The argument I have chosen for critical discussion is Aristotle’s views on women. Aristotle claimed that women are incomplete if comparing to men. He stated that they are subordinates, deformed or unfinished men, being inferior to males in the terms of physical power and mental abilities. Philosopher’s main arguments supporting his views on women were that, first of all, females do not produce semen that is actually considered to contain a human being in it. He stated that women are passive during the reproduction process, while men are active and dominatingly productive. Thus women do only have value of an instrument, carrying the children and keeping the house, while the men form children’s future personality and nature, providing his/her soul and qualities to inherit.

Given this background, the target of this essay is to demonstrate that Aristotle’s theory is not worth considering as a scientific position. I personally have a strong position of denying Aristotle’s arguments as those worth considering as scientific statements. I believe Aristotle was completely wrong and his ideas suffer from an obvious lack of sufficient proofs. I do not believe that in the nature of things females are considered to be a dominated, minor sex. Moreover I maintain that women have an extremely important role in the processes of conception, child-bearing and child birth.

First Supporting Argument: I state that while Aristotle was truly concerned about the nature of things and was obviously thinking hard over the roles of human beings in the world of ours, the philosopher did poorly in providing specific evidences and testing his theories in practice.  Aristotle was concerned about existence in its most fundamental condition. He did not apply his logic to lifelike situations, using pointless objects and metaphors when explaining the laws of genetic heredity on the examples of the chickens or the horses that had no direct application to a society made up of intelligent human beings (O’Flaherty). He used a narrow sight when making up his theories, regarding only a small part of society – his closest surroundings consisting of scientists and philosophers who where evidently represented by men at those times. His professional and political environment did not include women, which made it easier to speculate on the subject.  Surely, the philosopher did knew women, and had even been married to two, but had he ever faced a women at least close to being equal to a man? I guess not, and consequently, his ignorant approval of the patriarchal society of his time predisposed him to promote the biological theories about women that he did.

What Aristotle failed to understand when interpreting his theory of females as deformed males was that outside of his philosophical world of men existed a much more far-reaching network of people comprised of individuals of various social classes, material security, levels of education and well-being, including a great number of women and children. Even recognizing the existence of the mentioned network of people, he seemed to lack understanding of the processes he wasn’t truly familiar with, meaning the complex and extremely crucial role of women so obvious in the ordinary families composed of narrow-minded people who were not thoughtful about the essence of things, but just accepted them as the only possible reality.