 Marinella draws on both Platonist and Aristotelian accounts of causation, interpreted through ancient, medieval, and Renaissance commentators (she cites Plotinus, Lombard, Ebreo, and Ficino), when she argues that women are superior to men with respect to the causes that have generated them. Aristotle had posited four kinds of cause: material, formal, efficient, and final. In the case of an unqualified change, such as the generation of a substance (e.g., a person or a squirrel), the causes can be understood as follows: the material cause is the stuff out of which the substance is made, which remains as a constituent of the substance; the formal cause is the principle of organization that bestows on the individual substance both its form and its function, making it a member of a natural kind, with the characteristic properties and behaviors of that kind; the efficient cause initiates the process of generation; the final cause is the aim or end point of the process, which will often be in effect the same as the formal cause, because the aim of a process of generation is the mature and perfected form and function of the substance. Consider the example of the generation of an individual belonging to a natural kind, the squirrel (a natural substance). The material cause of the squirrel is the flesh, bone, blood, etc. from which the squirrel is constituted; the formal cause of the squirrel is its shape and function; the efficient cause of the squirrel is the male parent of that squirrel (because, on Aristotle’s view it is the male parent that initiates the process of generation of offspring); and the final cause is to be a mature squirrel and carry out the functions of a squirrel (whatever those may prove to be).