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Current Anthropology

The Potentiality Principle from Aristotle to Abortion

Lynn M. Morgan
Current Anthropology
Vol. 54, No. S7, Potentiality and Humanness: Revisiting the Anthropological Object in Contemporary Biomedicine (October 2013), pp. S15-S25
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
DOI: 10.1086/670804
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670804
Page Count: 11
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Abstract

Anthropological theorizing about “potentiality” should include an understanding of the contemporary legacy of Aristotle’s potentiality principle. This paper approaches potentiality as an object of anthropological scrutiny to show how it is evoked, presented, debated, and circulated among people interacting in a social realm. The potentiality principle, I argue, has been kept alive by Catholic moral philosophers who argue that embryos should not be killed because they possess the attributes that they will have later in life. Catholic moral philosophers and their feminist critics and interlocutors emerge in this paper as active agents who condition and shape the contemporary uses of the concept of potentiality. By looking at how potentiality debates are intellectually and historically situated, I argue for reflexive ethnographic attention to the politics of potentiality.

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This item contains 97 references.

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© 2013 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.