Abstract: Neo-Aristotelian theories of the organism have had a significant revival in recent years, with applications in ethics and in the philosophy of medicine. They have been widely criticised on methodological grounds, and for being unable to deliver plausible normative results. Here I present some more basic objections. Neo-Aristotelianism contradict the longstanding consensus in both biology and philosophy of biology that species do not have essences or ‘forms’. Species are simply collections of populations of varying individuals. When confronted with this consensus, Neo-Aristotelians point to a body of work by Michael Thompson and others which purports to show that biology implicitly depends on a conception of Aristotelian form and would be impossible without it. In this paper I first show that there is no substance to these arguments. I do this by simply describing some species and what we know about them. The aspects of descriptive biology that neo-Aristotelians allege make no sense unless we invoke the idea of species-form make perfect sense without
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