Geometrical premises in Aristotle’s Incessu Animalium and kind-crossing

Abstract

At some point in the Incessu Animalium, Aristotle appeals to some geometrical claims in order to explain why animal progression necessarily involves the bending (of the limbs), and this appeal to geometrical claims might be taking as violating the recommendation to avoid “kind-crossing” (as found in the Posterior Analytic). But a very unclear notion of kind-crossing has been assumed in most debates. I will argue that kind-crossing in the Posterior Analyticsdoes not mean any employment of premises from a discipline other than that to which the explanandumbelongs. Kind-crossing was meant to cover a specific sort of employment of premises from a different discipline, namely, the case in which premises from a discipline X are taken as the most important explanatory factor that delivers the fullest appropriate explanation of an explanandumwithin discipline Y. If this is so, the employment of geometrical premises in the Incessu Animaliumis not an instance of the prohibited kind-crossing, but something that is in line with the theory of the Posterior Analytics