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Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

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256 Aristotle <strong>and</strong> his schoolpreferable in view of the bipartition which runs through this whole sectionof the text. In any case, both irrational <strong>and</strong> rational divination are causedby ; also the use the divine movement, <strong>and</strong> thisconclusion can, as we have seen above, be read as a plain reference to thedistribution argument of 1247 a 28–9. Only then can it be understood thatAristotle says that God moves also () in those whose is disengaged,<strong>and</strong> that he moves more strongly ( ) 63 in those: he does notsay that God does not move in the . 64The rest of the chapter does not contain any further problems of interpretationas distinct from textual difficulties. 65To sum up, we may say that there are two reasons why the distributionargument actually poses an impediment to the attribution of eutuchia toa god in 1247 a 23–9, but does not do so in 1248 b 4. First, in 1247 a28–9 Aristotle speaks of ‘being loved’ () by the gods; eutuchia is,63 The words <strong>and</strong> seem to form a contrast here, but it remains obscure whatexactly Aristotle means when he says that ‘reason is disengaged’ ( ), <strong>and</strong> throughwhat cause it is supposed to be so. The example of the blind in 1248 b 1–2 points to a physical defect,but perhaps we should not press the analogy too far (see my note 65 below). In view of this obscurityit is questionable whether the traditional reading should be emended into , for thisvague reference can only be to the way in which the succeed .64 Dirlmeier’s (1962a) remark that, if rational divination too consulted God, ‘die ganze Argumentationsinnlos würde’, cannot be approved. On the contrary, if rational divination did not consult God,many elements in the text (lines 26–9 <strong>and</strong> 34–8) would be out of place.65 In 1248b 1–2 the MS tradition is . The difficulty is , for which many emendations have been proposed, none of which are free from difficulties.The simplest solution is that suggested by von Fragstein (1974) 377: ; but how can the blind be called without furtherqualification (although the aorist participle, after , is striking)? Dirlmeier (1962a) <strong>and</strong>Woods (1982) propose [sc. ] , but this is based on the Latin tradition amissis hiis quae ad visibilia virtuosius essequod memoratur. It is safer, though not free from difficulties either, to read . Anyhow, the point must be, as Woods (1982, 219) puts it,that ‘just as the blind man has better powers of memory as a result of lack of preoccupation withthe visible, the power of divination is improved when reason is in abeyance’. Then the text runs asprinted by Susemihl, who emends into , but for Spengel’s conjecture in 1248 b4〈 〉 which is certainly wrong (see n. 2 above): ‘It is clear, then, that there are two formsof good fortune, the former of which is divine. For this reason the fortunate man seems to owe hissuccess to a god. He is the one who succeeds in accordance with impulse, the other succeeds contraryto impulse; but both are irrational. It is the first form, rather, which is continuous; the second is notcontinuous.’ The second form is the one caused by referred to in the section 1247 b 38–1248 a15, as Dirlmeier (1962a, 492) rightly observes. But his contra-predestinarian remark ‘Weiterdenkendarf man hier nicht, also nicht fragen, warum Gott in solchen Seelen nicht tätig wird’, is certainlyout of place, for God is moving in all souls: the second form also occurs with people who have thefirst form, but in them its cause is different. For meaning ‘continuous’ cf. Eth. Nic. 1150b34: , <strong>and</strong> Insomn. 461 a 10.

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