Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

82 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystussuffering from a certain disease, that will do for the practical purpose ofhealing a patient suffering from this disease.His second objection is that a causal explanation of a substance’s havinga certain power is in many cases not possible. As for the words ‘many ofthe things that are’, , it seems that we have to think notonly of things or separate entities (e.g. foodstuffs, drugs), but also of factsand states of affairs (e.g. honey is sweet; or, garlic affects the eyes). 18 The useof expressions such as ‘in some way’ ( ) and ‘look like’ ()seem to serve the same purpose of not committing oneself to a statementwithout qualification: Diocles does not say that many states of affairs areprinciples, but only that they resemble them, show some characteristics ofthem; nor does he say that this applies without qualification, but only ina certain way (a way which is explicated in the clause ‘so that they do notadmit . . . ’, .). It is not clear from the textwhether by ‘starting-points’ Diocles means fundamental physical states ofaffairs or logical postulates that should be accepted as valid without furtherdemonstration, comparable to the logical postulates discussed by Aristotlein Metaphysics Ɣ, 19 but perhaps this is not relevant to the point he wants tomake: ‘honey is laxative’ (to mention just an imaginary example) is similarto a postulate like ‘a statement p and its negation not-p cannot both betrue at the same time under the same conditions’ in that it does not admitof demonstration. 20 This is not to say that the two have the same degreeof fundamentality: the point of the use of is that there is a similaritybetween a statement like ‘honey is laxative’ and a logical postulate like theone mentioned, and this similarity is expressed in the sentence ‘so thatthey do not admit of the [kind of] account that deals with [their] cause’( ...). Whereas a real principle like a logicalpostulate is undemonstrable without qualification (, one is temptedto say), foodstuffs and their effects are so only ‘in some way’ ( ).What this ‘some way’ is, becomes clearer when we consider the words . These are usually translated in an Aristotelian-like way by ‘naturally’,‘by nature’, or ‘normally’, suggesting as Diocles’ intention that it is in the18 Cf. the translations by Jaeger (‘vieles in der Wirklichkeit Gegebene’), Kullmann (‘viele Gegebenheiten’);Torraca translates ‘molti fenomeni reali’, Smith ‘many things’.19 Jaeger (1938a, 42) states without argument that ‘Das Wort weist hier nicht auf Prinzipiender Art hin, wie die Naturphilosophen sie gesucht hatten, die Urgründe der Physis, sondern aufPrinzipien im logischen Sinne oder oberste Beweisgründe.’ Armelle Debru has suggested to me asan alternative that we may think here of basic or ‘simple’ foodstuffs (as against complexones); but then it is difficult to see why Diocles says that many things (i.e. foodstuffs) look like basicentities, instead of saying that they are basic.20 Cf. Aristotle, Gen. an. 788 a 13: ‘this is what it means to be a starting-point, being itself the cause ofmany things, without there being another cause for it higher up’ ( .