Aristotle often claims that some animal kinds “dualise” between two opposite groups (e. g., terrestrial and aquatic, or biped and quadruped), i. e. that they belong “to both and to neither”. This claim is paradoxical since it appears to attribute incompatible features to the same kind. Some scholars have therefore suggested that, for Aristotle, dualisers are not an objective phenomenon, but rather a misleading appearance that depends of the ambiguity of terms like “aquatic”. Others have argued that Aristotle’s classifications contain overlaps because they are not meant to capture an essentialist hierarchy of kinds. I show that Aristotle sees dualisers as an objective feature of the world that does not depend on the ambiguity of our concepts, and that the passages on dualisers can be better understood on an essentialist (as opposed to a relativist) interpretation of classification. For Aristotle, dualisers belong “to both and to neither” of two opposite kinds because they belong to both in a spurious sense, but they are not full members of either.
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