id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
grbs-16557	Meeusen, Michiel; Oikonomopoulou, Katerina; Silvano, Luigi	The Prefaces to Pseudo-Alexander of Aphrodisias’ Medical Puzzles and Natural Problems Books 1 and 2: Greek Text, Translation, and Interpretation.	2021	31	.pdf	application/pdf	12002	548	66	Both prefaces contain vivid natural imagery, appealing to the reader’s senses: the first preface’s abundant examples (§§2–5, 8–10) invite the reader to imagine the colours, shapes, sounds, tastes, and textures of the animals, plants, or inanimate objects that are found in nature, towards understanding what natural philosophy and medicine can contribute to their investigation; in the second preface too, the striking images of the sun’s ray that immerses itself in water and of the sun’s brilliance that is hidden behind a cloud (§4) exploit the reader’s visual faculty in order to make a philosophical point about the soul’s purity (and, by analogy, about medicine’s ‘purity’ as a science). This point is illustrated through the use of an elaborate analogy with the sun’s ray passing through water (according to which the water’s blurriness or clarity affects the ray’s visibility, but does not change its essence): in just the same way, the soul’s essence is thought to remain unaffected by matter (the body), and, similarly, medicine retains its credentials as a science, even if these credentials can be “blurred” by its preoccupation with matter (§§4–5).	cache/grbs-16557.pdf	txt/grbs-16557.txt