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Introduction 17
of the question of sterility, a good example of the common ground that
connected ‘doctors’ and ‘philosophers’, in which thinkers like Anaxagoras,
Empedocles, Democritus and Aristotle himself were pursuing very much
the same questions as medical writers like the author of the Hippocratic
embryological treatise On Generation/On the Nature of the Child/On
Diseases 4or Diocles, and their methods and theoretical concepts were
very similar.
But Aristotle’s medical and physiological interests are also reflected in
non-medical contexts, in particular in the fields of ethics and of psycho-
physiological human 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 sig-
nificantly transformed and applied to a completely new context, namely
Aristotle’s analysis of the physical causes of exceptional human success or
hopeless failure, both in psychological and in ethical contexts. In the case
of Aristotle’s theory of sleep and dreams, too, there was a medical tradition
preceding him, which he explicitly acknowledges; but as we will see in
chapter 6 , his willingness to accommodate the phenomena observed both
by himself and by doctors and other thinkers before him brings him into
difficulties with his own theoretical presuppositions. A similar picture is
provided by the psychology and pathology of rational thinking (ch. 7 ), an
area in which Aristotle recognises the role of bodily factors in the workings
of the human intellect and where, again, an appreciation of the medical
background of these ideas is helpful to our understanding of Aristotle’s
own position. And, moving to the domain of ethics, there is a very in-
triguing chapter in theEudemian Ethics, in which Aristotle tries to give an
explanation for the phenomenon of ‘good fortune’ (eutuchia), a kind of
luck which makes specific types of people successful in areas in which they
have no particular rational competence (ch. 8 ). Aristotle tackles here a phe-
nomenon which, just like epilepsy inOn the Sacred Disease, was sometimes
attributed to divine intervention but which Aristotle tries to relate to the
human soul and especially to that part of the soul that is in some sort of
intuitive, instinctive way connected with the humanphusis– the peculiar
psycho-physical make-up of an individual. Thus we find a ‘naturalisation’
very similar to what we get in his discussion ofOn Divination in Sleep
(see chapter 6 ). Yet at the same time, and again similar to what we find
inOn the Sacred Disease, the divine aspect of the phenomenon does not
completely disappear:eutuchiais divine and natural at the same time. This
is a remarkable move for Aristotle to make, and it can be better understood
against the background of the arguments of the medical writers. Moreover,
