Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

92 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystus2.56 (p. 178,13–14 Joly and Byl): (‘When preserved in vinegar they [sc. meats] are less warming becauseof the vinegar’).Considering these examples, we may be inclined to say that Diocles’warnings against too automatic an application of causal explanation, as wellas his prescription (in section 11 of fr. 176) that causal explanation must makethe physician’s account more informative (), may well beunderstood as applying to the occasionally just truistic explanations foundin On Regimen.4 diocles’ position in dietetics and in thephilosophy of scienceIt is not my intention to suggest that Diocles has the authors of the treatisesOn Ancient Medicine and On Regimen in mind as his targets, but only tostate some objections against associating Diocles’ own position with that ofthese two Hippocratic writers. It rather seems to me that Diocles is arguingagainst what he believes to be – in the context of dietetics – some undesirableconsequences of the search for causes or principles, or to put it in otherwords, against too strict an application of what in itself – and in Diocles’opinion too – remains a sound scientific procedure. These consequencesseem to have pervaded Greek scientific thought in the fourth century tosuch an extent that opposition to it was also expressed by Aristotle andTheophrastus (in their case, the opposition is probably directed againstcertain tendencies in the early Academy). There are a number of passageswhich reflect a similar awareness in Aristotle and Theophrastus of thelimits of causal explanation. 41 Indeed the whole Diocles fragment shows41 Cf. Aristotle, Metaph. 1006 a 6–9: ‘for it is characteristic of a lack of education not to know of whatthings one should seek demonstration, and of what one should not; for it is absolutely impossible forthere to be a demonstration of everything (for that would go on indefinitely, so that there wouldbe no demonstration)’ ( )). Theophrastus, Metaphysics 9 b 1–13: ‘Wherefore this too isproblematical or at any rate not easy to say, up to which point and of which entities one should seek thecause, in the objects of sense and in the objects of thought alike: for the infinite regress is foreignto their nature in both cases and destroys our understanding. Both of them are starting-points insome way: and perhaps the one for us, the other absolutely, or, on the one hand, the end and theother a starting-point of ours. Up to some point, then, we are capable of studying things causally,taking our starting-point from sense-perceptions in each case; but when we proceed to the extremeand primary entities, we are no longer capable of doing so, either owing to the fact that they donot have a cause, or through our lack of strength to look, one would say, at the brightest things’( .