Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

210 Aristotle and his schoolto a large extent, but the study of soul comprises both more and less thanthe study of living beings: ‘more’ in the sense that there seems to be at leastone psychic function which does not involve bodily organs or processes(although it cannot function without bodily organs or processes beingpresent or taking place and its functioning can be influenced, i.e. bothimproved and disturbed, by bodily factors); and ‘less’ in the sense that itonly studies living things under a certain aspect (their being ensouled, i.e.alive), or perhaps not so much ‘ensouled beings’ as ‘soul’ itself, whereasbiology also deals with characteristics of living things that seem to havehardly any, or even no ‘psychic’ aspect at all, for example differences inthe shape of certain bodily organs, or characteristics that are at best veryindirectly related to the psychic functions they are supposed to serve.These considerations are of some importance when it comes to comparingthe various accounts of psychic powers and activities we find in Aristotle’sworks. For these accounts sometimes show discrepancies or evendivergences that cannot easily be reconciled. Any attempt at relating, oreven uniting, Aristotle’s statements on soul functions in On the Soul, theParva naturalia, and the zoological writings (not to mention the Ethicsand the Rhetoric) into a comprehensive picture should take into accountthe differences in scope, purpose, method and subject matter of the variousworks concerned in order to arrive at a correct assessment of whatAristotle may be up to in these contexts and of the kind of informationwe may reasonably expect there. For example, concerning a psychic functionsuch as sense-perception, one might say that its treatment in Hist.an. 4.8–10 (together with voice, sleep and sex differentiation) is mainlydetermined by the question of its distribution over various kinds of animals,and so Aristotle is only interested in dealing with questions such aswhether all animals have sense-perception, whether they all have all thespecial senses, whether they all partake in sleep, and so on. One mightsubsequently say that Hist. an. 7–9 and Gen. an. 5 discuss the differencesthat manifest themselves among different species of organisms with regardto, among other things, their perceptual apparatus, whereas in On the Souland the Parva naturalia Aristotle focuses on what all living beings possessingsense-perception have in common. The discussion of the sense-organsin Parts of Animals may then be said to be determined by a ‘moriologic’perspective in which the special sense-organs are considered with a view totheir suitability for the exercise of their respective special sense-functions.And finally, Aristotle’s reasons for dealing with particular aspects of senseperceptionat one place rather than another may be quite trivial, for example