MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

(Ron) #1
Aristotle on sleep and dreams 195

attention to the study of the human body. Therefore the student of politics should
also study the nature of the soul, though he will do so with a view to these subjects,
and only so far as is sufficient for the objects he is discussing; for further precision
is perhaps more laborious than our purposes require. ( 1102 a 18 – 26 )

It turns out that both doctors and natural scientists are called ‘distinguished’

by Aristotle in virtue of their tendency to cross the boundaries of their own

discipline. For the doctors, this means that they take an interest in the body

as a whole^43 and build their procedures on theoretical knowledge of the

causes of bodily processes and the structures and functions of the parts the

body consists of. Aristotle praises them for this and, as a consequence, ac-

knowledges that these doctors may even contribute to the study of nature.^44

This is probably the ‘overlap’ mentioned in the passage inOn Respiration.

It is at least one of the reasons why he takes their view about the relevance

of dreams for his discussion of prophecy in sleep quite seriously. It is not

difficult to imagine the candidates to whom these expressions may refer:

the writers ofOn RegimenandOn Flesheswould no doubt come into the

picture, and outside the Hippocratic corpus perhaps Diocles.^45

The wording of the passage further implies that according to Aristotle

notalldoctors belong to this group: there are also doctors who primarily or

exclusively rely on experience and who are ignorant of – or even explicitly

hostile towards – theoretical presuppositions. A similar distinction between

more or less theoretical approaches in the sciences is made inMetaphysics

1. 1 , where Aristotle uses the example of medicine to distinguish between the

‘master craftsmen’ (architektones) and the ‘handworkers’ (cheirotechnai); the

former are the real possessors of atechn ̄ein that they know (in the case of

medicine) the causes of diseases and of the effects of therapeutic measures,

so that they can give an account of why they are curing a patient in a par-

ticular way, but the latter only work on the basis of experience^46 – although

(^43) The background of this passage is provided by a passage in Plato’sCharmides( 156 b 3 –c 5 ), where
mention is made of the ‘good physicians’ (hoi agathoi iatroi) who practise their discipline from a
broader, more theoretical perspective.
(^44) This is a remarkably generous statement, but it remains a far cry from the opinion of the author of
the Hippocratic treatiseOn Ancient Medicinech. 20 , who says that medicine is theonlyway to arrive
at knowledge of nature.
(^45) See Diocles, fragments 52 and 61 vdE.
(^46) Metaph. 981 a 12 –b 14. Perhaps the distinction ofcharientes iatroialso has a social aspect, in that they
belong to a higher class. As for a ‘class distinction’ of doctors as made by Aristotle inPol. 1282 a 3 – 4
(on which see Kudlien 1985 ), however, it seems to me – for the reasons mentioned – that they are
closer to theiatroi architektonikoithan to theiatroi pepaideumenoi, for the latter are generalists with
an encyclopaedic knowledge of medicine rather than experienced practitioners. The use of the word
pepaideumenosby Aristotle usually has to do with an awareness of the methodological limits of a
certain discipline (see Jori 1995 ), whereas the wordcharieisis used to refer to people who enrich their
discipline by crossing its boundaries; on the other hand, in the passage fromNicomachean Ethics

Free download pdf