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By E. Farmon. Southern University, Baton Rouge.

The advantage of this interpretation is that in the later treatise (On Divination in Sleep) Aristotle explicitly refers to the earlier one (On Dreams) buy cheap npxl 30 caps on-line herbals himalaya, using it to try to explain two facts and characteristics of melancholics that at first sight seem difficult to square with each other. It appears that melancholics can have both vague and clear dreams; and which one of both affections manifests itself most strongly in a particu- lar case apparently depends on the person’s physiological state at the time (volume of air and heat, intensity of images), which in the case of unstable people like melancholics must be considered a variable factor. The fact that drunk- enness and melancholy are mentioned together, and are both said to be ‘pneumatic’ in character, will be discussed below, when I deal with Pr. With regard to the question of the melancholic ‘constitution’, it is worth noting that the use of the word pathos points to melancholy as a disease rather than a natural predisposition. However, it may well be that Aristotle chose the word pathos to refer to fever and drunkenness, without considering the difference (viz. There is a direct relation between the passages from On Divination in Sleep and the remark in the Eudemian Ethics (1248 a 39–40) about the euthuoneiria of melancholics. It is mentioned as an example of the way in which people who lack reason and deliberation (logos and bouleusis), by means of divine movement in their soul can still be successful in their actions and do the right thing. God] sees both the future and the present well, even in people whose reasoning faculty is disengaged; this is why melancholics have clear dreams, for it seems that the principle works more strongly when reason is disengaged’ (toÓto [i. However, he does not seem to have noticed that the relationship between Eudemian Ethics and On Dreams is the same as between On Divination in Sleep and On Dreams. His explanation is that this contradiction may have something to do with the fact that Aristotle later, in the Parva naturalia, denies that dreams could be of divine origin, something Aristotle considered possible in the Eudemian Ethics, which may well be earlier. In my opinion this explanation is not correct, as On Divination in Sleep also says that melancholics have clear dreams. Aristotle on melancholy 149 Aristotle distinguishes between two types of lack of self-control: on the one hand recklessness (propeteia), and on the other hand weakness (astheneia). According to Aristotle the difference is that the weak person thinks and deliberates, yet does not persist with the conclusions of his deliberations, whereas the reckless person does not think or deliberate at all. As examples of the reckless type of lack of self-control Aristotle mentions ‘the irritable’ (hoi oxeis ) and ‘the melancholics’ (hoi melancholikoi) in lines 25ff.

The doctrine of pneuma may be inspired by Diocles of Carystus (see Longrigg (1995) 441) npxl 30caps on-line herbals for blood pressure. On the claims of dietetics, and its relation to philosophy in the fourth century see also G. I should suggest that this difficulty is to be related to Aristotle’s endeav- ours to account for variations in psychic capacities and their performance by reference to variable bodily (anatomical, physiological, pathological) fac- tors – although it is not quite clear how these factors are to be accommodated within the ‘canonical’ doctrine of the incorporeality of the intellect and the changelessness of the soul. It is certainly to Aristotle’s credit as a scientist that he recognises the existence of these variations, most of which are prob- ably to be classified as belonging to the category of ‘the more and the less’ (diaforaª kaq’ Ëperocžn). Moreover, when it comes to physical defects, he also seems to apply a sort of principle of natural compensation, which manifests itself in his belief that nature (i. Aristotle on the matter of mind 233 but whose existence, however marginal their importance may be, Aristotle recognises as interesting and in need of explanation89 – an explanation which invokes the principle that even within the category of ‘what is con- trary to nature’ (t¼ par‡ fÅsin) there is such a thing as ‘according to nature’ (t¼ kat‡ fÅsin). However much this may seem to be applauded, it remains unclear how these gradualist and compensatory explanations should be accommodated within the ‘normative’ theory of De an. To be sure, it may be asked whether there is actually such a tension, for it might be argued that all instances of bodily influence on intellectual activ- ity discussed above can be classified under the rubric of the ‘dependence of the intellect on appearances’. Whether this affects the thesis of the incorporeality of the intellect, remains to be seen. The only terminological point we can make is that a number of passages assign an important role to dianoia, and it may be that this is Aristotle’s favourite term for intellectual activity on the borderlines between sense-perception and thinking; one sometimes gets the impression that it refers to a particular kind of thinking, a sort of attention, in any case a directed and concentrated intellectual activity (or the capacity to this). Neuhauser, however, rejected Baumker’s view by pointing¨ ¨ to a number of passages in which the verb dianoeisthai seems to be used as a general, non-specific term for any intellectual activity, including that of nous. There is, indeed, abundant evidence that in the border area between sense-perception and thinking, where elu- sive faculties such as ‘incidental perception’ (the perception that that white thing over there is the son of Diares), ‘common sense’ and imagination are at work, Aristotle is not always clear whether we are dealing with operations of the sensitive or the intellectual part of the soul. The question whether the judgement of images is a sensitive or an intellectual activity presents itself very strongly in On Dreams, where sometimes one sense (sight) corrects the other (touch), as in 460 b 21–2, but sometimes also an intellectual faculty is at work (as in 460 b 18–19), and sometimes it is unclear which faculty is judging (461 b 3ff.

If a measure such as a questionnaire is to be used in a community setting discount npxl 30caps on line herbals teas safe during pregnancy, then relia- bility has to be established in a similar community setting and not for example in a clinic setting where the patients form a well-defined sub-sample of a population. Patients who frequently answer questions about their illness may have well-rehearsed responses to Tests of reliability and agreement 317 questions and may provide an artificial estimate of reliability when compared to people in the general population who rarely consider aspects of an illness or condition that they do not have. Questionnaires are widely used in research studies to obtain information about per- sonal characteristics, illnesses and exposure to environmental factors. For a question- naire to be a useful research tool, the responses to questions must not have a substantial amount of measurement error. To measure test–retest reliability, the questionnaire is given to the same people on two separate occasions. Alternatively, if a questionnaire is designed to be administered by a clinician or researcher, it is administered on differ- ent occasions by different raters. An important concept is that the condition that the questionnaire is designed to measure must not have changed in the period between administrations and the time period must be long enough for the participants to have little recollection of their previous responses. This process may involve clinicians interpreting findings from physical examinations or imaging techniques such as X-rays. For example, a physician and a radi- ologist may independently review a series of patients’ digital chest X-rays to determine the presence or absence of tuberculosis. To assess the degree of concordance between the two clinicians’ ratings, the per cent agreement between the raters could be reported (e. However, this percentage could be misleading since it does not take into account the level of concordance between the two raters that may occur by chance. The kappa statistic can be used to assess the con- cordance of responses for two or more raters after taking account of chance agreement.