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Since souls are forms of living beings, according to Aristotle, a scientific study of living beings requires first and foremost a systematic account of the soul. Such an account is supplied in the treatise De Anima, where the soul is divided into distinct parts or aspects. In this chapter it is argued that the soul is only conceptually divided, that is divided for the sake of analysis, whereas in reality each soul is a unity. The notion of conceptual division of the soul, its principles and consequences are examined, often in contrast with the spatial division of the soul advocated by Plato in the Timaeus. Conceptual division of the soul enables Aristotle to avoid the problems detected in Plato's division, and to preserve the unity both of each soul and of each organic body.

Shields defends Aristotle's claim that life is homonymous, specifically, a core‐dependent homonym. Shields argues that Aristotle's account of the homonymy of life is a clear and compelling illustration of the fruitfulness of the methodology of homonymy. Aristotle's account of life reflects various facts about living things without making them definitional of life; which, as Shields argues, is desirable, as definitions of life should be neither univocal nor disjunctive.

This chapter starts by telling that one of the effects of the form of The Owl and the Nightingale is its capacity to shape attempts to describe it. It claims that this effect is evident in that improper reading can breed opposition and misunderstanding. It proposes that such effect and irresolution it produces are not so much successive failures at critical understanding as nearly perfect reading of a form characterized by a gesture known as the feint. The first half of the chapter expounds its governing premise that words adequate the world and in the case of living things, language is as animate as the object it describes. The second half describes how a form culminates in a more dramatic feint. It concludes that the speech of the owl and the nightingale is the best instrument for subjecting life to the kinds of scrutiny which will truly give up its meaning.

This chapter discusses causal understandings of one type of natural kind — living things. It considers three themes: one cannot build a coherent account of our concepts of the natural world without some hypotheses about how that world is really structured; the property homeostasis view of natural kinds fits with a psychological model of concepts as always embedded in theory-like structures which owe their origins to a small but diverse set of fundamental modes of construal — a model that posits a specific view of conceptual change; and one key part of these early modes of construal may be more general expectations about how the causal powers of types of properties, such as colours versus shapes, vary strongly as a function of these general categories and not at more fine-grained levels.

This concluding chapter describes the “grandeur,” as Darwin himself has put it, in the brief glimpses of life so far explored in this volume. It invites the reader to experience this grandeur through the steady development and growth of life from its hazy origin and early manifestations, down the long corridors of time that lead to the present. Life is after all a history of millions upon millions of millions of individuals, of millions of different species, through millions of years. In an endless procession, animals and plants have spread and multiplied and vanished, each for a fleeting moment a part of the continuing process we call life.

This chapter explains how medial space makes it possible for all living things to produce the sensible and to transform their own psychism in images. It shows that sensible life does not fade when the perceptive act ends, and instead lives before us and continues to live in us after perception. For both humans and animals, to live means giving place to autonomous, multiformed images, images that are utterly independent of the anatomical body. This chapter considers material culture and spiritual life as supreme expressions of the sensible life and argues that “spirituality” and “culture” do not spring from the relation of subjects to themselves, nor from the immediate tension between spirit and nature, body and soul. It suggests that it is only through sensible mediation that a living being acts on things, builds a specific environment starting from the surrounding world, interacts with this and influences objects and other living beings outside of itself.

This epilogue infers from the preceding analysis on avian entanglements with other living things. This analysis works against simplistic human exceptionalisms by giving a broader, more complex notion of what extinction is, as well as why and how it matters. With a better understanding of extinction, one may change his or her perspective from simple entanglements to the ways of life: ways of being with others; of mourning; of relating to a place; of rearing a young; and of making one's home in the world. Accounts on these ways of life have been, by far, in this text, premised on the living experiences of birds and how these experiences are woven into ecosystems of others. The epilogue concludes with a call for a genuine appreciation for other forms of life.

This chapter examines the fundamental “elements” of the planet Earth—rock, air, and water—which make up the construction materials of both the home planet and of all living things. It considers how the Earth's geological features remain “just right,” hence providing the ideal conditions from which life could thrive on. The main focus here, however, is the “rocky” aspect of the planet Earth, hence the chapter's primary aim here is to provide an overview of the Earth's geology, remarking on the ways it is able to sustain life, and compares and contrasts the Earth's physical makeup with the other planets in the solar system.

This chapter examines the process of evolution, with Charles Darwin's own studies as a foundation for the discussion. It describes the intricacies of the continuity of life, at the same time tracing this continuity throughout geological time through fossil records. This continuous expansion of living things can be reflected in a number of different ways—the total number of species, the degree of diversity, and the range of adaptations represented have all increased throughout geological time. But within this broad expansion, no constant rate of increase, no common regularity of expansion, no overall trend has been observed. This chapter thus looks at the evidence for the process of “descent with modification” posited by Darwin many years before.

This chapter discusses the following: the selective loss of semantic representations; contrasting impairments of semantics; models of disorders of semantics; degraded stores and atoms of meaning; converging localisations of the semantic store; semantics and the variety of its possible formats; selective losses of knowledge of living things; knowledge of living things; theories of category specificity; and herpes simplex encaphalitis and semantic dementia.

This chapter argues that asking about life’s origins uncovers intriguing questions about chance, meaning and order, and allows a rather startling discourse about the nature of knowledge in a world with physical realities and enduring cultural narratives. It addresses some of the many ethical issues engaged in synthetic biology and its emerging community of basic research scientists. It describes how the design of an artificial, self-organizing, evolving cellular environment may cross the border between things that are nonliving and things that are living. This chapter suggests that the main goal of ethics is a stance of deeply informed and thorough attention, rather than calls for moratoria or cessation of activities.

This chapter explains how the sensible defines the forms, the realities, and the limits of animal life. It suggests that sensible life is not exclusively a human trait, that sensation has always been considered to be the faculty through which “living things, in addition to possessing life, become animals.” Through the senses, we live in manner indifferent to our specific difference as humans, as rational animals. Sensations give form and reality to that which, in our life, is not specifically human. Sensible life allows animal life in all its forms to relate to images—that is, all forms of the sensible world, whether they be visual, smelling, or auditory. This chapter also discusses the science of the sensible and compares it to an anthropology of the sensible.

Questions about the meaning of life have been linked to the history of philosophy. People long to uncover the secrets of the universe and what it means, while seeking a meaningful way to live their lives. The nature of a meaningful life might be something people find or something they create, one that is dependent on purposes, values, or ideals. It might be related to happiness. This chapter examines the meaning of life from a philosophical perspective, first by considering the speculations of three nineteenth-century philosophers: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. It then discusses two approaches used to explain the meaning of life: the traditionalist, which includes most of religious belief in the West, and the absurdist or nihilist. It also introduces the idea of purpose in life, the universal plan of God in relation to a meaningful life, absurdity, and nihilism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of meaningfulness in living things.

This introductory chapter retells all-too-familiar extinction stories, with the perspective on avian entanglements with other living things. Alongside a particular focus on these entanglements, alternative thoughts on the extinction based on entrenched patterns of “human exceptionalism” are herein discussed. This exceptionalism basically sets apart human beings from all other animals and the rest of the “natural” world. In this context, extinction can be regarded as something that happens “over there” or out in “nature.” Given these patterns of human exceptionalism, subsequent chapters employ the understanding that human beings—as individuals, as communities, and as species—are, in diverse ways, implicated in the lives of disappearing others.

Like Dai Zhen in China and Jeong Dasan in Korea, Jinsai argued against the orthodox neo-Confucian conceptions of principle and qi. Like them, he argued that such ideas were never part of Confucianism and had insidiously crept into the tradition from Daoist and Buddhist sources. Also like them, he sought to unmask and root out foreign elements in the Confucian tradition and return to the original intent of the sages as revealed in the true meaning of the classics by employing a philologically based method, which he called the “Learning of Ancient Meanings.” But Jinsai offered a novel justification for the universal obligation to care for the world as oneself by advancing a view about how a creative and sustaining “Way of Heaven” shapes “single original qi” into the diverse phenomena of the world, making them all parts of a single “living thing.”