Aristotle and the Hippocratic De victu on innate heat and the kindled soul Hynek Bartoš Aristotle, the son of an elite physician, often in his extant works portrays the physician as a paradigmatic expert. Medicine serves him as an analogue to (and an illustration for) other fields of expertise, including rhetoric, poetics, ethics, and politics (cf. Jaeger 1957, Lloyd 1968, Craik 2006). He sometimes illustrates the works of nature with the skills and achievements of medical experts (PA 665a8, Phys. 199b31-21) and on one occasion he even mentions Hippocrates as the most prominent physician of the day (Polit. 1326a15). Accordingly, the rela- tion between Aristotle’s philosophy and the medical ideas and methods of his predecessors and contemporaries, and specifically those preserved in the so- called Corpus Hippocraticum, has been investigated by modern scholars from various points of view, and they arrive at markedly different conclusions. Fol- lowing the pioneering study on this topic, Poschenrieder 1887, many (mainly Hippocratic) scholars have considered Aristotle as ‘an attentive reader of Hip- pocrates’ (Jouanna 1999, 231), and dozens of Hippocratic passages have been suggested as possible sources of information and inspiration for Aristotle’s own thoughts (after Poschenrieder the most systematic contributions are Byl 1980 and Oser-Grote 2004). Yet in Aristotle’s zoological treatises there is, surprisingly, no reference to Hippocrates (with one or two exceptions physicians are not men- tioned by name), and very few verbatim parallels with the extant Hippocratic texts can be found. 1 Hence some scholars have rejected Poschenrieder’s conclu- sions (cf. Fredrich 1899, 9n4) and adopted the sceptical position that Aristotle was probably unacquainted with the Hippocratic writings that we have today and that he was actually not at all interested in the medical discussions of that time. 2 Ancient Philosophy 34 (2014) ©Mathesis Publications 1 1 In Historia animalium 511b23-30 we find a quotation ascribed to Syennesis, ‘the physician of Cyprus’, which is identical to a passage in the Hippocratic De natura ossium 8 (= L IX,174). HA, 512b12-513a7 quotes the views of Polybius, who is commonly identified with Polybus, the son-in- law of Hippocrates. Almost verbatim parallels to this passage are to be found in De natura ossium 9 (= L IX,174-176) and De natura hominis 11 (= L VI,58-60). Remarkably, in these exceptional pas- sages Aristotle strongly disagrees with the quoted authors, while at other places where he seems to be in agreement with medical authorities he does not mention their names and refers to them exclusively in plural, as if their knowledge were conceived as collective and anonymous. This obviously compli- cates (or even prevents) identification of his sources. 2 Fredrich 1899, 78-80: ‘Es macht den Eindruck als ob der grosse Philosoph in stolzer Abgeschiedenheit auf den medicinischen Kenntnissen des ausgehenden fünften Jahrhunderts weiter- baute und ohne Anatomie seine Spekulationen gründete, indem er sich um die Errungenschaften gle- ichzeitiger und etwas älterer Ärzte nicht kümmerte… Wie Plato nicht kennt, so haben Aristoteles und