Aristotle's Gynecology

In Aristotle's Gynecology, Mariska Leunissen examines Aristotle's methods for the establishment of gynecological facts within his natural science, arguing that many of the gynecological phenomena at stake, such as menstruation and the nature of menstrual blood, the role of female pleasure during sex and women's experiences of erotic dreams, and their knowledge of conception and their experiences of (false) pregnancy and childbirth, were-mostly for socio-cultural reasons-not at all or not immediately accessible for a male natural scientific observer such as Aristotle. Given this lack of immediate empirical evidence, Aristotle employed alternative methods for the establishment of facts-such as relying on signs and circumstantial empirical evidence or using analogical and probabilistic reasoning-and relied heavily on existing expert reports, such as mainly early medical sources but also sometimes verbal reports from women themselves. Moreover, Aristotle used a “secondary standard” for testing the results of this inquiry, namely one which he originally developed for investigations into physically remote meteorological and cosmological phenomena that are “not apparent to observation,” and according to which statements of facts are credible if they are ontologically possible. Leunissen thus reconstructs “Aristotle's gynecology” in the context of his commitments to empiricism and his scientific methods for the fact-establishing phase of natural science, and elucidates the role his concepts of evidence, credibility, and signs play in his natural scientific research. However, through its focus on Aristotle's use of gendered knowledge and his reconstruction of natural phenomena believed to be characteristic of women, Leunissen's book also offers a glimpse of the lived experiences and reproductive beliefs of women in Ancient Greece.

Mariska Leunissen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before moving to UNC, she was an Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis (2007-2011) and held a residential fellowship at the Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies (2010-2011). In the past, she has also held a Turner Fellowship at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC (Spring 2016) and a residential fellowship at the National Humanities Center (2022-2023).