Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

248 Aristotle and his schooland in the intelligent ones, but it is stronger in the irrational ones: in thelatter it is an immediate movement, whereas in the intelligent people Godworks through the intermediary of ‘the divine in us’ ( ),the intellect. This is an obvious reference to the distribution argument in1247 a 28–9, where it was stated that it is ‘paradoxical’ that a god or demonshould love simple people, not the best and wisest ( ); evidently Aristotle remains aware of the distributionargument and anticipates it by means of a careful presentation of his ownexplanation.I will now support this interpretation with a detailed analysis of the text.For the purpose of clarity I will print first a text and a translation of eachsection and then add comments on the section in question. The text of themanuscript tradition will be followed as closely as possible; any deviationsfrom it will be accounted for from line to line. 311248 a 16–26:16 ,17 ;18 19 , 32 20 33 21 34 22 31 In the light of the harassed transmission of the text it may seem rather naive to keep as closely aspossible to the MS tradition, but I have done so for methodological reasons. It seems to me that thenumerous problems of interpretation in this chapter are due at least as much to Aristotle’s concise andoften frankly clumsy way of writing as to possible corruptions in the text. Therefore the interpretershould maintain a fundamental distinction between hypotheses concerning the original text whichAristotle wrote down, and hypotheses concerning what he intended to say. This distinction seems tohave often been ignored, and apparently interpreters have, with an appeal to the abysmal state of thetext, proposed many conjectures with a view to making the text comply with interpretations mainlyprompted by theological assertions in other Aristotelian writings. The unfortunate consequence ofthis process is that there is no generally accepted text on which to base a debate concerning thetenability of a particular interpretation: in order to scrutinise it, one has to be willing to accept, forthe sake of argument, the readings proposed by the interpreter, while these readings were actuallychosen to support the interpretation. An interpretation open to falsification must necessarily keepas closely as possible to the, admittedly narrow, basis of the MS tradition, and should proposeconjectures only where this is absolutely necessary, and render an account of every conjecture. Thisaccount should be based principally on the immediate context and only secondarily on statementson the subject in other Aristotelian writings.32 The MS tradition is emended by Dirlmeier (1962a) and Woods (1982) into , analogously to 〈〉 in line 20, but this is unnecessary,as von Fragstein (1974, 375) points out, for the articulation is also present here.33 The MS tradition is ; I follow Spengel in inserting .34 The MS tradition is , which does not make sense and which can easilybe emended into analogously to .