Alan D. Code

Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the Humanities. Works on foundational issues in Aristotle's metaphysics, natural science, psychology, and logic. Much of this work focused on the status of metaphysics in Aristotle. Contrary to the orthodox view from 1960s on, he developed an account showing how metaphysics can meet Aristotle's requirements for a genuine science. In doing so, he developed an influential account of what general constraints an Aristotelian science of metaphysics must accept, and what it must take over from Aristotelian natural sciences. Also contributed to debates in Aristotle's metaphysics on the nature of form and matter, which are two basic notions. His recent work focuses on Aristotle's notion of real or scientific definitions and has shown how Aristotle's method for finding such definitions fits together with his conception of scientific proof and explanatory causes. Scientific proof and explanatory causes are essential parts of Aristotle's conception of understanding which is his analogue to modern notions of knowledge. He also has contributed to the understanding of Aristotle's psychology. His work elucidated Aristotle's notions of soul and physical body and shown how radically they differ from modern conceptions of mind and matter. He has been a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Princeton University Council of the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Center for Advanced Study at the Ledwig-Maximilians-Universit�t, Munich, and All Souls College, Oxford. He currently serves on the editorial board of Oxford Research Reviews in Philosophy, and will be co-editing, together with Prof. Calvin Normore of UCLA, the Oxford Histories of Philosophy series.