- Aristotle seems to be popular as a whipping boy these days, a sport often based upon myths like the one above. The more of these myths we hear repeated, the more people are inclined to believe that Aristotle held absurd opinions. The Wikipedia entry on the history of pain theory [4], for instance, says “Aristotle believed that pain was due to evil spirits that entered the body through an injury” and cites not a primary text by Aristotle, but “Models of Pain Perception” [5] by Steven Linton as the source. The author of that text says: “Aristotle, on the other hand, asserted that pain was due to evil spirits and the gods. These entered the body via an injury.”
Anyone who is even slightly familiar with Aristotle will be more than a little suspicious of that — it doesn’t sound like anything that Aristotle would say. Turns out that Linton uses as his source David Morris’ “Sociocultural and Religious Meanings of Pain” [6]. However, Linton appears to have misread Morris, who does not claim this, but rather mentions that some cultures believed evil spirits caused pain in a paragraph following one in which Aristotle is mentioned.
Thus by Chinese Whispers the claim gains spurious authority in Wikipedia, and the importance of citing primary texts is demonstrated once again.
I am fairly ignorant about philosophy in general but what the author is saying jibes perfectly with what little I remember from reading Aristotle in Greek Philosophy. My sum total of the teachings of Aristotle is this. 1. Everything begins with the senses. 2. From the senses one learns discrimination (the ability to tell one thing from the other). 3. From discrimination one gains knowledge. 4. From knowledge one can gain wisdom (the ability to make predictions). He seemed like the father of modern science to me at the time I was taking the class. I suspect that I might even be missing a step up above but it's a pretty nice system all the same.