Aristotle

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher and natural scientist whose work touched almost every domain of inquiry, from logic and ethics to politics and biology. For the history of medicine, he matters in two distinct ways. First, he contributed directly to the understanding of living things through systematic observation of animals, comparative anatomy, and a philosophical account of how organisms work — work that made human dissection thinkable. Second, and more pervasively, his physical philosophy — specifically the four-element theory and the principle that nature does nothing in vain — was absorbed into Galenic medicine so thoroughly that Aristotelianism and Galenism rose and fell together over the following two millennia. Aristotle did not write medicine, but the conceptual scaffolding he provided shaped how medicine understood itself for fifteen centuries.

Life and Context

Aristotle was born in Stagira, a Greek colonial city in Macedonia, in 384 BCE. His father Nicomachus was court physician to Amyntas III of Macedon, and there is plausible reason to think Aristotle grew up with some exposure to the practical side of biological inquiry before entering Plato’s Academy around 367 BCE. He studied at the Academy for roughly twenty years, until Plato’s death in 347. After periods in Asia Minor and Lesbos — where he conducted the most intensive marine biology of antiquity — he returned to Macedonia as tutor to the young Alexander. In 335 he founded the Lyceum in Athens, where he and his students worked until his death in 322. Among those students was Theophrastus — born Tyrtamos on Lesbos around 370 BCE, who had first studied at Plato’s Academy before meeting Aristotle, who gave him the name Theophrastus (“divine speaker”) in recognition of his graceful style.(Stapley, 2024) After Aristotle’s death in 322, Theophrastus assumed leadership of the Lyceum, a role he held for thirty-five years; the school attracted as many as two thousand students during his tenure, and he died in 290 BCE.(Stapley, 2024)

He was a contemporary of the Hippocratic tradition at its most active. Jouanna, following the internal evidence of the texts, locates the main body of Hippocratic writings between roughly 430 and 330 BCE, noting that the bulk of that material predates Aristotle (Jouanna, 1999). Aristotle knew this literature and cited it directly. In the Politics he used Hippocrates as his example of what it means to be great by the standards of one’s art — “one would pronounce Hippocrates to be greater, not as a human being but as a physician, than someone who surpassed him in bodily size” (Jouanna, 1999). The phrasing is careful: greatness measured by science, not by person. It tells us that by the late fourth century, citing Hippocrates settled arguments. Together, Plato and Aristotle supply almost everything scholars can say with confidence about Hippocrates the man: born in or around 460 BC on the Greek island of Cos, a member of the Asclepiads who claimed descent from Asclepius, short in stature, willing to charge for teaching medicine, and apparently well known before his death — and that is about all they have to say.(Pormann (ed.), 2018) Craik’s analysis of the Hippocratic Question underscores the point: the biographical information Plato and Aristotle provide is minimal and does not allow attribution of specific treatises to the historical Hippocrates.(Pormann (ed.), 2018)

Contribution to Medicine

The Biology Project

What Aristotle contributed to medicine was not therapy or clinical observation but the foundations of what we would now call theoretical biology. His zoological works — Historia Animalium, De Partibus Animalium, and De Generatione Animalium — represent a systematic attempt to describe, classify, and explain the diversity of living forms. He dissected hundreds of species, examined embryos, traced the development of the chick from egg to hatching. The scale of this project had no precedent.

Aristotle’s approach to the animal body as a site of knowledge marked a significant conceptual departure from Platonic anthropocentrism. By reconceptualizing man as comparable to other animals and then intervening with the animal body in dissection to build knowledge applicable to the human, Aristotle created the conditions of possibility for systematic comparative anatomy. The move required, however, a simultaneous re-inscription of the human-animal boundary through a different principle: man alone possessed a rational mind, and it was precisely this distinction that justified using animal bodies as proxies for understanding human physiology.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

Nutton argues that the decision to cut into a human body was an understandable extension of a dissection technique that had become relatively commonplace in Greek intellectual circles (Nutton, 2023). [GAP: The paragraph originally added specific details about Alexandria, Herophilus, Erasistratus, and a religious taboo on touching the dead, but these are not supported by the cited card.]

Aristotle and the Hippocratic Text Tradition

One source confirms Hippocrates’ importance in his own time and suggests that the four‑humour theory later called Hippocratic was not actually held by him (Nutton, 2023). Aristotle attributed The Nature of Man, the canonical four‑humour text, to Polybus, Hippocrates’ pupil and son‑in‑law (Nutton, 2023). The attribution rests on a concrete textual event: in Historia Animalium (3.3, 512a12–513a7), Aristotle quotes nearly verbatim a long passage from chapter 11 of On the Nature of Man dealing with blood vessels, attributing it explicitly to Polybus. The implication is that at least part of On the Nature of Man was written not by Hippocrates but by his son-in-law — making Aristotle one of the earliest and most direct witnesses against a blanket Hippocratic authorship of the humour treatise.(Pormann (ed.), 2018) This tract’s exposition of the four cardinal humours was a minority view even within the Hippocratic Corpus and was disputed by many later writers (Nutton, 2023).

This point deserves emphasis: Aristotle is one of our best witnesses against the myth that Hippocrates held the four-humour theory. The attribution in the Anonymus Londinensis and the direct citation in Aristotle together indicate that educated fourth-century Greeks understood Hippocratic theory differently from how Galen and the medieval tradition would later present it. The Anonymus Londinensis account of Hippocrates’ theory of disease causation corresponds closely to the Hippocratic Breaths, suggesting that Aristotle “read” that treatise or a doxographical account based upon it when forming his understanding of Hippocratic doctrine. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Drug Theory

In this broader intellectual framework, Aristotle distinguished between the architekton — the master craftsman who possesses theory and knows causes — and the mere practitioner who knows only facts and procedures. He applied this distinction to medicine, identifying which physicians counted as genuinely scientific authorities. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Nutton notes that Diocles of Carystos — a fourth-century Athenian physician and one of Galen’s revered classical sources — introduced the important notion that drugs worked through their properties or potentialities “in the Aristotelian sense” (Nutton, 2023). In this scheme, a substance’s pharmacological effect was explained by the potential power concentrated in it, not merely by its elemental composition. This Aristotelian vocabulary of potentiality (dynamis) and actuality was not decoration; it was the explanatory language through which late ancient and medieval medicine understood why a small amount of poison could produce enormous changes in a living body.

The Problems Literature

The pseudo-Aristotelian Problems — probably compiled around 250 BCE but attributed to Aristotle’s school — are evidence of a second order of influence: they show how humoral and allopathic doctrines spread beyond medical circles into general Greek intellectual culture (Nutton, 2023). The Problems apply medical logic to questions ranging from the effects of diet and climate to the sources of mental temperament. They did not create this diffusion, but they document it, and their attribution to Aristotle gave it authority. The convergence between Aristotelian natural philosophy and the Hippocratic tradition runs deep: key concepts of Aristotelian natural philosophy — the theory of four elements, the analysis of causality into material, formal, efficient, and teleological causes, and the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm — all resonate with familiar themes from the Hippocratic corpus, reflecting the common intellectual environment in which both traditions developed.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Siraisi notes that Aristotle’s writings on animals reinforced the doctrine of the four humours, contributing to its canonical status alongside the Hippocratic On the Nature of Man and Galen’s systematization (Siraisi, 1990). Ackerknecht traces the full genealogy of that doctrine to Empedocles of Agrigentum, who proposed that four elements (air, fire, water, earth) correspond to four fundamental qualities (hot, dry, wet, cold); the identification of these elements with the four constituent humors of the body then passed through Hippocratic writings and received its systematic elaboration through Aristotle and Galen, becoming the ruling medical theory of the Middle Ages (Ackerknecht, 1955).

Aristotle as Vitalist

Driesch’s History and Theory of Vitalism (1914) opens its historical survey with Aristotle, identifying him as “the first exponent of a scientific vitalism” — the first thinker to take embryology, the problem of formation from the germ, as biology’s primary starting point. Driesch’s claim is that this starting point is not accidental: all subsequent vitalist theories have taken embryological formation as their central problem, making Aristotle “not only a typical representative of antiquity and the Middle Ages, but also a typical precursor of all vitalistic theories until the most recent times.”(Driesch, 1914)

On Driesch’s reading, the core of Aristotle’s developmental philosophy lies in his analysis of dynamis (potentiality) and entelechy (actuality in its fullest sense). Dynamis, Driesch stresses, is not simply “potential energy” in the modern sense — the concept is wider: the statue is already contained in the block of marble as dynamis. Entelechy is “that which ‘is’ in the highest sense of the word, even if it is not strictly a realised thing” — the statue, before it is realised, exists in the mind of the sculptor.(Driesch, 1914) Together these concepts make the soul both the formal cause of development and its animating principle: in reproduction, the male contributes form and animating principle while the female contributes matter, and the seed carries a dynamis such that “when the impulse ceases, each part comes into being and comes moreover endowed with soul.”(Driesch, 1914)

Aristotle’s developmental theory is epigenetic — parts arise successively rather than being simultaneously present in the seed, and one part does not mechanically produce another but each arises in sequence through an internal principle. The heart is the first visible embryonic part, but it does not make the liver as a craftsman makes a product; rather, “one part comes into being after the other, just as the man succeeds the boy.”(Driesch, 1914) This meant that external mechanical production was, for Aristotle, explicitly inadequate: the organism develops through its own internal principle, not because something outside it shapes it. His analogy was to art: development resembles artistic creation in that something potentially existent is brought to actuality by something actually existent, but “the movement of nature takes place in the thing itself, and proceeds from a second entity which has this form actually.”(Driesch, 1914)

Aristotle’s hierarchy of souls (De Anima) placed the soul as “the first actuality of a natural body, having in it the capacity of life, and of one possessed of organs” — not a separate substance but “something inherent in the body,” as eyesight is related to the eye rather than to the eyeball as bare matter.(Driesch, 1914)(Driesch, 1914) His rejection of Democritean materialism followed directly: the pre-Socratics “knew only material and efficient causes while ignoring formal and final causes,” treating development as determined by elemental qualities rather than by essence and end.(Driesch, 1914)

Driesch’s assessment of this position is that it is “pure Vitalism” and “primitive or naive Vitalism” — not naive in quality but in origin: it arose from “an entirely impartial contemplation of life’s phenomena, and not as the result of struggle against other doctrines.” Where later vitalism was shaped by its contests with mechanism, Aristotle’s vitalism was simply what he found when he looked at organisms carefully. Driesch notes as supporting evidence that Aristotle was only “very rarely” even aware of rival mechanist views — as when he noted that heat and cold alone do not make a sword.(Driesch, 1914)

Driesch’s account also contains a significant historiographical claim: that Aristotle remained authoritative in biological and bio-theoretical questions from antiquity through the mid-eighteenth century and for some thinkers into the mid-nineteenth(Driesch, 1914), and that “Aristotle’s assertions have at any rate been justified” by late-19th-century experimental biology(Driesch, 1914).

The Teleological Framework

Aristotle’s most consequential contribution to medical thought was not descriptive but philosophical: the principle that nature is purposive, that living structures exist for a reason, and that the correct explanation of any organ asks what it is for, not just what it is made of.

This principle — expressed in Aristotle’s formulation that nature does nothing in vain (he physis ouden matên poiei) — was not invented as a medical doctrine, but it became one. Galen seized it with evident relish. Temkin traces how Galen’s On the Use of Parts uses anatomical evidence specifically to prove that all parts of the human body are constructed in the best possible manner to serve their functions. Galen credited this to Aristotle directly: “And, as Aristotle said, She does nothing in vain” (Temkin, 1973). The claim is pagan-naturalistic, not theological: it is Nature (capitalized, personified, but not omnipotent) who arranges matter well and deserves praise for it. But the reasoning structure is Aristotle’s.

This teleological framework shaped how every structure in the body was understood throughout the Galenic tradition. The question about any anatomical feature was always: what purpose does it serve? This is not an obvious question to ask. It could have been replaced by questions about efficient causation alone — what mechanism produces this structure? — but for fifteen centuries it was not, because Aristotle’s authority and Galen’s synthesis made teleology the default mode of biological explanation.

Temkin identifies a further consequence: Aristotle and Galen were united in thinking of the organism as striving to live and to maintain its kind — as capable of doing so when all parts played the role that Nature had assigned them (Temkin, 1973). When seventeenth-century mechanists tried to replace Galenic medicine with a purely mechanical physiology, they found that eliminating all teleology actually hindered medicine rather than advancing it. The organism’s self-maintaining behavior, which Aristotelian-Galenic biology had named but not fully explained, resisted pure mechanical reduction.

Aristotle and the Medical Tradition

Historiographic Background

The question of how deeply and directly Aristotle engaged with Hippocratic medical texts has generated a long scholarly debate without clear resolution. The nineteenth-century philologist Littré observed that Aristotle and the Hippocratic authors share “the same doctrines, same hypotheses, same details” and argued that the parallels were meaningful.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Later scholars pushed back: Fredrich and Balme dismissed the shared material as mere “commonplaces” of educated fifth-century thought that both the physicians and Aristotle drew from a common intellectual atmosphere without any direct textual relationship. An extreme version held that Aristotle was “apparently unacquainted with the Hippocratic writings” and simply “not interested in medicine.”(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The 2024 volume edited by Bartoš and Linka, Aristotle Reads Hippocrates, adopts a methodological middle position: its contributors use the term “Hippocratic” as shorthand for pre-Aristotelian medicine while avoiding attribution of texts to the historical Hippocrates, focusing on individual texts rather than authorship questions.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Perilli, the volume’s most methodologically precise contributor, begins by insisting that even the terms of the debate require disambiguation. Any claim about the Aristotle-Hippocrates relationship must specify which Aristotle is meant — author of published works, of lecture notes, or representative of the Aristotelian school — and which Hippocrates is meant — the historical physician or the accumulated corpus. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Two preliminary cautions run throughout. First, what is meant by “Aristotle” is not simple: the extant writings include published dialogues, lecture notes, school traditions, and texts whose authenticity is debated, and these may reflect different relationships to medical literature.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Second, “Hippocrates” as a source is at best a shorthand for the Hippocratic Corpus — a heterogeneous collection of roughly sixty texts assembled over centuries through a long accretive canonization process, with some texts post-dating Aristotle himself.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The historical Hippocrates wrote none of what has survived under his name with any scholarly certainty.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Perilli, writing in the volume, is the most skeptical contributor: he suggests that most parallels are better explained by reference to shared common knowledge among educated Greeks or to common but no longer extant sources, rather than direct textual borrowing.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Sources of Medical Knowledge

Aristotle’s father Nicomachus was court physician to Amyntas III of Macedon, and it is reasonable to assume that Aristotle grew up in a medical household with informal exposure to practical and theoretical medical knowledge.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Galen’s On Anatomical Procedures reports that sons of physicians “practiced dissection from childhood under parental instructions, as they did reading and writing.”(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The Diogenes Laertius catalogue of Aristotle’s works lists several medical texts — Dissections, Selection from Dissections, and Medical Issues — none of which survive.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Their existence in the list indicates that Aristotle wrote directly on medical topics, though the form and content of these works remain unknown. What survives in the biological corpus shows a writer who did not merely cite medical authorities but engaged them critically: he quotes at length the accounts of blood vessels attributed to Syennesis of Cyprus and Polybus in order to demonstrate that both are wrong, because both make the head rather than the heart the origin of the venous system.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) This cross-referencing also yields a small but significant text-critical result: some modern editions of Aristotle’s passage on Syennesis read that blood vessels originate in the “navel” (omphaloû) and run through the “loins” (osphûn), but comparison with the parallel Hippocratic passage shows that the correct readings are “eye” (ophthalmoû) and “brow” (ophrûn) — the indirect tradition of the Hippocratic text preserving the original where the direct Aristotle transmission had corrupted it.(Pormann (ed.), 2018) The Polybus vessel account that Aristotle cites appears in the Hippocratic On the Nature of Man (ch. 11); scholars have observed that Aristotle omitted the last ten lines of the passage and modified its initial qualification — not a mechanical transcription but active editorial engagement with his source.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Bartoš and colleagues have independently proposed that On the Nature of Man is the most likely common source from which both Aristotle and the author of On the Nature of Bones copied the Polybus vessel account, a view supported by the Anonymus Londinensis’s attribution of the four-humour theory to Polybus. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Aristotle was also alert to the social and political dimensions of medical literacy. In Politics 3.16, he cautions against lay people misusing medical texts, indicating that medical literature circulated publicly in Classical Athens but was not considered universally accessible knowledge. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Aristotle refers to Hippocrates by name only twice in the extant works: once in Politics 7.4, where Hippocrates is named as the standard of excellence for a physician, and once in a passing reference.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) This sparseness of named citation does not indicate ignorance. Aristotle routinely incorporated medical ideas anonymously — treating them as recognized endoxa (reputable opinions) belonging to the intellectual commons rather than as doctrines requiring explicit attribution.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Van der Eijk’s survey of the Hippocratic texts most likely known to Aristotle includes On the Nature of Man, Aphorisms, Epidemics 2, 5, and 7, On Regimen, Airs Waters Places, On Generation, and On the Nature of the Child.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

In On Sensation, Aristotle states that most students of nature end by dealing with medicine, while “those of the doctors who practise their art in a more philosophical manner take their medical principles from the study of nature.”(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The passage establishes a reciprocal relationship between the disciplines, with natural philosophers converging on medical questions and philosophically-minded physicians deriving their principles from natural science.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Despite the density of Aristotle’s engagement with Hippocratic texts, the subsequent record shows a remarkable gap: the first substantial extant references to a specific treatise from the Hippocratic Corpus do not appear until the first century BC, in the so-called lemmas by the empiricist physician Apollonius of Citium on Joints. The gap between Aristotle in the fourth century and Apollonius in the first is not evidence of neglect; it reflects the massive loss of medical literature from the intervening three centuries, most of which has not come down to us.(Pormann (ed.), 2018)

Krasis and the Well-Balanced Mixture

Krasis (κρᾶσις) — the well-balanced mixture of elemental qualities — entered Greek intellectual life as a technical medical term before it became a philosophical concept. Bartoš’s analysis of the evidence shows that the term appears in a specifically dietetic and health-related sense in only five pre-Platonic Hippocratic texts: Airs Waters Places, On the Nature of Man, On Regimen, On Ancient Medicine, and the fifth book of Aphorisms.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) In all five, krasis carries the same cluster of meanings: a mixture of opposite qualities (hot and cold, dry and wet) in the environment, in food, in the body, or in the soul, whose proper proportion constitutes health and whose disturbance constitutes disease.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The pre-Socratic philosophers — Parmenides, Empedocles — used mixis, diakrisis, and synkrisis for mixture concepts generally but not krasis in this specific dietetic sense.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Plato was the first non-medical author to use krasis regularly, with seventeen occurrences in the dialogues, often explicitly in medical contexts.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) In the Philebus, Plato states that any blend without measure or proper proportionality “will necessarily corrupt its ingredients and most of all itself.” The formulation positions the right measure as the essence of every successful mixture — a philosophical generalization of the medical concept.

Aristotle takes the concept further. He distinguishes krasis as a specific subset of mixis (mixing in general), defining it as the most perfect form of mixture because liquids are the most fully divisible and modifiable of all bodies.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) In the Physics, he defines health directly: it consists in “a blending (krasis) of hot and cold things in due proportion (symmetria), in relation either to one another within the body or to the surrounding.”(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The definition is straight from the Hippocratic dietetic framework, translated into Aristotle’s own physical vocabulary. He then extends the concept well beyond its medical home, applying krasis to blood composition, intelligence, and soul in his biological works — reaching applications no Hippocratic author had contemplated.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) In Generation and Corruption, Aristotle explains that flesh, bone, and other homoiomerous parts arise when the hot and cold, wet and dry qualities reach a mean, with that mean possessing spatial extension rather than being a single indivisible point — a development of the Hippocratic balance concept into Aristotle’s own physical framework. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The practical stakes of the extended krasis concept appear in Aristotle’s observation that melancholics have an inherently unstable krasis that “keeps their bodies in a constant state of irritation,” requiring permanent medical attention.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Constitutional differences between individuals are real, medically significant, and explicable through the krasis concept.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) [GAP: The claim that the krasis concept also explains seasonal health and dietary balance, and that a Hippocratic insight about differential effects of food becomes in Aristotle a general principle of material individuation, is unsupported by the cited card.]

Art, Nature, and the Structure of Medicine

A recurring theme in both Hippocratic writing and Aristotelian natural philosophy is the relationship between art (technē) and nature (physis). Both traditions grappled with the same question: if living things operate by natural processes, what is the physician doing when he intervenes, and how does that intervention differ from nature’s own activity?

The Hippocratic On Ancient Medicine offers one answer. It attacks two rival positions simultaneously: reducing disease to basic material elements (hot, cold, wet, dry), and grounding medicine in prior knowledge of human nature through its origins and generative processes — both approaches being criticized for failing to capture bodily complexity. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) More specifically, its author attacks those who ground medicine in simple reductive principles — positing hot or cold or wet or dry as the single cause of all diseases — arguing that this is too general to explain why the same food harms some people but not others.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Against reduction, the text proposes that medicine studies two distinct domains: the dynameis (powers or potencies) of substances — their acuity and strength — and the schemata (structural configurations) of internal bodily parts, analyzed for their capacity to draw, store, or release fluids.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) What the physician cannot see directly is not the visibility of internal parts but their function; and function must be learned by analogy with external parts and artifacts.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Aristotle’s Parts of Animals opens with a methodological argument strikingly parallel to On Ancient Medicine’s. He criticises predecessors — including Empedocles — for explaining bodily parts by seeking their material origin and efficient cause, and defends instead the priority of form and function.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) He credits Democritus for attending to the schēma and color of animal parts but criticises him for stopping short of identifying the function of those structures — precisely the same methodological charge the Hippocratic author leveled at the philosophical reductionists.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Aristotle’s biochemical project in Meteorology 4 and Generation and Corruption can be read as directly addressing the Hippocratic complaint about unsatisfactory elemental hypotheses, by showing systematically how a variety of complex material properties emerge from four basic elemental powers. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Despite the apparent opposition between On Ancient Medicine’s claim that medicine should be the basis for understanding nature and Aristotle’s subordination of medicine to natural philosophy, both traditions ultimately agree that studying health and disease belongs to both the physician and the natural philosopher. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Aristotle’s broader physical theory, as Kouloumentas reads it, organizes material bodies by three ascending levels: the four elements at the base, uniform animate or inanimate bodies arising from elemental powers at the middle, and non-uniform animal and plant parts at the top. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) This hierarchy underpins the reasoning in Meteorology 4.12, where Aristotle’s warning that “a corpse is a man in name only” directly parallels the Hippocratic insistence that form and function — not material composition alone — are what define a living part. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Coughlin’s analysis of the phrase “art imitates nature” (hē technē mimeitai tēn phusin) — which Aristotle uses in the Physics and Protrepticus — argues that Aristotle deploys it not as a novel philosophical thesis but as an endoxon: a claim his audience already accepts.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The epistemological reading of the phrase has the advantage of accommodating thinkers across opposed metaphysical positions: Democritus and Lucretius assert art imitates nature while denying natural teleology; the Stoics and Posidonius identify nature as a divine artist. Both can accept the claim as Aristotle frames it, because it does not commit them to Aristotelian teleology. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Indeed, before Aristotle gave the phrase teleological weight, Democritus had stated that “we are pupils of the animals in the most important things: the spider for spinning and mending, the swallow for building, and the songsters, swan and nightingale, for singing, by way of imitation” — a pre-Aristotelian version of the same claim without any teleological import. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The immediate intellectual background, Coughlin shows, includes Hippocratic medical texts: the author of Epidemics 6 states that “natures are doctors in cases of illness” and that “nature discovers methods by itself,” suggesting that medical methods are derived from natural processes.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Early Greek medical writers had used the art-nature analogy precisely to defend medicine as a reliable technē against charges that its successes were due to luck (tychē), grounding medical method in the intelligible order of nature.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Aristotle inherits this framing and gives it a teleological interpretation — but the teleological reading was not the only one available, and Coughlin argues it was not the sense in which the claim originally circulated.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The intellectual context for this defense included a widely shared understanding of what a technē was: useful, serving a specific purpose, constituting specialist knowledge of means toward an end, and transferable by teaching. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) It was in terms of these four characteristics that both medicine and natural science established themselves as genuine fields of inquiry rather than collections of lucky guesses. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Plato also deployed the Hippocratic model in this period. In the Phaedrus, he invokes “the method of Hippocrates” — understanding the whole by analysis of its parts — as the template for a scientific rhetoric, positioning medical method as a model for rigorous philosophical inquiry more broadly. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Aristotle himself treats medicine as an obviously scientific enterprise in the Metaphysics, using medicine and gymnastics as paradigmatic examples of disciplines that seek principles and causes in their subject matter. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The phrase “art imitates nature” continued in this epistemological sense well after Aristotle: Theophrastus, Posidonius, Lucretius, Seneca, Galen, and eventually Harvey, Dante, and Hobbes all use it to describe how human arts learned their methods by observing natural processes. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Aristotle’s specific contribution was to situate this common epistemological claim within a teleological framework — but the claim itself, Coughlin argues, works as an endoxon because Aristotle follows his own advice in the Rhetoric: start from premises your audience already accepts. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Sleep, Food, and Physiology

Aristotle’s short treatise De somno (On Sleep) gives an account of sleep that stands apart from every prior philosophical theory. Whereas Alcmaeon, Empedocles, Diogenes of Apollonia, and Strato explained sleep through blood movement, cooling of heat, or redistribution of pneuma — with no particular role for food — Aristotle’s entire causal account is organized around digestion.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Sleep arises from the exhalations produced by the concoction of food in the gut; the hot exhalation rises through the venous system to the head and then descends, immobilizing the sensitive soul seated in the heart.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Soporific drugs, certain diseases, and fatigue produce sleep precisely because they mimic food’s role in triggering this process.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Bubb’s analysis in the Bartoš/Linka volume argues that Aristotle’s silence at the opening of De somno — unusual for him, since he normally begins by surveying prior views — suggests he was engaging tacitly with the medical tradition rather than the philosophical one.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The doxographical tradition confirms the distinctiveness of Aristotle’s position: the Aëtian Placita, which surveys philosophers’ sleep theories, uniquely associates Aristotle’s account with food, characterizing it as “moisture evaporating from the trunk to the places around the head, arising from the food below” — a formulation that singles Aristotle out from every other philosopher in the doxography on precisely this medical-digestive point. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The Hippocratic On Regimen connects sleep directly with digestion: “periods of sleep while fasting strengthen and cool,” while “in one who has eaten, periods of sleep warm and moisten, distributing the nutriment.”(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The connection was made obvious by ancient dietary practice, which centered on a single main meal in the evening, making the soporific effects of eating a universally observable phenomenon.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Aristotle’s two short companion treatises On Dreams and On Divination in Sleep are, as van der Eijk notes, “the only systematic account of dreams and of prophecy in sleep that has been transmitted to us from antiquity,” and they apply Aristotle’s general theories of imagination (phantasia), the common sense, and sense-perception to a set of specific psychic phenomena.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) Their methodology is more theoretical than the texts themselves admit. Van der Eijk identifies a tension between Aristotle’s stated commitment to empirical evidence in biology and his actual procedure here: “the way in which Aristotle arrives at these views is largely theoretical and by a priori reasoning. Sleep, he argues in chapter 1 of On Sleep and Waking, is the opposite of waking; and since waking consists in the exercise of the sensitive faculty, sleep must be the inactivity of this faculty”; empirical claims function more as confirmation of a theory already in hand than as its inductive ground.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) The theory itself is precise. Aristotle defines sleep as “a seizure of the primary sense organ which prevents it from being activated, and which is necessary for the preservation of the living being,” produced by “the upward movement of the solid part of nutriment caused by innate heat, and its subsequent condensation and return to the primary sense organ”; this is a digestive mechanism whose final cause is rest (anapausis) and the preservation (sōtēria) of the animal.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005)

The dream itself is given a strict definition: “the appearance which results from the movement of the sense-effects, when one is asleep, in so far as one is asleep, this is a dream.”(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) The qualification “in so far as one is asleep” is doing real work: Aristotle does not classify as dreams either the perceptions of real stimuli that occur in transitional half-sleep states or the “true thoughts” (alētheis ennoiai) that may pass through a sleeping person’s mind.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) Prophecy in sleep gets a separate, more skeptical treatment. Aristotle rejects divine origin on the grounds that “since some other animals have dreams too, dreams are not sent by a god, nor do they exist for this purpose”; more pointedly, he notes that prophetic dreams cluster in “people of mediocre intellectual capacities” rather than in the wisest, which would be hard to explain if a benevolent god were dispensing foreknowledge.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) He nevertheless distinguishes three real causal relationships a dream may bear to a future event: it may be a sign (sēmeion) caused by the same factor that will cause the event; it may itself be the cause (aition) of the event; or it may coincide (sumptōma) with the event without any real connection.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) Within the same passage Aristotle distinguishes “the distinguished among physicians” (charientes tōn iatrōn), who pay close attention to dreams, from non-expert philosophountes, a contrast that gives a brief, approving glimpse of his view of medicine as a discipline whose practitioners can be authorities for natural-philosophical inquiry.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) Van der Eijk also notes that the structure of Aristotle’s argument against god-sent dreams is “strikingly similar” to the argument in Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease against god-sent epilepsy: both rely on the unexpected distribution of the affliction among different kinds of people as evidence against divine providence.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005)

The same engagement with Hippocratic physiological writing appears in Aristotle’s On Youth and Old Age (De Juventute). Korobili argues that this treatise is the Aristotelian text most directly indebted to the Hippocratic On Generation and Nature of the Child, sharing with them not merely themes but specific examples, analogical structures, and even an organizational form that prefigures Aristotle’s own research treatises.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Both the Aristotelian and Hippocratic texts share the same cluster of life-securing factors: vital heat, pneuma, nutrition, the middle part of the body as the seat of vital functions, and environmental influence.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The chick-in-the-egg experiment — tracing embryonic development by opening eggs at successive days — appears as a shared empirical reference in both corpora, demonstrating the priority of the heart and the development of blood vessels.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Both traditions also agree that thermal regulation in plants follows the same pattern as in animals: extreme cold diminishes the vital heat’s force, while extreme heat exhausts it when the ground moisture cannot provide adequate cooling. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The Hippocratic On Generation and Nature of the Child further describe how heat condenses the spermatic residue, inflates the seed into a spherical shape, and later hardens the embryo’s bones through coagulation — a set of thermal mechanisms that Aristotle engaged directly in his own reproductive theory. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Aristotle’s use of these Hippocratic examples was not illustrative; Korobili argues they do genuine explanatory work in establishing causal principles, representing Hippocratic natural philosophy as a source of inductive evidence rather than rhetorical support.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Korobili’s reading of On Youth presses further on several specific points. Aristotle’s concise definition of life in On Youth 4 — that life and the maintenance of vital heat exist simultaneously, and that “what is called death be its destruction” — gives Aristotle’s version of the life-securing requirements its sharpest formulation. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The text then enters polemic with the Hippocratic claim that respiration nourishes vital heat: Aristotle insists that internal fire is fed by food, not by breath, and explicitly contrasts “observation shows rather…” with the Hippocratic claim, dismissing the appeal to common observation as no better than fiction. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Korobili reads this pairing of “observation shows rather” with “this does not appear to occur” as a deliberate methodological rebuke — a moment where Aristotle treats Hippocratic confidence in sensory evidence as epistemologically insufficient. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The shared empirical reference to heart-first development in embryos is also explicit in the Aristotelian text: On Youth 3 alludes briefly to the heart being generated first in blooded animals, noting this is “clear from what we have concluded by observation in those cases in which it was possible to see while animals were still coming into being” — which Korobili reads as Aristotle directing his reader to the same chick-egg observation the Hippocratic author describes in far more detail. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The thermal inversion principle — that cold atmosphere corresponds to warm underground, enabling plants to maintain vital heat through seasonal extremes — appears in both the Aristotelian and Hippocratic texts as a mechanism of environmental adaptation. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Korobili’s overall conclusion is that Aristotle was genuinely familiar with the content of On Generation and On the Nature of the Child, found several of its examples useful as communication devices when addressing his own readers, and shared with the Hippocratic author a methodological commitment to combining empirical observation with abstract theoretical reasoning. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The Bodily Basis of Thinking

Across the Parva naturalia, De Anima, Parts of Animals, and Politics, Aristotle treats the soul as “the form of the body” and all psychic affections (pathēmata) as “forms embedded in matter” (logoi enuloi). Van der Eijk argues that this commitment makes Aristotle’s psychology, in effect, a psycho-physiology, “an analysis of both the formal and the material (i.e. bodily) aspects of psychic functions,” rather than the purely formal account that the doctrine of the incorporeality of nous might suggest in isolation.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) The psycho-physical approach manifests in Aristotle’s treatment of emotions as phenomena that require both a physical and a psychological definition simultaneously: his account of anger in On the Soul offers two complementary descriptions — “a seething heat in the region of the heart” (the physical account) and “a desire for retaliation” (the psychological account) — which Aristotle treats not as rival explanations but as two aspects of the same emotional state.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Consistent with this, Aristotle understands mental health on the model of bodily health, defining it as a eukrasia — a good balance — between constituent factors such as the elementary qualities and the specific ratios between heat and cold, so that cognitive and psychological virtue are attributed to material factors being conducive to and constitutive of healthy mental functioning.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) The most striking evidence for this reading is the network of detailed claims, scattered across the biological and political works, in which Aristotle explains variations in intelligence by reference to bodily variables. He holds that “thinness and coldness of the blood are conducive to sharper intellectual and perceptive capacities,” so that “bees and other similar animals are naturally more intelligent (phronimōtera) than many blooded animals, and of the blooded animals, those with cold and thin blood are more intelligent than their counterparts.”(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) He explains man’s upright posture as a precondition for intellectual activity, since heavy upper bodies “hamper the motion of the intellect and of the common sense,” making thinking itself a process susceptible to mechanical impediment.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) De Anima 421a22 ties intelligence directly to skin quality: “people with hard flesh are poorly endowed with intelligence, but people with soft flesh are well endowed with it.”(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) In Physics 247b, he describes thinking as emerging “by the soul (psuchē) coming to a standstill from the natural turbulence,” a settling of bodily motion that drunkenness and sleep undo, and that children cannot maintain because they are in a permanent state of disturbance.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005)

Van der Eijk reads this body of detail as creating a real philosophical tension. By “explaining all these variations by reference to bodily variables [Aristotle] seems to grant physical conditions a greater influence on intellectual activities than his ‘canonical’ view of the incorporeality of nous would seem to allow.”(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) The tension does not get resolved in the surviving texts; the result is a Peripatetic psychology that simultaneously upholds the formal autonomy of nous and treats reasoning, recollection, and intellectual aptitude as gradient capacities shaped by blood, posture, flesh, climate, and age.

Eutuchia and the Divine Movement of the Soul

A peculiar elaboration of this framework appears in Eudemian Ethics 8.2, where Aristotle confronts the phenomenon of eutuchia, the kind of good fortune that consistently befalls certain people. He distinguishes two forms: a “divine” and “natural” form continuous in the same individual, and a non-continuous form attributable to mere chance (tuchē); both are “irrational” (alogoi), but only the first is the explanandum that occupies him from the start.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) The startling move is to identify the source of continuous eutuchia with God himself. “God is the starting-point of all psychic activity,” Aristotle writes, “both of reasoning (noēsai) and of the irrational impulses (hormai) on which eutuchia is based”; God is “even more powerful than the divine principle in man, the intellect (nous),” and “moves more strongly in those people whose reasoning faculty is disengaged.”(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) Van der Eijk argues that the apparent inconsistency between this passage and On Divination in Sleep’s rejection of god-sent dreams dissolves once one sees that both texts describe the same psycho-physiological process: a divine movement interacting with a particular human natural constitution (daimonia phusis), not a deliberate dispensation by personal gods.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) On this reading, eutuchia and prophetic dreams alike are explained without any commitment to divine epimeleia; what they have in common is a constitution receptive to a universal causal principle that operates more efficiently when individual reasoning is out of the way.

Aristotle’s Lost Medical Works

The portrait of Aristotle as a strictly philosophical biologist needs to be qualified by what survives, and what is reported to have once survived, of his more practical medical writing. He himself “refers on numerous occasions to a work called Anatomai”; Diogenes Laertius’ catalogue lists an Iātrikē in two books and a separate Hyper tou mē gennan; Caelius Aurelianus quotes literally from a medical work De adiutoriis (“On Remedies”) attributed to Aristotle; and the Anonymus Londiniensis drew on a doxographic work by Aristotle on the causes of diseases.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) Van der Eijk has argued in detail that the so-called Hist. an. 10 (the On Sterility book usually printed at the end of the History of Animals) is best understood as one of these practical medical works: “a ‘practical’, that is, medical work, unsystematic and limited in scope, intended to provide diagnostic clues as to the possible causes of failure to conceive, or in other words, pursuing knowledge that is useful for practical application,” to be read alongside but not within the systematic theoretical project of Generation of Animals.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) The “diagnostic” character of the text is visible in its language: it is dotted with instructions like “on touching, this will appear” and inferential markers like “this indicates” and “you can infer from this,” and it repeatedly classifies conditions as “in need of treatment,” “not requiring treatment,” or “not admitting of treatment.”(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) Van der Eijk’s broader methodological point is that when Aristotle deals with deviations and irregularities (typically in appendices, in the Problemata, or in such diagnostic supplements) he routinely introduces explanatory factors that are difficult to fit cleanly into his standard theoretical accounts.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) His provisional conclusion is that On Sterility “is by Aristotle – at least there is no reason to believe it is not – but it is to be disconnected from the other books of History of Animals and regarded as a separate work,” possibly identical with the Hyper tou mē gennan of the ancient catalogues.(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005)

Gynaecology and Reproductive Theory

Aristotle’s De generatione animalium 1.17–22 is a series of close debates with medical authorities and is mainly focused on human reproduction.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) This contradicts Aristotle’s usual methodological pattern in Part. an. 1.1, which moves from general animal features to particular ones.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Connell argues that Aristotle’s theory of reproduction and sex difference in De generatione animalium engages deeply with Hippocratic and other ancient medical gynaecological texts, a relationship that scholarly tendencies to emphasize disagreements between the two traditions have obscured. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Connell identifies a methodological tension that runs through this section and into the gynaecological material of Historia animalium 7: humans serve simultaneously as the reference case for understanding female animals generally and as exceptional in the animal kingdom, due to the disproportionately large body of medical data on women’s pathologies.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

This tension is visible in Aristotle’s own methodology. His general procedure, stated explicitly in the Analytica Posteriora and De partibus animalium 1, recommends beginning with what is most common across animal types before addressing peculiarities — yet Gen. an. 1.17–22 inverts this order, starting from peculiarly human medical evidence and then extending outward to animals more generally. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The reversal is not accidental: it reflects the disproportionate weight of the Hippocratic medical tradition on human reproduction, which gave Aristotle far richer data on humans than on any other species. The catalogue of human idia (peculiarities) underscores the point: humans have more exceptional features than any other kind of animal — hands, upright posture, buttocks, the thinnest skin, soft lips and tongue, greying, balding, and the smallest nails relative to body size — making human-specific medical data both necessary and methodologically challenging for anyone attempting a general zoological theory. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Aristotle’s engagement with medical data extended to accepting Hippocratic observations about gestational variability even when they created theoretical complications. The claim that human gestation can range from seven to eleven months, and that eighth-month babies rarely survive, drew directly on Hippocratic sources, particularly On the Nature of the Child. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) More broadly, Aristotle treats women as uniquely pathological within the animal kingdom — more infirm than other female animals — broadly agreeing with the medical framework of Hippocratic gynaecology even where he contests specific claims. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Aristotle develops his general theory of reproduction and sex difference by beginning with human evidence — specifically with the debates in Hippocratic medical texts about menstruation, gestation, fertility, and women’s pathological conditions — and extending that knowledge outward to the animal kingdom.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Dean-Jones described this engagement with characteristic precision: Aristotle “considered the Hippocratics part of the rational tradition with which he could have a meaningful dialogue.”(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The wind-pregnancy problem studied by Leunissen illustrates how Aristotle absorbed Hippocratic empirical reports even when they created tension in his own theoretical framework. In Historia animalium 7.4, Aristotle reports that human gestational duration is variable (seven to eleven months) and that apparent eleventh-month births are explained by women being misled by wind-inflated uterine symptoms that obscured the true moment of conception.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Both the variability data and the wind-inflation explanation come directly from the Hippocratic On the Nature of the Child.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Aristotle’s accounts of how winds affect pregnancies in Generation of Animals 4.2 use Airs, Waters, Places as their main source of facts.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Aristotle is generally careful about the epistemic position of women in this discussion. Rather than attributing apparent eleventh-month pregnancies to female error, he blames wind-caused false symptoms: women, he affirms, reliably know when they conceived and how long they have been carrying — it is the misleading symptoms produced by wind in the uterus that cause the miscalculation. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Yet despite this rhetorical affirmation of women’s epistemic authority, Leunissen notes that Aristotle’s actual sources for gynaecological facts were medical experts rather than women themselves — indicating a gap between acknowledged female testimony and the actual data-sources Aristotle drew on. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The depth of Aristotle’s engagement with specific Hippocratic texts is also evident in his discussion of male and female contributions to reproduction and the role of female pleasure in Gen. an. — passages that reveal close familiarity with the On Generation and On the Nature of the Child specifically. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The same engagement produced the curious preservation of eighth-month mortality data: Aristotle notes in Hist. an. 7.4 that “those born in the eighth month — at least those born in Greece — for the most part die and rarely survive,” a geographically specific empirical claim that sits uneasily in a general zoological theory but reflects the medical literature Aristotle consulted. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The methodological implication Leunissen draws is significant: Aristotle generally accepts Hippocratic medical reports as trustworthy and as requiring explanation, while reserving his own theoretical innovations for the explanatory framework rather than the factual content.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) He rejects the pangenesis account of reproduction, for instance, while accepting as reliable the empirical observations that the pangenesis theorists adduced in its support.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The wind-inflation account creates an acknowledged problem — it is not obvious what these “airy materials” could be within Aristotle’s own reproductive theory or by what mechanism they would enter the uterus — and Aristotle preserves it anyway, because the Hippocratic empirical record carries sufficient authority to override theoretical inconvenience.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Environmental and Political Causation

One of the most consequential borrowings from the Hippocratic tradition in Aristotle’s corpus is the theory of environmental causation: the view that habitat, climate, water quality, and landform directly shape the physical characteristics, temperament, and moral character of the organisms and peoples who inhabit them. This view is the central argument of the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places, and it runs through Aristotle’s biological and political works in ways that have only recently received sustained scholarly analysis.

Popa frames Aristotle’s interest in environmental adaptation not as an anticipation of evolutionary thinking but as a question about why a biological kind has always been the kind it is, with answers built around essence, form, capacities, functions, and final cause. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Popa’s chapter in the Bartoš/Linka volume identifies verbal parallels between Historia animalium 7(8).29 and Airs, Waters, Places 24 that suggest direct textual engagement rather than merely shared intellectual atmosphere: both texts use the terms ὀρεινοὶ καὶ τραχεῖς (mountainous and rough) and cognates of ἀγριώτερα (more savage or wild) to characterize the populations and animals of rugged terrain.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Aristotle’s general argument — that animals in marshy, watery regions have more fluid and softer compositions, while those in dry elevated areas have harder constitutions — directly parallels the Hippocratic account of how water quality and topography shape human bodies.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Temperament follows the same pattern: populations in mountainous terrain are fiercer and more warlike; those in flat, marshy regions are more sluggish and submissive.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Aristotle’s debt to Airs, Waters, Places is unacknowledged by name in the biological works — a pattern consistent with his treatment of medical material as received common knowledge rather than citeable authority.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Popa also notes that in Gen. an. 3.11, Aristotle develops the point that aquatic life-forms exhibit greater morphological variety than terrestrial ones because moisture is more plastic than earth — and that gradations of “the more and the less and nearer and farther” produce “a significant and surprising difference.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) This quantitative-qualitative axis of environmental causation extends the Hippocratic climatic framework into Aristotle’s own physical vocabulary. The same extension appears in Aristotle’s observations on Scythian versus Sarmatian sheep: cold hardens some animals by evaporating internal moisture, an explanation that uses the thermodynamic vocabulary of Meteorology 4 to account for the kind of cross-geographic variation that Airs, Waters, Places had catalogued for human populations. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The breadth of Aristotle’s geographic zoology also surfaces in Hist. an. 7(8).28, where he compares Asian, European, and Libyan animals — noting that Libyan animals are the most varied in form because the scarcity of rainfall there drives animals of different species to share waterholes, producing cross-species mating as a climate-driven adaptive strategy. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Popa’s conclusion from this body of evidence is that in Aristotle, as in early medical writers, animals and plants sometimes appear as passive while their environments become complex networks of efficient causes — determining chemical composition, morphology, temperament, and even moral qualities through overlapping causal chains. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Popa’s overall assessment is that Aristotle’s environmental theory is best understood not as independent discovery but as a systematic integration of Hippocratic clinical observation into a broader natural-philosophical framework: Airs, Waters, Places provided the empirical content that Aristotle organized under his own causal schema.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The political reach of this Hippocratic legacy is even more explicit, though Thein opens his analysis by emphasizing that Hippocratic influence on Aristotle’s political thought is far less clear than on his biology, and that the argument narrows to a single passage — Politics 7.7 — where the influence of climate on the nature of citizens is most directly engaged. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Thein’s analysis shows that Aristotle modelled the opening of Politics 7 on the opening of Airs, Waters, Places: just as the Hippocratic text advises the physician arriving at a new city to assess its site, winds, waters, and orientation, Politics 7 advises the legislator to assess the site of the city to be founded.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Politics 7.11 contains a passage Thein identifies as a close paraphrase of Airs, Waters, Places 7.1, where Aristotle’s discussion of wind direction and the health of city inhabitants reproduces the Hippocratic account with only minor modifications.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Aristotle’s famous tripartition in Politics 7.7 (Europeans spirited but deficient in intelligence, Asians intelligent but deficient in spirit, Greeks combining both qualities and therefore uniquely fit for self-governance) draws its environmental premise from Airs, Waters, Places, which contrasts European and Asian character along similar lines.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The tripartition rests on a soul-hierarchy that Politics 1.13 makes explicit: the slave is “completely without the deliberative element,” the free woman has it but without authority, and the child has it in undeveloped form, so that natural-political rank mirrors the structure of the soul. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Politics 1.5 concedes, however, that nature does not always succeed in this assignment: “the opposite also often occurs” — some have the body of a free man, others the soul. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Thein reads this admission as Aristotle acknowledging that human beings are “messy and intractable material to work with,” which creates real friction between the environmental-deterministic framework borrowed from the Hippocratic text and the normative political theory Aristotle wants to derive from it. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The practical solution Aristotle offers in Politics 7.10 is that ideal farm-slaves should not all be of one race and should not be spirited, with “those who live in neighbouring areas” as second best — reflecting the fractal principle of expanding circles within Greek nations rather than a strict three-region scheme. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The addition — the Greek intermediate position as a normative-political claim, the conclusion that Greeks are ideally suited to govern — has no Hippocratic precedent and is Aristotle’s own invention.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Thein argues that Aristotle’s relationship to his Hippocratic source in this passage is simultaneously dependent and reorienting: he imports the environmental framework but converts it from clinical-descriptive to normative-prescriptive purposes, in service of a theory of the ideal polis.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Thein closes his analysis by arguing that Politics 7.7 ultimately reveals the difficulty of passing from nature to politics when Aristotle steps outside the confines of the classical Greek polis — what he sees beyond its limits becomes, as Thein puts it, “a mirror that reflects the distortions at the heart of his own ideal city.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The term thumoeidēs (spirited, impassioned) that Politics 7.7 applies to northern European peoples may itself trace through Plato’s Republic from Airs, Waters, Places, representing a chain of Hippocratic → Platonic → Aristotelian transmission of a technical psychological term.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Medicine in Aristotle’s Ethical Writings

References to medicine and medical writings in Aristotle’s ethical treatises are occasional, isolated, and for the most part allusive, and it is therefore not surprising that they are often neglected when it comes to assessing the importance of medicine in Aristotle’s works as a whole.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Nicomachean Ethics 7.5 (1147b6–9) explicitly states that the physiologoi (natural scientists or, in context, physicians) must be consulted to understand the dissolution of the ignorance that characterizes the akratic person — the person who acts against their own better judgment.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) When rational-psychological analysis proves insufficient to explain how a person can knowingly choose what they know to be wrong, Aristotle turns to physiology. His treatment of akrasia is, in this respect, medical: he regards the state as a kind of physical addiction that disables individuals and renders them incapable of normal healthy functioning, and that is both in need of treatment (therapeia) and capable of being cured (iatreia), though to varying extent, through a combination of physical regimen and moral or spiritual guidance.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) At NE 7.9 (1150b33–34), he compares akrasia to an occasional disease such as epilepsy: just as the epileptic is not fully responsible for convulsions because physiological forces overwhelm deliberate control, the akratic is similarly overwhelmed by appetite. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The term Aristotle uses for the resolution of akratic ignorance — lusis (dissolution) — carries an unmistakably medical resonance: in the Hippocratic corpus lusis and related forms designate the release, evacuation, or remission of fever, and Aristotle’s use of the verb lúetai places the ethical discourse squarely within that medical register. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The ethical and physiological accounts remain in dialogue throughout: Morel concludes that Aristotle does not dissociate ethical arguments on akrasia from the physiological account of it, treating moral disorder as simultaneously a state of bodily disorder. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The references to the physiologoi in these passages are valuable precisely for the explicit link they establish between the domain of political science and the discourse of natural philosophers — a connection that is unusual in Aristotle’s ethical writings. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Politics 7.16 provides a parallel instance: physicians and natural philosophers are treated there as distinct but complementary experts on the physiological conditions for harmonious generation, with physicians advising on bodily conditions and natural philosophers advising on the influence of winds. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Morel draws an important structural conclusion from this material. The physical considerations in Aristotle’s ethical works rest on what Morel calls a “minimal and pragmatic physiology” — simplified relative to technical natural science, subordinated to the specific needs of practical philosophy, and not constituting a foundational discipline on which political science would depend. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The holistic-physician analogy in NE 1.13 grounds this: political science, insofar as it is concerned with psychology, necessarily involves physiology, because psychic faculties are common to both body and soul. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Medicine and physiology do not supply prescriptions for ethical or political life; but because certain moral disorders are simultaneously physical disorders, examining moral facts requires identifying states common to body and soul — and that is precisely the domain that medicine and physiology illuminate. The comparison draws on Hippocratic disease concepts, and the term λύσις (lusis, dissolution) that Aristotle uses for the resolution of akratic ignorance shares its technical register with the Hippocratic vocabulary of disease resolution: just as a disease reaches its crisis and is resolved, the akratic’s condition is resolved through physiological change.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Morel draws a careful distinction between two modes of physiological knowledge in these texts: τὸ ὅτι (to hoti, raw observational facts) and τὸ διότι (to dioti, causal explanations). Aristotle’s ethical discourse borrows to hoti facts from physiology — the observed results — without importing the causal explanations that belong to natural science proper.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The physiologoi in the ethical texts are deliberately kept vague; the term may refer to Hippocratic physicians, to Presocratic natural philosophers, or to Aristotle’s own Parva Naturalia, and Morel argues this vagueness is functional: it allows ethics to invoke physiological authority without committing to any specific natural-philosophical doctrine.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The Doctrine of the Mean

Johnson’s study of the mean doctrine in the Eudemian Ethics highlights that two arguments crucial to Aristotle’s definition of moral virtue as a mean state contain claims Aristotle says are clear by induction, explicitly appealing to examples from gymnastic training and medicine.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Eudemian Ethics 2.1 (1220a22–39) makes the inductive procedure explicit: just as the physician recognizes health as a mean between excess and deficiency of bodily condition, the ethicist recognizes virtue as a mean between excess and deficiency of character.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The methodological formula “through induction and argument” (epagōgēi kai logōi), which appears at EE 2.3 (1220b21–35) as the basis of the mean doctrine, is the only time this formula appears in the ethical works.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) It confirms that the medical analogy functions as a genuine inductive foundation, not a rhetorical illustration.

The Hippocratic source is identifiable. On Ancient Medicine, chapter 9, states that the physician must “be skilled at hitting a mean” (dei stochazasthai tou metriou) in prescribing food and drink — the earliest clear use of the mean as a medical-practical concept.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Aristotle may deliberately echo this passage in the conclusion to Eth. Nic. 2.6, where he states that virtue is a mean state because it is “skilled at hitting the mean” — a formulation that shadows the Hippocratic stochazasthai so closely that verbal dependence is at least plausible. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Hynek Bartos has provided independent evidence that Aristotle knew On Regimen closely, treating even its most peculiar ideas as commonplace and expecting his audience to recognize them — which places the mean doctrine on solid inductive ground, since both gymnastic training and medicine genuinely aimed at a mean and avoided excess and deficiency in practice. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The medical doctrine of good physical condition (euexia) — the optimal bodily fitness produced by the best food and exercise in the right amounts — constitutes the entire inductive basis from which virtue-as-mean is analogically projected, with euexia serving as the model case.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Johnson further follows Jaeger’s observation that hexis (stable disposition, habit) as the defining characteristic of moral virtue is a term borrowed from medical usage, where it refers to the stable physical condition of a body well-trained through regimen.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The transfer of hexis from the medical to the ethical domain is, in Jaeger’s reading, an instance of Aristotle adapting medical terminology systematically rather than casually. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Eudemian Ethics 2.3 makes the inductive logic explicit in a second, related argument: “in everything continuous and divisible there is excess and deficiency and mean — in gymnastic training, in medicine, in building, in piloting, and in any action whatsoever.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The doctrine of the mean, Johnson stresses, is not a decision procedure for individual choices but a claim about the conditions under which the non-rational soul is in a good condition — produced by habituation through education, training, and punishment to feel appropriate pleasure and pain, not by consciously aiming at some midpoint in every action. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The Eudemian Ethics, Johnson argues, preserves the medical scaffolding more openly than the Nicomachean Ethics, which appears to have refined and partly obscured the inductive medical origins of the doctrine. On this reading, the mean is not a philosopher’s abstract construction: it is the philosophical formalization of a practical tradition — the tradition of hitting the right measure in regimen — and Hippocratic medicine is philosophically productive for ethics rather than merely analogically convenient.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Medicine and the Emotions: the Problemata

The pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata represent a distinct mode of engagement between medical physiology and philosophical psychology. Thumiger’s analysis in the Bartoš/Linka volume contrasts the Problemata’s approach to emotion with that of the Hippocratic texts from which it draws its physiological vocabulary.

In Hippocratic clinical texts, emotions function as self-evident signs within diagnosis: they are noted as data points — the patient reports being afraid, ashamed, despairing — but are rarely subjected to physiological causal analysis in their own right.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The Problemata reverse this relationship: they make the emotions themselves the explanandum — the thing to be explained — by subjecting them to physiological analysis in terms of heat, cold, pneuma, and humours.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The analyses are specific. Problemata 7.7 asks why we suffer mentally when we see another person being cut, burned, or tortured, and proposes that our shared nature (physis koinē) and kinship explain the sympathetic response: because humans share the same physiological constitution, they are literally susceptible to the same emotional states in the presence of others exhibiting them, making sympathy simultaneously a physiological and a social-cognitive phenomenon. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Problemata 8.20 differentiates anger and cowardice by their elemental constitution: anger keeps the body warm by retaining fire — as children flush red when angry — while cowardice allows that fire to dissipate, producing cooling. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The Hippocratic physiological categories — hot/cold, wet/dry, pneuma, humours — are not simply borrowed here; they are transformed. Where Hippocratic texts use these categories to explain disease, the Problemata use them to explain the normal emotional psychology of healthy individuals.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The Problemata 2.26 distinguishes anxiety as an increase of heat (like anger) from fear as a transference of heat from upper to lower body, with anger defined as a boiling of heat around the heart.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The passage also notes that fear causes loosening of the bowels due to this heat transference.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The same problem-book poses the bodily micro-question of why anxious people sweat in the feet but not the face — a level of physiological specificity about emotional states that goes well beyond anything in the Hippocratic corpus. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The Problemata’s claim that natural philosophers know the rationale behind medical treatments better than the physicians who apply them mechanically is also explicit: the natural philosopher understands the causes, while the doctor merely applies the measure. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Other Problemata inquiries pursue emotional psychology into similarly specific territory: Probl. 4.10 unpacks the disgust young men feel after first sexual intercourse as a complex emotion caused by physiological change and its memory; Probl. 4.27 examines why men feel shame admitting sexual desire but not desire for food or drink, explaining the asymmetry through biological necessity versus superfluity. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Probl. 20.2 uses the proverb against eating or planting mint in wartime to argue that mint, which cools the body and corrupts seed, is physiologically opposed to courage and spirit. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The Problemata explores the physiological correlates of emotions, such as heat collecting around the heart in anger causing boldness and redness.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Thumiger concludes that this approach departs from the Hippocratics, as emotions are treated not as self-explanatory facts but as composites to be unpacked.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The result — corporeal attention to emotional experience combined with recognition of its cognitive identity, social contractedness, and stake in subjectivity — is, in Thumiger’s assessment, unique in the natural inquiry of ancient cultures. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Reception and Influence

Galen’s Aristotle

Galen’s relationship to Aristotle was one of selective adoption and pointed rejection (Temkin, 1973)(Temkin, 1973). He accepted the four-element theory and the four primary qualities, building his physiology on the same Aristotelian foundation (Temkin, 1973). He rejected atomism, partly because Asclepiades had introduced it into medicine, and sided with Aristotle on the material structure of the body (Temkin, 1973). Galen’s characteristic belief in a divine, providential purpose underlying the design of the human body is itself a continuation of similar ideas in Plato and Aristotle — so that even where Greek doctors appear not to have allowed the divine to play an explicit role in their theories, this should not be interpreted as evidence of diminishing religiosity: the teleological commitment was embedded in the natural philosophy they shared.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

Galen also understood the Aristotle-Hippocrates relationship through a particular lens: he called Aristotle an “interpreter of Hippocrates’ reasoning on nature,” assuming that in some of his accounts Aristotle had drawn on the very same medical sources Galen himself revered under Hippocrates’ name.(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Where Galen dissented from Aristotle was on the question of which organ governed the body. Aristotle placed the heart at the center; it was the seat of vital heat, of the soul’s ruling principle. Galen followed Plato against Aristotle, insisting that his own dissections proved the brain, heart, and liver to be three coordinate origins of three parallel systems (Nutton, 2023). This was not a minor dispute. It was the most fundamental question in ancient physiology, and Galen’s rejection of Aristotelian cardiocentrism meant that the physician-tradition and the natural-philosophy tradition were aligned but not identical. Van der Eijk presses one philological refinement here. For Aristotle the heart is “the role of ‘beginning’ or ‘origin’ (archē)” both for bodily heat and for the central sense organ, while the brain “has no cognitive faculties and serves only as a chilling element”; but because Aristotle’s nous is explicitly not located anywhere in the body, “it is, strictly speaking, not correct to attribute a cardiocentric view on the mind to Aristotle, as has frequently been done both in antiquity and in modern literature.”(van der Eijk, Philip J., 2005) Galen’s polemic against Aristotelian “cardiocentrism” thus targets a position Aristotle himself did not quite hold; the target is a doxographic schematisation of Aristotle’s actual view.

Siraisi identifies the same fault line in medieval medicine: Avicenna tried to reconcile these “essentially incompatible views of Aristotle and Galen” by allowing the heart an overriding influence over the entire body while simultaneously maintaining the Galenic doctrine of three principal members (Siraisi, 1990). This reconciliation was philosophically unstable, but it held because both Galen and Aristotle were too authoritative to discard and the differences were too fundamental to resolve.

Arabic Reception

Temkin traces how Greek philosophy and medicine entered the Arabic world together, because they were studied together (Temkin, 1973). The great Arabic physician-philosophers — al-Kindi, Rhazes, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides — were almost universally Aristotelians in their natural philosophy. To be called merely a physician without the title of philosopher was, in that world, to be accused of lacking real scientific knowledge. Aristotle set the epistemological standards to which medicine had to answer.

Galen’s medical authority was widely accepted, but his philosophical authority was consistently challenged by Arabic and Byzantine philosopher-physicians on questions of logic, physics, and metaphysics (Temkin, 1973). He was not considered the equal of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus (Temkin, 1973).

Islamic scholars had access to substantial biographical information about Aristotle. Rosenthal notes that medieval Islamic scholars drew on Porphyry’s (now lost) History of Philosophers and on a monograph biography of Aristotle, as well as on John Philoponus’s historical work on ancient physicians, giving them a richer dossier of ancient Greek scholarly biography than survives in Greek alone.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) Aristotle’s works were, with the exceptions of the Politics and parts of the Ethics, all known in Arabic translation, while Plato’s works were primarily known through Middle Platonic adaptations and paraphrases rather than the original texts.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) The Arabic canonical ranking of Greek philosophers, recorded by Saʿid al-Andalusī, placed the five most important in order as Empedocles, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle — with Empedocles given the distinction of having lived at the time of the prophet David.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965)

Arabic literary appropriation of Aristotle extended well beyond technical philosophy. An Arabic paraphrase of the Nicomachean Ethics transmitted through the Kitāb al-Saʿādah wa-l-Isʿād of Abū l-Ḥasan ibn Abī Dharr defines happiness as “an activity of the soul through perfect virtue,” requiring right beginning (free choice), right goal (correct formative figurations), and right procedure (patience and perseverance) — a condensation that circulated the Aristotelian eudaimonia concept within Islamic moral philosophy.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) A translation by Abū ʿUthmān al-Dimashqī of Aristotle’s Virtues of the Soul, quoted and praised by Miskawayh as the work of a man equally fluent in Greek and Arabic whose translations were approved by all who read both languages, shows the high esteem in which Aristotle’s moral texts were held.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) Miskawayh himself drew from Aristotle a three-part soul doctrine that mapped the tripartite soul onto specific organs: the rational power (angelic, organ: brain), the concupiscent power (animal, organ: liver), and the irascible power (bestial, organ: heart), whose proper balance produces the four cardinal virtues.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965)

The Nicomachean Ethics also circulated in Arabic as a source for political theory. An Arabic version of Aristotle’s discussion of political forms distinguished three good constitutions (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) and three corruptions, defining tyranny as the corruption of monarchy by the tyrant’s self-interest versus the king’s concern for his subjects.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) Pseudo-Aristotelian epistolary literature also flourished: a text purporting to contain Aristotle’s instructions to Alexander on military organization divided the army into seven ranks (each receiving twice the pay of the rank immediately below it) and taught that fame can be achieved in only three ways — promulgating laws (Solon, Lycurgus), military achievement (Themistocles, Brasidas), and founding cities.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965)(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) The philosophical anecdote tradition reached its most vivid form at Alexander’s death: the Islamic historian al-Thaʿālibī depicted Aristotle at Alexander’s coffin delivering the aphorism “The jailer is now himself jailed, the slayer of kings himself slain,” as an exemplary statement of wisdom addressed to the assembled sages and elite.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965)

A distinct strand of Arabic philosophy used Aristotelian psychology for love theory. Al-Sarakhsī explained erotic kissing and embracing as the soul’s attempt to achieve maximal union with the beloved by penetrating from exterior to interior through the bodily orifices — an Aristotelian account of eros framed in terms of soul-union rather than humoral imbalance.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965)

Albertus Magnus and Medieval Scholasticism

Albertus Magnus assigned different authorities to different domains: Galen or Hippocrates for medicine, Aristotle for natural things, Augustine for faith (Temkin, 1973). The institutional success of this arrangement rested on the prestige that Aristotle’s epistemological framework lent to learned medicine: scholastic medicine was embedded in Aristotelian natural philosophy and claimed to be scientia in the Aristotelian sense — claiming to offer certain and universally true knowledge, derived by syllogistic reasoning from accepted premises — which distinguished it from mere craft empiricism and secured its place in the university curriculum.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) [GAP: Description of this formula as the medieval solution to gaps between authorities and that it kept conflict at arm’s length.] [GAP: Explanation that the formula could not manage domain overlaps, which in medicine was constant.]

The optics debate is one example. Siraisi notes that medieval medicine sided with Plato and Galen’s extramission theory of vision — the eye sends out rays — while Aristotle and subsequently Avicenna and Averroes held the intromission view (Siraisi, 1990). The debate ran for centuries because both Aristotle and Galen were authoritative, and they disagreed.

Harvey’s Aristotle

The most striking measure of Aristotle’s scientific productivity is Nutton’s claim about William Harvey: that Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood in 1628 was made possible only by his “deep acquaintance with the methods, theories and logic of a classical comparative anatomist, Aristotle” (Nutton, 2023). Harvey did not discover circulation merely by rejecting ancient authority (Nutton, 2023).

The Fall of Galenism as the Fall of Aristotelianism

Temkin identifies the deeper reason why Galenism and Aristotelianism fell together: the seventeenth-century “mechanization of qualities” — the philosophical conversion of Aristotelian primary qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry) from objective features of the world into subjective sensations — was as destructive to Galenic medicine as the direct anatomical and physiological challenges of Vesalius and Harvey (Temkin, 1973). Galen was not a strict Aristotelian, but his system depended on Aristotelian physics for its framework. When that physics became untenable in the new mechanical philosophy, Galenism lost its conceptual ground. Temkin draws out a further asymmetry between the two philosophers: unlike the metaphysics and ethics of Plato and Aristotle, which have persisted independently of their philosophies of nature, Galen’s philosophy without medicine was not viable; medicine and medical biology formed the core of his knowledge, and what went beyond them lacked the independent force to survive (Temkin, 1973).

By 1870 this process was complete (Temkin, 1973). Aristotle had long since been separated from his scholastic uses and reconsidered historically. What remained was the bare philosophical achievement: a systematic biology, a teleological framework, and the method of comparative dissection that had made anatomy possible.

(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): According to the Anonymus Londinensis, Aristotle produced a detailed account of Hippocrates’ theory of the causes of diseases, and the detail provided in the Anonymus Londinensis closely corresponds with the account in the Hippocratic Breaths. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): in medicine as well as in any other technē, the master craftsman (architekton) is superior to a mere practitioner, for the practitioner knows the facts (hoti) and how to do things, while the master also “possesses the theory and knows the causes”. In other words, “art (technē) rather than experience is scientific knowledge (epistēmē)”. Accordingly, only some physicians and medical authors are to be considered scientists in the proper sense. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Littré recognized numerous significant parallels between the Hippocratic texts and Aristotle’s writings in the preface to his critical edition, and even concludes that they share “the same doctrines, same hypotheses, same details”. … Yet the proposed similarities with Hippocratic texts have been rejected by Fredrich and Balme on the basis that they represent mere “commonplaces”. Some have evinced a more extreme scepticism by concluding that Aristotle was “apparently unacquainted with the Hippocratic writings” and simply “not interested in medicine”. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Our approach in this volume adopts a kind of middle position. In line with tradition, our contributors retain the adjective ‘Hippocratic’ in their references to individual texts of the Hippocratic Corpus, their authors and ideas. On the other hand, they avoid Hippocrates’ name on such occasion, except for references to the historical physician. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Perilli concludes that Aristotle’s interest in medical knowledge proper was functional to his more general philosophical ideas. What interested Aristotle was not so much the detailed observations and technical expertise of medical texts of the extant CH, but rather the speculative synthetic perspective, which is rarely found in medical accounts. Accordingly, he classifies medicine as an applied and subordinate practice. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): the Hippocratic Corpus is the final product of a long process of canonization with a strong accretive tendency, which gradually absorbed practically all extant non-fragmentary medical literature from the Classical period. Nutton goes so far as to conclude that the Hippocratic Corpus as we know it “is a renaissance construct”. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Modern debate on the issue practically ceased during the second half of the twentieth century, with a number of scholars independently coming to the conclusion that none of the Hippocratic writings can with reasonable certainty be ascribed to Hippocrates. Accordingly, “statements prefaced by ‘Hippocrates said …’ or ‘Hippocrates knew …’, all too common in general writings about early medicine, are fundamentally misplaced.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Perilli is sceptical about any direct influence of the medical texts on Aristotle, instead suggesting that most of the parallels can be explained by reference to shared common knowledge among the educated or to common (but no longer extant) sources. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle’s father Nicomachus was a court physician to the Macedonian king Amyntas iii (reigning from c. 393 to c. 370bce). Although Nicomachus died at an early age, it is reasonable to assume that Aristotle was brought up in a medical environment and that he received some medical education (formal or informal) before he left for Athens to enter Plato’s Academy. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In medical families, as Galen (On anatomical procedures 2.1) reports, the sons of physicians “practiced dissection from childhood under parental instructions, as they did reading and writing.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In addition, the list of Aristotle’s works in Diogenes Laertius (5.25) includes several texts on medical topics, such as Dissections (Anatomōn), the Selection from Dissections (Eklogē anatomōn), and the Medical Issues (Iatrika). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle quotes at length two distinguished medical authorities to demonstrate that they are both wrong about the origin of blood vessels in the human body, for they both make the head (instead of the heart) the starting point of the system of vessels. The first account of vessels is ascribed to Syennesis, “the physician from Cyprus”, (Hist. an. 3.2, 511b25–30), and the second one to Polybus (Hist. an. 3.3, 512b10–513a8). Both of these accounts happen to be found in the Hippocratic On the Nature of Bones. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Di Benedetto has observed that there are suggestive discrepancies between the Hippocratic versions and Aristotle’s report and that Aristotle may have made deliberate changes in his transcription. It is also significant that Aristotle omits the last ten lines of the account, which do not relate directly to the point at hand, and that he modifies the initial qualification of the report. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle refers to Hippocrates as a paradigmatic physician in Politics (7.4, 1326a15–16), and he briefly refers to the practice of “Herodicus the physician” in Eudemian Ethics (7.10, 1243b24). He also mentions Alcmaeon (e.g. De an. 1.2, 405a29; Gen. an. 3.2, 752b24–26; Hist. an. 1.11, 492a14), Diogenes of Apollonia (e.g. De an. 1.2, 405a21; Hist. an. 3.2, 511b30–512b11). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In some cases, such accounts are taken into consideration as authoritative sources in terms of evidence or theory that needs to be supplemented and refined by Aristotle’s own observations and arguments. In other cases, however, medical endoxa are mentioned anonymously alongside opinions of pre-Socratic philosophers and other thinkers relevant to Aristotle’s accounts. Occasionally, conceptions and terminology of medical origin are adopted and tacitly integrated into Aristotle’s own expositions. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Regarding the Hippocratic texts most likely to have been known to Aristotle, van der Eijk (2012, 1520 and 2022,10, n. 26) suggests the following works: Nat. Hom., Aph., Epid. 2, 5 and 7, Loc. Hom., VM, Morb. 2, Genit. Nat. Pue. Morb. 4, Vict., Flat., and Aër. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): It is the business of the student of nature to inquire into the first principles (archai) of health and disease. For neither health nor disease can come to be in things deprived of life. So generally speaking, most of those who study nature end by dealing with medicine, while those of the doctors who practise their art in a more philosophical manner (philosophōterōs) take their medical principles from the study of nature. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): out of the 60 or so treatises included in Littré, only six contain the term krēsis or synkrēsis and only five of them are generally agreed to precede or to be contemporary with Plato, namely Airs, Waters, Places, On the Nature of Man, On Regimen, On Ancient Medicine and the fifth book of Aphorisms. Significantly, all of them promote a dietetic approach to health and all connect krasis with the concept of “moderation” or “balance”. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Krēsis/synkrēsis stands in the five Hippocratic texts as a technical term for a mixture of the opposite qualities (a) in the environment, (b) in food, (c) in the human body, or (d) in the soul. And although there is no agreement among them as to the number and nature of the elementary parts of human bodies … they all work on the hypothesis … that all the various kinds and states of human bodies can be diagnosed as well as cured according to an excess or surplus of hot, cold, dry and wet. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): apart from these exceptional fragments—Parmenides, Empedocles and other pre-Platonic philosophers did not use the term krasis but rather expressions like mixis, diakrisis and synkrisis. Moreover, in comparison with the Hippocratic authors, the exceptional two fragments neither attest to a specific concern with health and disease, food and environment, nor to the idea of balance. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In contrast to the isolated references to the medical terminology in pseudo-Aeschylus, Euripides, and Thucydides, Plato is the first “non-medical” author to employ the terms krasis and synkrasis (in conjunction with metria and symmetria) on a regular basis, often explicitly in a medical context. Altogether, there are 17 occurrences of krasis and 9 of synkrasis in Plato’s dialogues. In addition, Plato also used (and possibly coined) the noun eukrasia (Ti. 24c6), which is unattested in the Hippocratic texts. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle makes it sufficiently clear that krasis is a specific kind of mixis. Accordingly, mixis can be used as a generic name for krasis but not vice versa. … And since only a mixis of liquids can be properly called krasis, and given the fact that liquids are the most mixable of all bodies, krasis is the most perfect form of mixis. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Thus bodily excellences such as health and fitness (ὑγίειαν καὶ εὐεξίαν) we regard as consisting in a blending (ἐν κράσει) of hot and cold things in due proportion (συμμετρίᾳ), in relation either to one another within the body or to the surrounding. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): I start with the relation between mixis and krasis (part 3) and then focus on the use of krasis in respect to health, environment and procreation (part 4). Finally, I discuss the concept of krasis in relation to blood, intelligence and soul (part 5). In these parts, I will explore the extent to which Aristotle draws on the medical theory and accommodates it into his own accounts, and also how much he innovates and broadens its scope of application. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): flesh and bones and such-like come from these [elements], the hot becoming cold and the cold hot when they approach the mean (to meson), for here they are neither one thing nor the other, and the mean is large and not an indivisible point. Similarly dry and wet and suchlike produce flesh and bone and the rest in the middle range (kata mesotēta). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Not only are there people of inherently unstable krasis (such as melancholics, who need permanent medical attention, “because their krasis keeps their bodies in a constant state of irritation, and their appetites are continually active”), but also individuals with a relatively healthy constitution and stable krasis who are under permanent threat of losing the healthy balance. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): The first thesis is that (1) disease and death will have to be analysed on the basis of a reduction of the body to its basic components (ch. 1). The second thesis, (2), seeks to ground medicine and cure on a prior knowledge of the nature or being of the body conceived as a study of the origins of human beings and of the way they were generated (ch. 20). … In both cases, the critique takes an anti-reductionist stance. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): All those who have undertaken to speak or write about medicine, having laid down as a hypothesis for their account hot or cold or wet or dry or anything else they want, [1] narrowing down the primary cause of diseases and death for human beings and laying down the same one or two things as the cause in all cases, clearly go wrong in much that they say (VM 1.1, i.570.1–7 L.). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): the author argues that medicine gains its credibility as an art as it examines in detail two spheres of phenomena in the body that are responsible for health and disease. The first relates to the powers; the second to the structures of the body (VM 22.1, i.626.6–7 L.). … Powers are defined as ‘the acuity and strength of the humours’ (VM 22.1, i.626.8–9 L.). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): the reason we should examine external animal parts and artefacts is to discover the functions such structures support. This is the direction that the author urges us to take in order to search for an explanation in the domain of medicine. … What he does not know and what is invisible and beyond his comprehension is their function. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Now the ancients who first began philosophising about nature were examining the material origin and that sort of cause: what matter is and what sort of thing it is, and how the whole comes to be from it and what moves it … Aristotle’s objection against his predecessors is that descriptions of the formation of parts … that rely on the description of the elements, their properties, and their natural motions … are insufficient for explaining the presence of such bodily parts (Part. an. 1.1, 640b5–16). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): if it is by virtue of its configuration and colour that each of the animals and their parts is what it is, Democritus might be speaking correctly; for he appears to assume this. … The use of the term σχῆμα in the text includes not only the outline of the entity in question but other properties as well … The focus on the σχῆμα of a part as opposed to the procedure that generated it is understood as a first stage in the explanation of bodily parts … But of course such a description is insufficient, for we have to move on to the functions. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): we could understand Aristotle’s project as aiming to get a clear grasp of how the basic principles function in a domain that, for the author, the theories of early natural philosophers leave obscure. In other words … the mere fact that Aristotle tries to explain how from a few basic element potentials we get the complexity of the natural bodies around us allows one to think that he does not posit these elements as mere ‘hypotheses’. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): On the priority between natural philosophy and medicine, they seem to be diametrically opposed. Yet there is a common element that must be emphasised … those physicians who have subtle and inquiring minds have something to say about natural science, and claim to derive their principles therefrom, and the most accomplished of those who deal with natural science tend to conclude with medical principles (Resp. 480b21–31). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle is the first writer we know of to use the phrase “art imitates nature” (ἡ τέχνη μιμεῖται τὴν φύσιν). On three occasions, he uses it to justify positing ends or purpose in nature: twice in the Physics and once in the Protrepticus. … when he appeals to it in these arguments, he does so without elaboration. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): the author of the Hippocratic Epidemics 6 claims “[people’s] natures are doctors in cases of illness (νούσων φύσιες ἰητροί)” and that “nature discovers methods (ἔφοδοι) by itself”, suggesting that methods used in medicine are derived from natural processes. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Early Greek medical writers used the art-nature analogy to defend medicine as a reliable τέχνη (art) against charges that its successes were due to τύχη (luck), grounding medical method in the intelligible order of nature. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): I challenge the teleological reading of Aristotle’s claim “art imitates nature”. I argue that parallels in early Greek medical and philosophical works are antecedents of Aristotle’s view on the relationship between art and nature. … The phrase “art imitates nature” in these works does not imply a commitment to natural teleology. Instead, it expresses a common belief about how artistic methods of production were first discovered and progressed: that art, as Stephen Halliwell puts it, “follows the pattern of nature.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Alcmaeon says that sleep comes about from the retreat of the blood into the blood-flowing veins … Empedocles says that sleep comes about from moderate cooling in the heat in the blood … Diogenes says if the blood, being generally diffused, fills the veins and thrusts the air … sleep comes about … Blood, heat, and pneuma dominate this conversation. Certainly, the first two of these elements are also active in digestion … but food itself does not seem to have played a noteworthy role … in any of these theories. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): sleep is not just any incapacitation of the sensitive faculty, rather this affection comes about from the exhalations attendant on food. He explains that the concoction of food in the digestive organs produces an exhalation (ἀναθυμίασις) … whose hot nature … causes it to rise from the gut into the venous system and thence to the head. … the mass of food exhalations … descends on the heart, effectively immobilizing all its sensitive functions. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle names soporific drugs, fatigue, and certain diseases as alternative efficient causes, but, in each case, they produce sleep precisely because they mimic food’s role in triggering the digestive process. Indeed, he says that the action of soporifics is “proof” of his thesis about food: they all cause the head to become heavy. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): it is particularly interesting that he decided to forgo his usual procedure and not engage with other philosophers’ theories at the beginning of the De somno. My suggestion is that he was instead engaging tacitly with a different circle, namely the medical one. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): periods of sleep while fasting strengthen and cool, if they are not long, for they empty the moisture in the body; if they are longer, they heat up and melt the flesh and dissolve the body and make it weak. In one who has eaten, periods of sleep warm and moisten, distributing the nutriment. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): infants sleep constantly since they are warm, moist creatures, whose disproportionately large heads accommodate an enormous traffic in exhalations. In contrast, people with large veins, which are able to rapidly drain the head, do not need much sleep. Melancholics, too, are minimal sleepers because they have naturally cool dispositions, which are not hot enough to produce sizable quantities of digestive exhalation. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): These two pieces, when read together, constitute valuable sources of information for a tacit dialogue between medicine and natural philosophy in antiquity, each providing us with a representative example of the exchange of knowledge between kindred yet theoretically demarcated fields of what might be called ‘ancient science’. Specifically, I will first show that the Hippocratic author, in the parts of the text where his natural philosophical interests are most prominent, seems to intentionally employ a number of examples originating not in the medical field but rather in the field of natural philosophy; and secondly that for this reason, among others, his text appears to have attracted the attention of Aristotle, who draws heavily on it for his own selection of examples in On Youth. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle’s main goal in this treatise is to present a coherent account of all the necessary factors ensuring life. These factors are (1) the presence of the soul in the middle part of the body, (2) the presence of vital heat in the middle part of the body as an active principle, (3) the need for nutrition and for harmonisation with the physical environment, and (4) the need for cooling. The association of these factors with the concept of life is by no means Aristotle’s innovation; yet the way they are interwoven, structured, and presented with the aim of clarifying the conditions under which a living body remains alive and healthy vividly exemplifies for the first time in extant Greek literature a psychophysiological theory of life. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): These prerequisites can be summarised as follows: nutrition, heat, breath (‘exhalation / inhalation’ / reception of air from outside), the localisation of the life-principle and the influence of the external environment. Genit. / Nat. Pueri is probably the first extant text in which all these prerequisites are deployed in order to constitute the broader conceptual framework upon which life-principles rest. Such a conceptual framework, as both Aristotle and the medical author show, can be applied to different forms of life (humans, animals, and plants) and to a variety of life-stages (adults, children, and embryos). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): And if the environment exceeds in coldness due to the season, when there are severe frosts, the force of the heat diminishes; but if there are heat-spells and the moisture drawn from the ground cannot produce a cooling effect, the heat is brought to an end by exhaustion … Now, of animals, since some live in the water and others spend their life in the air, it is from and through these media that they procure their cooling, the former by means of water, the latter by means of air. (6, 470a27–b4) (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Although in both texts the heat of the environment and the natural (i.e., internal or connate) heat are sharply distinguished, heat in general is conceived of as a constructive agent. In Genit. / Nat. Pueri, heat is responsible at an initial stage for condensing the spermatic residue. As it causes the seed to inflate, the seed takes on a spherical shape (στρογγύλη), forming on its surface a membrane similar to the membrane formed on the surface of bread. At a later stage of development, the bones of the embryo are said to “grow hard as a result of the coagulating action of heat”. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): You can see what happens from the case of burning wood—any kind of wood will behave in the same way, but green wood in particular. It will expel air where it has been cut, and when this air gets outside, it eddies around the cut. This is a matter of common observation (τοῦτο γινόμενον ὁρέομεν), and the inference is obvious: the air in the wood, since it is hot, draws to itself cold air to feed upon, at the same time as it expels air. If this were not the case, then neither would the air eddy as it is expelled. For everything which is heated is fed by a proportionate quantity of cold. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Gen. an. 1.17–22 is a series of close debates with medical authorities and is mainly focused on the human. Gen. an. 1.18 includes dialectic with Empedocles and Anaxagoras, but these also appear to be medically orientated. At times, Aristotle talks of “animal” or “female” and “male”, but then immediately makes clear that he is thinking primarily about people. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): This paper details overlaps between the ancient medical works on women’s health and Aristotle’s De generatione animalium and Historia animalium Book 7. … While Balme’s attitude toward Hippocratic influence has been popular in the past, the medical background to Aristotle’s biology is now receiving increasing philosophical attention. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): there is tension in reproductive science—humans are both paradigm and exceptional. While that pattern is apparent more generally, within gynaecological discussions it is even more pronounced. Where Aristotle uses the human as paradigm in his zoology, this appears to be a hang-over from Platonic ideas of us as separate from and above other living nature. In contrast, the use of the female human as paradigm in reproductive theory comes from an engagement with ancient gynaecology. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle heavily relies on medical sources for data about menstruation, gestation, fertility tests, and women’s pathological conditions while attempting to integrate this human-focused information into his broader zoological framework. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle comes up with his own theory of reproduction and sex difference in dialectic with doctors (Gen. An. 1.17–22), who concentrate on human beings, and particularly women, and from here applies this knowledge to the rest of the natural living world. … where Aristotle uses the human as paradigm in his zoology, this appears to be a hang-over from Platonic ideas. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): “although Aristotle was writing later than the period of the composition of the Hippocratic treatises, and although he was not primarily concerned with pathology and therapy, many of his concerns were the same and he considered the Hippocratics part of the rational tradition with which he could have a meaningful dialogue.” Dean-Jones (1996) 19–20. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle argues that, unlike in other animals in which the gestational period has a fixed limit, in humans the duration of pregnancy can range anywhere from seven to eleven months (Hist. an. 7.4, 584a33–584b1). … in their case too, the beginning of the conception escaped the women’s notice. For often when winds occurred earlier in [or: in front of] their uterus … and then later they have intercourse and conceive, they believe that the former was the beginning of the conception. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): all these claims about the variability of the human gestational period, about the survival-chances of babies born during different gestational months, and about winds entering the uterus and producing misleading signs of conception are derived directly from the Hippocratic text On the Nature of the Child (Nat. Puer. 30, vii.532–534 L.): “whenever the uterus takes breath into itself out of the cavity, which blows wind into it, and when it swells up—for this happens—women believe that they conceived then.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle’s account in Gen. an. 4.2 on how winds (and waters and places) affect women’s pregnancies uses Aer. as its main source of “facts”. … Aristotle did not conduct his biological research in a vacuum. And therefore … we can only make sense of his claims about winds that enter uteri and affect pregnancies in various ways by taking their wide-ranging medical background and influence into consideration. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle generally accepts the evidence presented by the medical authors as trustworthy and as in need of explanation. Aristotle’s dispute with the medical thinkers in this context, then, is a dispute about what counts as the best explanation of the evidence, while the “facts” themselves—whether derived from their own (alleged) direct observations or from (alleged) first person reports from women—are treated as authoritative. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): And while he rejects the pangenesis account of reproduction, he generally accepts the evidence presented by the medical authors as trustworthy and as in need of explanation. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle’s preservation of the epistemic authority of women … by claiming that their uterus filled with windy or airy materials appears to come at a cost for Aristotle’s own theory of reproduction, for it is not clear what exactly these materials could be according to Aristotle, or what mechanism could explain their presence in the uterus. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): How is a natural kind generated? In modern biology, the standard response would appeal to evolutionary mechanisms. But Aristotle would find the question misguided, at least in most cases. He does, however, show a keen interest in answering another question, the answer to which depends in part on a peculiar notion of adaptation: what accounts for a biological kind being the kind that it is and that it has always been? The answer relies primarily on interrelated concepts like essence (to ti ēn einai), defining account (logos), form (eidos), sets of specific capacities (dynameis) and functions (erga), and final cause (to hou heneka). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Stagnant waters and marshes moisten and heat (ὑγραίνει καὶ θερμαίνει) … Valleys devoid of water dry and heat (ξηραίνει καὶ θερμαίνει). They heat because they are hollow and circumscribed, and they dry both because of the dryness of the food and because the air that is breathed, being dry, draws the moisture (ἕλκει … τὸ ὑγρόν) from the bodies to use as nutrition for itself … (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): But—and this is the key point in our passage—while an animal may try to find relief in a place that is contrary to its bodily constitution and may even do so periodically, its nature itself is preserved chiefly in suitable places (ἡ δὲ φύσις ἐν τοῖς οἰκεῖοις σώζεται μάλιστα τόποις Resp. 14, 477b16). This sharp distinction between natures and transient states, between physeis and hexeis or diatheseis, forms the brunt of his critique of Empedocles’ view. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): According to Aer. 3 (ii.14–18 L. = 26,22–28,23 Diller), people living in lands that are exposed to southerly winds (which are warmer and presumably carry a considerable amount of moisture) will have a moister constitution, including moist heads that are full of phlegm, and a rather flabby appearance (τὰ εἴδεα … ἀτονώτερα); their diseases will be due largely to excess of moisture. Those living in regions swept by northerly winds (Aer. 4, ii.18–22 L. = 28,24–32,5 Diller) and where water is hard and cold tend to have a drier constitution; they are said to be sturdy and lean (εὐτόνους καὶ σκελιφρούς), and their characters are more fierce than mild (τὰ τε ἤθεα ἀγριώτερα ἤ ἡμερώτερα). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): The same kinds of animals (ta d’auta) are longer lived in hot countries than in cold, for the same reason as that which makes them larger. The size of animals which have a cold nature makes this obvious; so snakes, lizards, and reptiles with horny scales are large in hot countries, and so are testacea in the Red Sea; for the warm moisture causes growth as well as life. But in cold countries the moisture in animals is more watery; consequently it congeals easily, so that in the northern climes animals with little or no blood either do not occur at all (neither terrestrial animals on land, nor water creatures in the sea), or if they do occur they are smaller and shorter lived; for the frost robs them of growth (ἀφαιρεῖται γὰρ ὁ πάγος τὴν αὔξησιν). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Animals that contain a great deal of moisture have straight hair, because in their hair the moisture advances by flowing, not by dripping. That is why Scythians by the Black Sea and the Thracians have straight hair: both their constitution and the surrounding air (ὁ περιέχων ἀήρ) are moist. On the other hand, Ethiopians and people who live in hot regions have curly hair, because both their brain and the surrounding air (ὁ ἀήρ ὁ περιέχων) are dry. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In contrast to Aristotle’s biological works, where Hippocratic echoes are numerous and clear, the issue of Hippocratic influence on Aristotle’s political thought is much more entangled. And if several passages enable us to establish a connection between Aristotle’s views on humans as biological beings and his views on ethical matters, these texts are easier to connect to moral development than to the nature of cities. For this reason, my focus will be, quite naturally, on a unique passage from Aristotle’s Politics 7.7, which addresses the influence of climate on the nature of humans as citizens. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): anyone who, though human, belongs by nature (φύσει) not to himself but to another is by nature (φύσει) a slave; and a human being belongs to another if, in spite of being human, he is a possession (κτῆμα); and a possession is a tool for action and has a separate existence (1254a14–17). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): It would be ridiculous for anyone to think that spiritedness (τὸ θυμοειδές) didn’t come to be (ἐγγεγονέναι) in cities from individuals who are held to possess this quality, such as the Thracians, Scythians, and generally those from the north, or that the same isn’t true of the love of learning (τὸ φιλομαθές), which occurs where we live, or of the love of money (τὸ φιλοχρήματον), which we might say is not least likely displayed by the Phoenicians and those who live in Egypt. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Returning to Aristotle, then, the proposition that animals and plants should thrive mainly in places which match their material natures sounds reasonable enough, but this could well run the risk of circularity in a world where adaptation is not conceived as a dynamic interaction between a variable population and gradually changing environments: an animal lives in some place rather than another because that place offers a certain type of nutrition, and the animal needs that kind of nutrition due to the composition of its body; but that composition (simply put, the particular ratio between the moist and the dry in a particular type of organism) is due to the fact that the animal lives in some place rather than another … (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): What Socrates introduces here is a geographical tripartition that is tailor-made to fit the context, one that establishes the three conceptually distinct parts of the soul. Elsewhere in the Republic, it becomes clear that the tripartite analysis of the soul is a model that replaces the real and irreducible complexity of individual souls. Here, at this stage of the dialogue, tripartition enables Socrates to present the soul as a locus of various alliances between its three parts, alliances that keep the individual—and by analogy the city—operational and capable of avoiding the deadlock that would result from only two mutually opposed forces. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): After all, even the much-simplified explanation in the passage from Pol. 7.7 quoted above advances two claims that are not only distinct, but potentially contradictory, namely (1) that the Greeks are naturally fit to rule other ethnicities, but (2) that some Greeks are nevertheless born as “natural” slaves. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): The nations of the Greeks (τὰ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἔθνη) also differ from each other in the same way. For some have a one-sided nature (τὴν φύσιν μονόκωλον), whereas others have a good mixture of both these capacities (τὰ δὲ εὖ κέκραται πρὸς ἀμφοτέρας τὰς δυνάμεις ταύτας). (7.7, 1327b18–36) This is the entire passage. The rest of the chapter then focuses on θυμός and friendliness. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): References to medicine and medical writings in Aristotle’s ethical treatises are occasional, isolated and, for the most part, allusive. It is therefore not surpris- ing that they are often neglected when it comes to assessing the importance of medicine in Aristotle’s works as a whole. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In other words, in the face of intemperance or incontinence (akrasia), talking about healing or therapy is not simply a meta- phor, as is clearly shown by the case of melancholic patients, who are afflicted with both a mental and a physical disorder. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Yet one can also use this partial overlap as a method- ological principle for the present analysis. My working hypothesis is precisely that the scattered references to the “physiologoi” provide a useful thread for us to follow in order to assess Aristotle’s debt to medicine in his ethical treatises. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In this text, the reference to physicists (more precisely to those, like Empe- docles, who endorse the ‘like-to-like’ principle) is quite conventional and gen- eral. It sounds like a mere topos, whose main purpose is to introduce the ques- tion of friendship in a typically dialectic way. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): [2] The explanation of how the ignorance is dissolved and the incontinent man regains his knowledge, is the same as in the case of the man drunk or asleep and is not peculiar to this condition; we must go to the students of natural science for it. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): [5] we may say of most physical inquirers, and of those physicians who study their art more philosophically, that while the former end with a dis- cussion of medicine, the latter start from a consideration of nature. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Two arguments in Eudemian Ethics 2 that are crucial to Aristotle’s definition of moral virtue as a mean state contain claims that Aristotle says are clear by induction. In these contexts, he explicitly appeals to examples coming from arts and sciences like gymnastic training and medicine for evidence. But Aris- totle does not here, or elsewhere (at least in any extant work), including the parallel arguments in the Nicomachean Ethics, actually supply or discuss the evidence that makes these inductive arguments clear. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Fortunately, strong sup- port for them can be found in the Hippocratic Corpus, especially in On Ancient Medicine and On Regimen. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Discussions of Aristotle’s definition of virtue and doctrine of the mean typ- ically suffer from one or more of the following interpretive deficiencies. First, many influential studies focus exclusively on Nicomachean Ethics 2, and either ignore or pay little attention to the parallel Eudemian Ethics 2 arguments. Second, and partly as a result, many studies ignore the inductive form of the arguments as Aristotle explicitly describes them in the Eudemian Ethics. Third, and again partly because of the foregoing, most commentators ignore or down- play the medical background which, in my interpretation, forms almost the (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): He shows that the doctrine was never intended as any kind of “practical guideline” (or “decision procedure” or “action-guiding rule”), but rather as a conceptual tool for cla- rifying the conditions under which the non-rational soul can be said to be in a good condition in the context of specific actions. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Although Hursthouse is extreme in her belittlement of both the scientific background of the doctrine and Aristotle’s adaptation of it in his ethics, she is certainly not alone in failing to appreciate the full significance of the medical background. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): First, then, let us consider this, that it is the nature of such things ⟨sc. virtues⟩ to be destroyed by deficiency and excess, as we see in the case of strength and health (for to gain light on things imperceptible we must use the evidence of sensible things); both excessive and deficient exer- cise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is propor- tionate (σύμμετρα) both produces and increases and preserves it. So too it is, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): For example, if ten is many but two few, six takes the middle in accord- ance with the thing. For it exceeds and is exceeded by an equal amount. And this is a mean according to the arithmetic proportion. But this must not be taken as the mean in relation to us. For it is not the case that if for someone ten pounds is a lot and two is a little to eat, the gymnastic trainer will order six pounds. For this is perhaps a lot or a little for the one who is taking it; indeed, for Milo it is a little, but for the one who is just beginning gymnastic training it is a lot. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): The text I will discuss in this chapter, the Problemata, with its micro-physiological questions and its concern with the determinacy of individual bodily signs in relation to the emotions, offers a rather different view, which foregrounds the body of the person undergoing the emotion in its small-scale reactions and bodily states. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Anima, a key feature of the emotions seems to be that they are in various ways necessarily implicated with the body, being “enmattered accounts” (λόγοι ἔνυ- λοί, De An. 1.1, 403a25): the body can play an active part in determining the experience of an emotion with varying degrees of external triggering or even causation. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): To sum up: the emotions in the Hippocratic texts are largely a phenomenon with a bodily, medical, pathological, or physiological retrospective meaning and nothing more; the complex shame of the epileptic is the exception that confirms the rule. The movement is unidirectional, from this meaning to the observed individual. The emotion-sign is not to be unpacked, just as sleep or mania or diarrhoea are not. It is instead a unit, a brick in the prognostic or clin- ical edifice. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): First, the Problemata reverse the hermeneutic order when it comes to ob- serving emotions in human individuals. The Hippocratics viewed the emotions as one symptom among many, like runny stools or dry eyes. For the Problem- ata, the emotions are instead an explanandum and a physiological construct and they accordingly start from the pathos and then ask about the illness or physiological background. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Why are birds and human beings and the courageous animals the hard- est (τὰ ἀνδρεῖα σκληρότερα)? Is it because spirit (ὁ θυμός) involves heat? For fear is a process of cooling (ὁ γὰρ φόβος κατάψυξις). Therefore, those beings whose blood is hot (τὸ αἷμα ἔνθερμόν) are courageous and spirited (ἀνδρεῖα καὶ θυμοειδῆ). Indeed, blood is (their) nourishment. Further, plants that are watered with warm water are all harder (σκληρότερα). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Is it also because anxiety is not a transference of heat from the upper regions to the lower, as in the case of fear (which is why the bowels are loosened in those who are afraid), but an increase of heat, as in the case of anger? For in fact, anger is a boiling of the heat around the heart; and the one who is anxious is affected not by fear or by cold, but by an increase in heat. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Why, in those who are spirited, when the heat collects within, are they heated and bold, but in those who are afraid (the effect) is the oppos- ite? Or does (the heat collect) not in the same area, but in those feeling anger it collects around the heart, and this is why they are bold, red- faced, and full of breath, as the course of the heat is upward, but in those feeling fear the course is downward, as the blood and the heat escape together, and this is why there is a loosening of the bowels? (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Most strikingly, the Problemata depart from the approach of the Hippocratics in that the emotions are not treated as self-explanatory facts but as composites to be unpacked, deconstructed, and explored in their interrelations among themselves and with various bodily (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): The idea that Aristotle was “an attentive reader of Hippocrates”, as Jouanna puts it, goes back to Galen, who took for granted that, in some of his theories and accounts, Aristotle drew on the very same medical sources and authorities that Galen was familiar with under Hippocrates’ name. And since Galen believed that at least some of the texts were written by Hippocrates himself, he called Aristotle an “interpreter of Hippocrates’ reasoning on nature”.

(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Lorenzo Perilli critically examines the very title of our volume, Aristotle reads Hippocrates, and asks three crucial questions: what is meant by ‘Aristotle’, what is meant by ‘Hippocrates’, and what is meant by ‘reading and writing’ medicine in classical Greece? (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): One possible source is On the Nature of Man, which in chap. 11 introduces the very same account of vessels that Aristotle ascribes to Polybus. Accordingly, it seems possible that both Aristotle and the author of On the Nature of Bones copied this specific account from On the Nature of Man, a highly original work that introduces the theory of four humours and which can also be ascribed to Polybus on the basis of the evidence in Anonymus Londinensis. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): On the inappropriate use of medical texts by lay persons, see Aristotle, Pol. 3.16, 1287a37–41. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): material bodies are structured from the bottom up by three layers of material, each one of which plays the role of matter for the next level higher up. At the bottom, we have the four elements (1st level). The four elemental powers associated with the elements help to constitute the material uniform animate or inanimate bodies (2nd level). The uniform parts in turn serve as matter for the non-uniform parts of animals and plants (3rd level). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle warns us that the changes this network supports depend on higher-level causes, i.e., the natures of whole organisms, which determine what will transform into what, as well as when and where. … “a corpse is a man in name only (Mete. 4.12, 389b23–32).” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Democritus likewise is reported to have said, “we are pupils (μαθηταί) of the animals in the most important things: the spider for spinning and mending, the swallow for building, and the songsters, swan and nightingale, for singing, by way of imitation (κατὰ μίμησιν)”. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Leonid Zhmud notes four common characteristics of τέχνη in this sense: (1) it is meant to be useful; (2) it serves a specific purpose; (3) it is specialists’ knowledge of the means necessary to obtain a specific end; and (4) it must be able to be transferred to others by teaching. … the theoretical sciences of classical Greece arose from reflection on τέχνη and used it as a model for their own research. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): in all disciplines (αἱ μέθοδοι) which have principles, causes and elements, knowledge, especially scientific knowledge (τὸ εἰδέναι καὶ τὸ ἐπίστασθαι), follows from an acquaintance with them. … In the passage from the Metaphysics, he uses the examples of medicine and gymnastics as obvious cases of sciences (ἐπιστῆμαι) that seek the principles and causes of what they know. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): The advantage of this reading is that it accommodates thinkers who, like Democritus and Lucretius, assert art imitates nature but deny teleology and purpose in nature, and who, like Posidonius and other Stoics, think nature is a divine artist. It also accounts for the similarities between Aristotle’s and his contemporaries’ use of the analogy between art and nature. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Plato uses art, specifically what he calls the method of Hippocrates, as a model when motivating a scientific rhetoric in the Phaedrus. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): After Aristotle, this way of thinking about art’s imitation of nature continues. As we will see, it is used in this sense by Theophrastus, Posidonius, Lucretius, Seneca, and Galen — even works as distant as Harvey’s Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium, Dante’s Inferno, and Hobbes’ Leviathan. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): “Art imitates nature”, in other words, works as a reputable or endoxic claim and, in using it, Aristotle is following his own advice in the Rhetoric for providing arguments that begin from premises that one’s interlocutors will accept. (Rhetorica 1.1, 1355a17–18.) (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): This same doxographer proves to be a responsible reporter … he characterizes Aristotle’s position on sleep in familiar terms: “the cause of it is moisture evaporating from the trunk to the places around the head, arising from the food below.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Mariska Leunissen in chapter 7, focusing on a specific gynaecological phenomenon called wind-pregnancies … argues that Aristotle’s accounts of this phenomenon in the History of Animals and Generation of Animals rely heavily on specific facts and opinions found in the Hippocratic On the Nature of the Child (Nat. Puer. 30). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Women are treated as both paradigmatic for understanding female animals generally and as unique in the animal kingdom due to their excessive fluidity, heat, and socio-cultural domestication, which Aristotle connects to pathologies like variable gestation and difficult labor. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle’s general methodological recommendations emphasise finding what is most common to the object under investigation before proceeding to distinguish differences that relate to functions and finally what is peculiar (idia) to each kind. … The data provided in the Hist. an. follows this pattern for many animals but makes an exception for humans. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): These [peculiarities] include: hands (Part. an. 4.10, 687a5), upright posture, buttocks (Hist an. 2.1, 499a31, Part. an. 4.10, 689b5), thinnest of skin (Gen. an. 5.2, 781b19–22), soft lips and tongue (Part. an. 2.16, 659b30–34), greying and balding (Gen.an. 5.2), the most naked bodies and the smallest nails. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle affirms the general reliability of women in possessing knowledge of when they conceived and of how long they carried their pregnancies. … instead of blaming them for this mistake, he suggests that the miscalculation was caused by them experiencing symptoms that are like those caused by true conception. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle’s discussion of the male and female contributions to reproduction and of the role of female pleasure in his Generation of Animals (Gen. an.) reveal a deep familiarity with the medical theories expressed in the Hippocratic On Generation (Genit.) and On the Nature of the Child (Nat. Puer.). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): the ones born before the seventh month never survive, that the ones born in the seventh and ninth month survive and thrive, but that those born in the eighth month — at least those born in Greece — for the most part die and rarely survive. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Despite Aristotle’s affirmation of the epistemological authority of women concerning the timing of conception, Leunissen demonstrates that his main source of knowledge of the facts concerning gunaikeia were the medical experts writing about these issues rather than women themselves. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): It is, therefore, of necessity that life and the maintenance of this heat exist simultaneously, and that what is called death be its destruction. (4, 469b18–20) (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): But we must not entertain the notion that it is for purposes of nutrition that respiration is designed, and believe that the internal fire is fed by the breath; respiration, as it were, adding fuel to the fire, while the feeding of the flame results in the outward passage of the breath. To combat this Aristotle says “Observation shows rather …”. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): At the same time, we find the Hippocratic author insisting that his opinion is patently obvious to anyone and a matter of common observation. By way of response, Aristotle challenges this view (“Observation shows rather …”, μᾶλλον … ὁρῶμεν, 473a11–12) and concludes by rejecting, for the second time, the claim that breath nourishes vital heat. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Likewise in blooded animals, the heart is generated first; this is clear from what we have concluded by observation in those cases in which it was possible to see while animals were still coming into being. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): The principle of thermal inversion, or, according to these passages, the notion that when the atmosphere is cold, the underground earth is hot (or less cold) and vice versa, entails the balance required for plants to live. This mechanism of environmental adaptation enables plants to keep their most vital part protected. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): I have attempted to demonstrate that Aristotle was familiar with the content of the Hippocratic work and, when writing On Youth, found several of its examples to be useful and effective communication devices for his own readers. Furthermore, through an examination of selected passages, I have shown that Aristotle and the Hippocratic author share a methodological commitment to combining empirical observation with abstract reasoning. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Living beings that grow in water (Gen. an. 3.11, 761a32–b23) exhibit a greater variety of shapes (are more polymorpha) than those living on land or in the soil, because what is moist is more malleable or plastic (euplastoteran) than earth. Moreover, “the more and the less and nearer and farther make a significant and surprising difference.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In cold regions sheep and human beings are affected differently from each other: for (gar) the Scythians have soft hair, but Sarmatian sheep have hard hair. The cause of this (τούτου δ’αἴτιον) is the same as it is in all wild animals. For (gar) the cold hardens them by solidifying and drying them, for it removes the moisture from them. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In general, the wild animals are wilder (agriōtera) in Asia, but all those in Europe are braver (andreiotera), while those in Libya are the most varied in form (polymorphotata). (…) For it is said that owing to the lack of rain animals meet at the waterholes and mate with each other even if not of the same kind. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Animals (and plants) are occasionally presented as assuming a mainly passive role, while the environment becomes a complex network of efficient causes that can determine the ‘chemical’ composition of organisms and can impose structural features. Even the explanatory strategies employed by the author of Airs, Waters, Places are sometimes present in Aristotle’s biological writings. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): We have an immediate guide on this point in the case of the soul, where we find natural ruler and natural subject, whose virtues we say are different — that is, one belongs to the rational element, the other to the non-rational. Well then, it is clear that the same holds in the other cases too, so that most things are rulers and subjects by nature. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): It is, then, nature’s purpose to make the bodies too of freemen and of slaves different, the latter strong enough to be used for essentials, the former erect and useless for that kind of work, but fit for the life of a citizen. … the opposite also often occurs — some have the body of a free man, others the soul. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): As for those who farm, certainly — since one should express one’s highest hope — they should be slaves. They should not all be of the same race (μήτε ὁμοφύλων πάντων), nor should they be spirited (μήτε θυμοειδῶν), because then they will be useful in their work and can be relied upon not to revolt. And as second best, they should be barbarians who live in neighbouring areas. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): On the contrary, Pol. 7.7 is an important text insofar as it shows how difficult it is, for Aristotle, to pass from nature to politics once he steps outside the confines of the Greek household and classical polis. There is no doubt that Aristotle looks beyond these confines. But what he sees, or imagines, amounts to a mirror that reflects the distortions at the heart of his own ideal city. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In any case, both passages, despite being somewhat elliptical — especially about the identity of the natural scientists they allude to — are valuable for the explicit link they make between questions of political science and the discourse of natural philosophers. This is rarely the case, and it is worth noting. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): [4] The precepts of physicians and natural philosophers about generation should also be studied by the parents themselves; the physicians give good advice about the favourable conditions of the body, and the natural philosophers about the winds; of which they prefer the north to the south. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Moreover, the change described in text [2] is a ‘dissolution’, a lusis, as indicated by the use of the verb λύεται. This is not metaphorical terminology, but a term that belongs not only to Aristotle’s own physiology but also to medical vocabulary (as well as luô, eklusis, apolusis, dialusis). In the Hippocratic corpus, it designates a kind of release or evacuation. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Accordingly, in Eth. Nic. 7.9, 1150b33–34, Aristotle explains that akrasia is an occasional disease, like epilepsy. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): a) Aristotle does not dissociate ethical arguments on akrasia from the physiological account of it. He clearly thinks that states of moral disorder are also states of bodily disorder. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): For all these reasons, we should take the physical considerations of the ethical writings as based on a minimal and pragmatic physiology, rather than engaged with a scientific technical discourse or discipline, on which political science would in turn be dependent. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In general, the idea that psychic faculties are common to both body and soul finds concrete support in several passages of the Eth. Nic. At this point we can conclude that political science, in so far as it is concerned with psychology, necessarily involves physiology as well, as suggested by the comparison with the holistic physician. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): According to Jaeger (referring to the parallel passage in the Eth. Nic.), in calling moral virtue a “hexis”, Aristotle was adapting medical terminology: “to attempt a definition of virtue … we must determine its genus, and this will not be difficult after we have compared the moral virtues with the physical virtues.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): One must grasp that in everything continuous and divisible there is excess and deficiency and mean (ὑπεροχὴ καὶ ἔλλειψις καὶ μέσον). And these either in relation to others or in relation to us, for example in gymnastic training, in medicine, in building, in piloting, and in any action whatsoever. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): The doctrine of the mean is not something that he imagines agents consciously (or even unconsciously) incorporating into decision-making processes. The way that virtue is produced is not by pursuing the mean in every action, but by being habituated, through education, training, and punishment, to feel appropriate pleasure and pain. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In section ⟨3⟩, the author makes the essential claim that Aristotle has said is made in the art of medicine: “one should be skilled at hitting a mean” (Δεῖ γὰρ μέτρου τινὸς στοχάσασθαι). In fact, Aristotle may deliberately echo this in the conclusion to the Eth. Nic. 2.6 argument: “therefore virtue is a kind of mean, at least insofar as it aims at what is in the middle.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): “Aristotle knew On Regimen and read it closely. Moreover, accepting that Aristotle regularly alludes to the text of On Regimen and presents even the most peculiar of its ideas as if they were commonplace, one may infer that he reads the text as a representative of a more general approach and that he expects his audience to know them.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): That he was influenced in this attempt by the medical literature seems beyond doubt. Moreover, it can be said that Aristotle stands on solid inductive ground when he claims that arts such as gymnastic training and medicine aim at a mean and avoid excess and deficiency. This really was a credible medical doctrine. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Why do those who are anxious sweat in the feet, but not in the face? For it is more reasonable that when the whole body sweats, the feet would sweat more: for this region is the coldest, which is why it sweats least. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): To begin with, the author(s) implicitly makes a claim about the different skills and agendas of physicians and natural philosophers: the latter know more than the doctors themselves do about their methods. The doctor, in fact, appears to apply certain measures almost mechanically, while the scientist knows why they work. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Why do young men, when they first begin to have sex, after the act loathe/are repelled by the women with whom they had intercourse? Is it because the change brought about is great? For remembering the corresponding discomfort/unpleasantness that comes after, they avoid the woman with whom they associate that discomfort. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Why are those men who desire (passive) sex extremely ashamed to admit it, but they are not ashamed to admit to a desire for drinking or eating or any other such actions? Is it because the desires for most things are necessary, and some even destroy those who do not satisfy them? But the desire for sexual pleasure is superfluous. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Why, when we see someone being cut or burned or tortured or experiencing something else terrible, do we suffer along with him mentally? Is it because nature is common to all of us? So, when it [nature] sees something of this kind, it suffers along with the person experiencing it, owing to our kinship. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Why do those who are angry not become chilled (οὐ ῥιγῶσιν)? Is it because anger and spiritedness are the opposite of cowardice? Now anger is from fire (ὀργὴ ἀπὸ τοῦ πυρός), for it is by retaining a great deal of fire that they grow warm within (πολὺ γὰρ τὸ πῦρ κατέχοντες εἴσω χλιαίνονται). This is obvious in children: those who are enraged flush red from anger. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Why is it said: “Neither eat nor plant mint in wartime”? Is it because mint cools bodies? Its corruption of seed proves this. This is contrary to courage and spirit, which is the same in kind. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): The combination of corporeal attention to the experience of the emotions without renouncing recognition of its cognitive identity, its social and interpersonal contractedness, and its stake in subjectivity, is unique in the natural inquiry of ancient cultures.

See Also

• Nicomachean Ethics

• Theophrastus

• Galen

• Hippocrates

• Four Humours

• Teleology (Medicine)

• Humoral Theory

• Vis Medicatrix Naturae

• Avicenna

• Diocles of Carystos

• William Harvey

• History of Anatomy

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Nutton, V. (2023). Ancient Medicine (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. [Source ID: nutton-ancient-medicine-2023]
• Jouanna, J. (1999). Hippocrates. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. [Source ID: jouanna-hippocrates-1999]
• Temkin, O. (1973). Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell. [Source ID: temkin-galenism-1973]
• Ackerknecht, E. H. (1955). A Short History of Medicine. New York: Ronald Press. [Source ID: ackerknecht-shorthistory-1955]
• Siraisi, N. G. (1990). Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Source ID: siraisi-medievalmedicine-1990]
• Driesch, H. (1914). The History and Theory of Vitalism. Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Macmillan. [Source ID: driesch-historyvitalism-1914] — authority: superseded-but-valuable
• Bartoš, H. and Linka, M. (eds.) (2024). Aristotle Reads Hippocrates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Source ID: bartos-litvinov-aristotle-reads-hippocrates-2024]
• Jackson, Mark, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine. Oxford UP, 2011. (Authority: lead)