Zoology in the Ancient Greek World and Its Reception in the Islamic and Latin Worlds

This chapter offers a narrative account of the natural phenomena ab initio. The beginning of the narration coincided with the beginning of the world, and the overall account took the form of a narration of how the present world order emerged. In short, it took the form of cosmogony . The focus of this cosmogonic account is on the emergence of various parts of the human body, but reference to animals suggests that the results obtained in the study of the human body are, in principle, transferable to non-human living beings. In Timaeus , Plato adopts a cosmogonic framework. The reception of Aristotle's study of animals in the Islamic world marked a decisive trend inversion. The Book of Animals is Avicenna's only work on zoology. Embryology has remained the most disputed and lively part of Aristotle's zoological theory.