Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

218 Aristotle and his schoolrole of heat, or pneuma, or blood) is beyond the scope of this chapter. 43In particular, the question will be raised to what extent these roles canbe subsumed under the rubric of ‘the dependence of thought on appearances’; for this is a dependence Aristotle acknowledges 44but which seems to open the door to a variety of serious bodily influenceson the operation of the intellect and thus may present a challenge to his‘canonical’ view that thinking is not a bodily process taking place in aparticular bodily organ (a view that can be related to other parts of his philosophy,e.g. his epistemological and ethical views about man, man’s beingakin to the gods, man’s highest activity consisting in contemplation, etc.).First, there are a number of texts that describe thinking itself in seeminglyphysical terms. Thus a passage in Ph. 247 b 1ff. describes thinking as a state of‘rest’ or ‘coming to a standstill’ following upon,indeed emerging from, a state of bodily motion or turbulence:Nor are the states of the intellectual part qualitative changes . . . nor is the originalacquisition of knowledge a process of becoming or a modification. For it is through[discursive] reasoning coming to a standstill that we are said to know andunderstand , and there is no process of becoming leadingto the standstill, nor indeed to any kind of change . . . Just as when someone changesfrom [a state of] drunkenness or sleep or disease into the opposite states we do notsay that he has come to have knowledge again – although he was unable to realisethe knowledge – so likewise when he originally acquires the state [of knowing] weshould not say so [i.e. that he is ‘coming to be’ possessed of knowledge]. For it is bythe soul coming to a standstill from the natural turbulence that somethingbecomes understanding or knowing – and this is alsowhy children cannot acquire knowledge or pass judgements accordingto their senses as grown men can, for they are in a state of great turbulence andmovement. It [i.e. the soul] is brought to a standstill and to rest, with regard to43 It would be very useful indeed to study the role of particular factors, especially heat and blood,in the various psychic powers and to see what part they play in the explanation of variations inpsychic performances among different kinds of animals (for a thorough treatment of the role of theelementary qualities in Aristotle’s biological writings see Althoff (1992a), whose index locorum willguide the reader to useful discussions of the relevant passages). This might also shed light on thedifficult question of how the different ‘parts’ of the soul are interrelated and how, or rather, whetheroperations of ‘lower’ soul functions may be influenced by higher ones, e.g. whether human perceptionis itself different from animal perception because of the presence of the intellectual capacity. Thusin addition to speaking of ‘sense informed by a noetic capacity’ and saying that ‘It is only in thecase of human perception, enriched by the conceptual resources provided by its marriage with nous,that Aristotle can speak of us perceiving a man’ (Kahn (1992) 369), one might also consider sayingthat according to Aristotle the human bodily structures and conditions for perception are better andmore conducive to knowledge and understanding than in animals (e.g. because man has a better,purer blend of heat and cold).44 Mem. 449 b 31–450 a 1; De an. 403 a 9; 427 b 15; 431 a 17; 431 b 2; 432 a 3ff.