Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

252 Aristotle and his schoolLines 33–4 contain many difficulties. (‘others’) are the people whoactually owe their sucess to reasoning (). But it is improbable thatthese should be the subject of (‘they have’) and that (‘this’) should refer to , since it is hardly credible that these peopledo not have this starting-point (), for this starting-point was said tobe the origin of all movement in the soul, including intellect, reason anddeliberation. Various solutions to this problem might be suggested:(1) The subject of (‘they have’) is not , but the ‘irrationalpeople’ (the ); and (‘this’) refers to (‘reason’). It mightbe objected to this possible solution that the sentence (‘they are not capable . . . ’) is then redundant, since this second refersto and . But this objection can be countered in two ways:either (i) the sentence (‘others havereasoning; this the lucky people do not possess’) can be taken as a parenthesis(as does Susemihl, who puts it between brackets): in this case the redundancyis not unacceptable; or (ii) there is a new change of subject: thesecond (‘this’) refers to (‘divine inspiration’) andthe subject of (‘they are capable’) is , the people with reason(). But this seems to be going too far, since in the next sentencethe ‘irrational people’ () are again the subject; moreover, is linguistically an awkward combination.(2) The subject of (‘they have’) is (‘the other people’);Aristotle is thinking here of a specific form of divine movement (as theword suggests); this movement (some sort of inspiration)does not affect those who have . There is a shift in the argumentfrom a general divine causality of all psychic movement to a specific divinecausality. 49 But the problem is that this shift is nowhere marked explicitlyin the text; moreover the conjunction with the following sentence nowbecomes problematic.(3) von Fragstein (1974) 376 reads: (sc. ) : ‘Die Andern aber haben die Fähigkeit logischenDurchdringens; dieses aber, den Anstoß von der Gottheit her, haben sienicht, auch nicht die göttliche Begeisterung; das können sie nicht. Wennnämlich ihr Denken einmal versagt, gehen sie in die Irre.’ Against this itmust be objected that is redundant after 49 See Woods (1982) 183: ‘although the previous section apparently introduced the divine element in thesoul as the source of all psychic activities, it is clear that in this section a divine causation of a ratherspecial kind is in question; instead of initiating a fallible train of reasoning from the desired end tothe conclusion, the divine element produces action of the appropriate kind in a manner superior torational calculation’.