Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Aristotle on the matter of mind 209not completely reducible to the study of nature. His consideration of the –perhaps no more than potential – existence of ‘affections that are peculiarto the soul’ in De an. 1.1 and Part. an. 1.1 does suggestthat there are areas, or at least aspects, of the study of the soul which biologydoes not cover (because no bodily factor appears to be involved). 11 Thusthe assumption that On the Soul is, in fact, a biological treatise becomesproblematic when one considers that it contains an extended, althoughnotoriously sketchy, discussion of thinking (, 3.4–8); for if thinking isreally a non-physical process – an issue on which Aristotle’s remarks are tentativeand not always quite clear 12 – one would rather expect its treatmentto belong somewhere else, for example in the Metaphysics.Likewise unclear is the status of the Parva naturalia, which seem to occupya kind of middle position between On the Soul and the zoologicalworks and which, as a result, have traditionally, although rather unfortunately,been divided into a ‘psychological’ and a ‘biological’ section. 13 Theirsubject matter is intriguingly defined by Aristotle as ‘the affections that arecommon to the soul and the body’ 14 – which, again, at least suggests theexistence of affections peculiar to the soul, just like affections peculiar tothe body, such as diseases.Hence it would perhaps be more appropriate to say that for Aristotlepsychology and biology, as far as their subject matter is concerned, overlap11 De an. 402 a 9; 403 a 8ff.; Part. an. 641 a 32-b 10. Cf. Frede (1992) 106.12 The clearest statements are De an. 430 a 17–18, 22–3, and Gen. an. 736 b 28–9.13 See Kahn (1966) p.49; Balme (1987) 9–20; Hett (1957) 388.14 See Sens. 436 a 8. On the method and scope of the Parva naturalia see van der Eijk (1994) 68–72; fora different view see G. R. T. Ross (1906) 1: ‘They [the Parva naturalia] are essays on psychologicalsubjects of very various classes, and there is so much detail in the treatment that, if incorporated inthe De Anima, they would have detracted considerably from the unity and the plan of that work.Consequent on the separateness of the subjects in the Parva Naturalia, the method of treatment ismuch more inductive than in the De Anima. There, on the whole, the author is working outwardsfrom the general definition of soul to the various types and determinations of psychic existence,while here, not being hampered by a general plan which compels him to move continually from theuniversal to the particular, he takes up the different types of animate activity with an independenceand objectivity which was impossible in his central work.’ It is true that in the Parva naturaliaAristotle makes more (though still very selective) use of empirical data, but he goes out of his wayto make them consistent with his general psychological theory (see ch. 6 in this volume). In spiteof Aristotle’s own characterisation of the scope of the Parva naturalia in the beginning of On SensePerception, it is not easy to characterise the difference with regard to On the Soul in such a way asto account for the distribution of information over the various treatises. Even if one is prepared toregard On the Soul and Parva naturalia as a continuous discussion of what it basically means for aliving being (an animal or a plant) to live and to realise its various vital functions, or to explain therelative lack of physiological detail in On the Soul as the result of a deliberate argumentative strategy,it remains strange that some very fundamental formal aspects of the various psychic functions aredealt with at places where one would hardly expect them (e.g. the discussion of the ‘common sense’faculty in On Sleeping and Waking, the discussion of the relation between thought and imagination inOn Memory and Recollection, etc.) and that so many seemingly crucial issues in Aristotle’s psychologyare left vague.