Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Aristotle on the matter of mind 207This consensus might easily give rise to the view that there is no suchthing as an Aristotelian ‘psychology’, or at least that psychology more or lesscoincides with, or forms part of, biology in that it represents an investigationof animals (and plants) qua living beings, that is, ensouled natural things.Although this view is, in my opinion, not entirely correct (see below),it is in general accordance with Aristotle’s belief that the study of soul‘contributes greatly’ to the study of nature, 3 his definition of soul as ‘the formof the body’ 4 and his programmatic statement that all psychic ‘affections’ are ‘forms embedded in matter’ . 5 For thesestatements clearly imply that psychology, in Aristotle’s view, amounts topsycho-physiology, an analysis of both the formal and the material (i.e.bodily) aspects of psychic functions. The fact that in On the Soul itself wehear relatively little of these bodily aspects 6 might then be explained as aresult of a deliberate distribution and arrangement of information over Onthe soul and the Parva naturalia, which should be seen as complementaryparts of a continuous psycho-physiological account which is in its turncomplementary to the zoological works. 7A very welcome consequence of this point of view could be that studentsof Aristotle’s psychology pay more systematic attention to what the zoologicalworks have to say on the (bodily) conditions for the actual functioningof the psychic powers identified in On the Soul (nutrition, growth, locomotion,desire, sense-perception, imagination, thinking). Thus the presentchapter will deal with Aristotle’s views on the bodily aspects of thinking,and it will attempt to show that although thinking, according toAristotle, is perhaps itself a non-physical process, bodily factors have amuch more significant part to play in it than has hitherto been recognised.In their turn, students of Aristotle’s zoological writings might feel an increasingneed to relate Aristotle’s views on bodily parts and structures oforganisms explicitly to the psychic functions they are supposed to serve,Hardie (1964); Tracy (1969) and (1983); Verbeke (1978); Hartman (1977); Modrak (1987). This isnot to say that developmental approaches to Aristotle’s psychology have entirely disappeared; oncertain specific topics, such as the various discussions in On the Soul and the Parva naturalia of the‘common sense’ and its physiological aspects, there is still disagreement about how to account for thediscrepancies; a developmental explanation is offered by Welsch (1987), a very important book whichseems to have gone virtually unnoticed by Anglo-American scholarship on Aristotle’s psychology, andby Block (1988).3 De an. 402 a 5–6. 4 De an. 412 a 19–21. 5 De an. 403 a 25.6 To be sure, physical aspects of the various psychic powers are referred to occasionally in De an., e.g.in 417 a 4–5; 420 a 9ff.; 421 b 27–422 a 7; 422 b 1; 423 a 2ff. Brief references in De an. to the heart ascentre of psychic activity are discussed by Tracy (1983).7 See Kahn (1966) 68: ‘Thus the physiology of the Parts of Animals and the psychology of the De Animaare fully compatible, and they are in fact united in the psychophysiology of the Parva Naturalia.’