  There is no doubt that Aristotle's texts are misogynist; he thought that women were inferior to men, and he said so explicitly. For example, to cite Cynthia Freeland's catalogue: “Aristotle says that the courage of a man lies in commanding, a woman's lies in obeying; that 'matter yearns for form, as the female for the male and the ugly for the beautiful'; that women have fewer teeth than men; that a female is an incomplete male or 'as it were, a deformity': which contributes only matter and not form to the generation of offspring; that in general 'a woman is perhaps an inferior being'; that female characters in a tragedy will be inappropriate if they are too brave or too clever”(Freeland 1994: 145–46). However dispiriting or annoying this litany is, and whatever problems it presents to a woman studying or teaching Aristotle, it can be argued that Aristotle simply held a mistaken view about women and their capacities (as did most Athenians of his time). But, if this is so, then Aristotle's theories, or most of them, are not tarnished by his statements about women, and we can ignore them, since they are false. 