Aristotle and His Hippocratic Precursors on Health and Natural Teleology
Aristotle and His Hippocratic Precursors on Health and Natural Teleology

Summary/Abstract: In Hippocratic treatises we find a concept of self-organizing and self-healing phusis, which anticipates Aristotle’s principle of natural teleology. Since Aristotle interprets most natural processes teleologically, it is surprising that Aristotle, contrary to some of the Hippocratic authors (but in accordance with others), is much more cautious in admitting cases of natural self-healing, and instead sets out the majority of these cases as something accidental, i.e. non-teleological. in the final section of the paper i will submit that this is due to Aristotle’s much more elaborate philosophical conception of the status of the artificial, and of the works and effects of craft. Moreover, as i shall point out, such a stance has important consequences for the image of medicine, as a model to be deployed in the field of practical philosophy, and particularly in ethics.

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