 It might seem that Aristotle is rather going against ordinary linguistic usage here, since we in fact regularly do refer to dead bodies as “bodies”. Whether a dead body is really a body might seem like a trivial linguistic issue, which can simply be decided by fiat. The obvious way to resolve the problem might seem to be simply to drop the insistence that the body cannot exist without being coupled to a living human soul. Allowing that a dead body remains the same body as its living counterpart will not help the difficulty of what to say about the matter that predates the coming to be of the organism, when there is no apparent body, living or dead. What is more, Aristotle is deeply committed to his position that the human body is essentially ensouled, because of his view that things are defined by their functions (Meteorologica iv 12, 390a10–15; Generation of Animals ii 1,734b24–31). It seems as though he believes that a human being’s matter must be contingently alive, so that it can serve as the underlying thing that remains when the human being comes into existence, but also that it must be essentially alive, because it is functionally defined. If so, he contradicts himself.