Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Aristotle on the matter of mind 215the position of women, or on the natural disposition of the good citizen).Moreover, he also seems to recognise that natural dispositions, though beingnecessary conditions for the realisation of human moral and intellectualcapacities, are not sufficient to provide human beings with virtue and withhappiness, but need development, training, and education. 30 To be sure, herecognises the existence of ‘natural virtues’ , 31 but they arein need of regulative principles (such as ‘prudence’, in order todevelop in the right direction, and they are even potentially harmful withoutthese regulative principles, as his discussion of ‘shrewdness’ shows. 32 Thus in the sphere of such distinctly human things as virtue, heacknowledges that nature requires further elaboration and even correctionby ‘art’ . There is a tension here between a ‘biological’ and an‘ethical’, perhaps ‘anthropocentric’ approach to human activity which hasbeen well expressed by Gigon in his discussion of Aristotle’s treatment ofthe contribution of nature to human happiness in the first chapter of theEudemian Ethics: ‘In the background lurks the problem (which is nowhereexplicitly discussed in the Corpus Aristotelicum as we have it) why nature,which arranges everything for the best, is not capable of securing happinessfor all people right from the start.’ 33To summarise this first section: a comprehensive study of Aristotle’s viewson the bodily structures and processes involved in the actualisation of thevarious psychic functions of organisms (nutrition, growth and decay, locomotion,sense-perception, desire, imagination, thinking) would be verydesirable. 34 Such a study would be even more interesting if it could demonstrateto what extent these views are determined by a concern, on his part,to provide a physical foundation for his normative views on hierarchy in30 See the discussion in Eth. Nic. 2.1, esp. 1103 a 24: ‘Therefore virtues occur neither naturally norcontrary to nature, rather they occur to us because we are naturally suited to receive them and tobring them to perfection by habituation’ (’ , and 10.9, esp. 1179 b21ff.; cf. also Eth. Eud. 1.1.31 Eth. Nic. 1144 b 15–16 and b 35ff.32 Eth. Nic. 1144 a 24ff., b 3, 9.33 Gigon (1971) 108: ‘Im Hintergrund lauert das Problem (das in unserem corpus Aristotelicum nirgendsexpressis verbis verhandelt wird), warum die , die doch alles einrichtet,nicht in der Lage ist, alle Menschen von vorneherein mit der Eudaimonie auszustatten.’34 This is not to deprecate the importance of, indeed my indebtedness to, existing scholarship on thistopic. Extremely useful (and deserving to be taken into account much more thoroughly by studentsof Aristotle’s psychology) are the contributions by Tracy (1969); and by Solmsen (1950), esp. 464ff.,(1955), (1957), (1961a), and (1961b). Nor are some German contributions from the nineteenth centuryto be neglected, such as Bäumker (1877); Neuhäuser (1878a, b); Schmidt (1881); Kampe (1870); Schell(1873). Still useful are Beare (1906); Rüsche (1930); and Peck (1953). See further Manuli and Vegetti(1977); Webb (1982); G. Freudenthal (1995) and Sisko (1996) 138–57.