Week 3: Pre-socratic philosophers

Major developments & key players

• No extant medical texts pre-dating the Hippocratic Corpus (mid-fifth century BCE - mid-second century CE***)

• (Relatively) remarkable claims to empiricism and non-reliance on the supernatural

• Miletos (Ionia, Asia Minor; modern Turkey) thriving philosophical schools

• Miletos prosperous, without strong religious scene: favourable for inquisitive and rational culture

Major developments

• 6th c BCE: search for “natural first cause” unifying natural phenomena

• Reliance on single cause —> Monists

• Religion takes backseat but not entirely eliminated

• Divine elements according to orderly and intelligible laws

• Rational system: everything has physeis (nature), just need to figure out the “how”

• Applies to human body & disease

• No (modern) scientific method

Thales, fl. 585 BCE

• Born in Miletos

• First philosopher to investigate the natural world without using divine explanations

• Focus on mathematics & astronomy; thought earth was a floating sphere

• Water as underlying principle of all matter; water = life

• Soul as cause of movement; everything has a soul

• Initiated search for “single, unifying principle”

Anaximander, fl. ~560 BCE

• Argued that first principle was not elemental (air/ water/ fire)

• Things exist in paired opposites —> single element negates existence of others

• Underlying cause of everything is indefinite and always existed (thus divine)

• May originate in Egyptian concept of nun (potential); fluid and unbound

• Indefinite substance: “includes everything in itself, and guides everything.”

  • Elements with opposing qualities

  • Experience shows what happens when elements interact

Image: Anaximander leaning close to Pythagoras (on his left) in Raphael’s The School of Athens (1510-1511

Anaximenes, fl. 546 BCE

• Student of Anaximander

• Adopted the idea of change with air as principal cause

• “as our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air surround the whole universe.”

• Air is changeable: rarefication (thinness) or condensation (thickness)

  • Rarefication - fire; condensation - water/ stone

• Temperature of air can change

Heraclitus, fl. 500 BCE

• From Ephesos

• Order manifested in thought, speech, experience; rationality represents unity of the cosmos (similar to Egyptian notion of maat)

• Soul is cognitive rather than just animating

• Change/ flux shows unity of the world

  • Fire as physical embodiment of flux

  • “everything comes about by way of strife and necessity”

  • Everything is moved by an innate force, and from opposite tensions result harmony

Empedocles, mid 5^th c BCE

• 150 fragments

• Cosmos consists of 4 elements: earth, air, water, fire

• Blood: perfect balance

• Blood nourishes body & creates flesh

• Eye: made of all elements; vision due to fire and water

Central notions

• observation

• single causes/unifying principles

• role of elements

• need for balance

• Existence of the supernatural in this explanatory model of illness