POIESIS AND PRAXIS: Two Modes of Understanding Development

Aristotle’s well-known distinction between poiesis and praxis as two distinct kinds of activities focuses on the relation between process and goal. A praxis is an activity whose process is itself its goal, whereas in poiesis the process is instrumental in reaching a different goal, external to the process itself. Aristotle thought that this distinction also applied to processes in living organisms. In this essay I will explore what it means to understand development as a kind of organic praxis. What, if anything, does that change in our descriptions of life processes in development; in our understanding of what biology tells