Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Introduction 17of the question of sterility, a good example of the common ground thatconnected ‘doctors’ and ‘philosophers’, in which thinkers like Anaxagoras,Empedocles, Democritus and Aristotle himself were pursuing very muchthe same questions as medical writers like the author of the Hippocraticembryological treatise On Generation/On the Nature of the Child/OnDiseases 4 or Diocles, and their methods and theoretical concepts werevery similar.But Aristotle’s medical and physiological interests are also reflected innon-medical contexts, in particular in the fields of ethics and of psychophysiologicalhuman functions such as perception, memory, thinking,imagination, dreaming and desire. Thus his concept of melancholy (ch. 5)presents a striking case study of an originally medical notion that is significantlytransformed and applied to a completely new context, namelyAristotle’s analysis of the physical causes of exceptional human success orhopeless failure, both in psychological and in ethical contexts. In the caseof Aristotle’s theory of sleep and dreams, too, there was a medical traditionpreceding him, which he explicitly acknowledges; but as we will see inchapter 6, his willingness to accommodate the phenomena observed bothby himself and by doctors and other thinkers before him brings him intodifficulties with his own theoretical presuppositions. A similar picture isprovided by the psychology and pathology of rational thinking (ch. 7), anarea in which Aristotle recognises the role of bodily factors in the workingsof the human intellect and where, again, an appreciation of the medicalbackground of these ideas is helpful to our understanding of Aristotle’sown position. And, moving to the domain of ethics, there is a very intriguingchapter in the Eudemian Ethics, in which Aristotle tries to give anexplanation for the phenomenon of ‘good fortune’ (eutuchia), a kind ofluck which makes specific types of people successful in areas in which theyhave no particular rational competence (ch. 8). Aristotle tackles here a phenomenonwhich, just like epilepsy in On the Sacred Disease, was sometimesattributed to divine intervention but which Aristotle tries to relate to thehuman soul and especially to that part of the soul that is in some sort ofintuitive, instinctive way connected with the human phusis – the peculiarpsycho-physical make-up of an individual. Thus we find a ‘naturalisation’very similar to what we get in his discussion of On Divination in Sleep(see chapter 6). Yet at the same time, and again similar to what we findin On the Sacred Disease, the divine aspect of the phenomenon does notcompletely disappear: eutuchia is divine and natural at the same time. Thisis a remarkable move for Aristotle to make, and it can be better understoodagainst the background of the arguments of the medical writers. Moreover,