The fundamental response that Aristotle made to the non-Greeks of his time was to "give them a taste of their own medicine." It is obvious that the notion of "barbarian" (which really amounts to "sub-human") is a relative one. And, as set forth in his "pyramid of life" (see Lloyd 1977, pp.65-8), Aristotle had devised a new general conception of the living world, in which-by definition-rationality in his sense was essential to every human being. Thus (analogous to what the Egyptians had said about the Hyksos) it followed from his view that it was questionable whether the Egyptians should be counted as genuine human beings at all, or merely as animals. In fact-this is a paradoxical point, because it apparently is incompatible with his own law of contradiction-the world as Aristotle conceived it simply had no room in it for thinkers like the Egyptians to exist.

What has history shown to be the respective fates of the two competing curses of non-existence that I have been discussing in this paper? The answer is as follows: The curse of the ancient Egyptians has failed completely; but that of Aristotle (at least for the time being) has been spectacularly successful. To consider the case of the Egyptians themselves, all or nearly all of their tombs now have been desecrated. And, as a result of repeated invasions and occupations by foreigners, there is not one person left alive today who continues to live, worship, and think in the ways that would give him or her a legitimate claim to be called a "pure" Egyptian, in the sense recognized throughout their long history. Still more generally, I think it is fair to say that now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, because of a great rise in the prestige of modern science, it has become impossible for the first time in history to find any human on earth who qualifies as a "barbarian" in Aristotle's special sense of that word. To say the same thing another way, not just the ancient Egyptians, but all people of this sort now have ceased to exist.

If anything, it seems to me that Aristotle's curse has succeeded too well. What I mean is this: Today every informed person rejects the truth of Aristotle's so-called pyramid of life, because it embodies a hierarchical conception of things that the observations of biologists have failed to support. Nevertheless, many of the same people who take this view continue to affirm one of the other central ideas involved in Aristotle's theory-without appreciating the fact that this last mentioned point also must be mistaken. What I am referring to is Aristotle's notion that the special sort of reason described in his Metaphysics-or that which many people nowadays call "folk psychology"-is part of the genetic inheritance that belongs to all normal members of the species, Homo sapiens. However, a study of ancient history, as well as of relatively recent anthropology, shows something different. That is, there are good observational and historical grounds for supposing that the (ideal of) an unacculturated, "God-given" way in which humans supposedly find it natural to think probably is much closer to Egyptian thinking, than to anything based on the sort of general laws, principles, and rules presupposed by the thought of Greeks like Aristotle, and their modern intellectual descendents like Russell and ourselves.

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