter. I was really, yeah, kind of concerned whether about whether that was true and spent some time looking at the biological works, which people tend to not think of as the most interesting place to go philosophize. And I found, I think, uh resources not only for addressing that question about nature, but for thinking about some of the broader questions in Aristotle's metaphysics. So I'm excited about this effort to bring together my ancient interests with my more contemporary interests in uh uh contemporary feminist thought and
Hopefully that's what this book does.
Yeah, no, it very much is this conversation between You move between people who are working on Aristotle, people who are working on feminist concerns and people who are
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central thesis of Trott’s ‘Aristotle on the Matter of Form’?
0:07–7:12
2
How does Trott’s academic background shape her approach to Aristotle’s concept of nature?
7:12–13:21
3
Why does Trott use the Möbius strip as a model for Aristotle’s matter‑form relationship?
13:21–21:12
4
What do the epigraphs from Heraclitus and Homer reveal about the book’s philosophical agenda?
21:12–29:58
5
How does the book reinterpret Aristotle’s male‑female binary in terms of generation and heat?
29:58–39:13
6
Why does Trott reject the traditional notion of ‘prime matter’ in Aristotle’s metaphysics?
39:13–47:53
7
In what ways does the feminist metaphysics of generation challenge hierarchical readings of form and matter?
47:53–54:05
8
What future projects does Trott plan to pursue after this book, and how do they build on her current work?
54:05–56:48
Speakers
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