Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

274 Aristotle and his schoolbeen in the air. Contrary to Föllinger, 66 I find it not at all difficult toimagine that in Generation of Animals Aristotle would refer to one of suchpossible explanations by means of , even if he himselfhad considered it on another, possibly earlier occasion.The only problem concerning a divergence of doctrine for which I failto see an immediate solution is the explanation of multiple offspring fromone pregnancy in Hist. an. 637 a 8ff. to the effect that different places in theuterus each receive a different portion of the seed. This seems to be the verytheory which Aristotle rejects in Gen. an. 771 b 27ff. Balme comments in afootnote ad loc. that Generation of Animals ‘corrects and further develops’the view expounded in ‘Hist. an. 10’, but this is a very gentle way of puttingit. However, it is not very clear what the author is up to in 637 a 8ff.,and there are several textual problems that make it difficult to fathom themeaning of this passage.Clearly, then, not all difficulties have disappeared. 67 To sort all this out, aprobing analytical commentary on ‘Hist. an. 10’ is needed, which wouldexamine the alleged inconsistencies with Generation of Animals on the basisof close consideration of each individual context in which a relevant statementis made, and which would also examine in much closer detail therelationship with the Hippocratic writings (where the differences may bejust as significant as the similarities). However, such a commentary wouldat least have to take account of the difference in status, method and purposebetween ‘Hist. an. 10’ and Generation of Animals – which seems undeniable– and consider the consequences of this for the kind of thing we canreasonably expect the author to say.So although Balme’s analysis of the text is open to serious questionand many of Föllinger’s objections to his arguments are justified, Balme’sconclusions have some plausibility, although they would be better presentedin the form of a hypothesis in need of further investigation; ‘Hist. an. 10’is by Aristotle – at least there is no reason to believe it is not – but it is tobe disconnected from the other books of History of Animals and regardedas a separate work. It is possibly identical with the work entitled 66 Föllinger (1996) 150.67 As stated above (pp. 268–9), the discussion of sterility in Gen. an. 746 b 16ff. displaysseveral differences with regard to ‘Hist. an. 10’, although there are no genuine inconsistencies. TheGeneration of Animals passage distinguishes various kinds of sterility with various causes but theseare stated in very general terms, and the cases ‘Hist. an. 10’ mentions could well be accommodatedwithin this typology: they are all instances of infertility that arises when man and woman get older , and they are due either to physical defects or to disease; some are curable, others incurable.