“Nutrition, Life and Health of the Ensouled Body” in U. Kornmeier (ed.) The Soul is an Octopus. Ancient Ideas of Life and the Body, Berlin 2016, pp. 68-75. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Soul is an Octopus. Ancient Ideas of Life and the Body (Full Catalogue!)
In antiquity, doctors and philosophers identified the physical body as the space in which life was located and originated. They used the word psychê or ‘soul’ to refer to the force in spiring, organising and energising the body. It was the soul that provided living beings with the structures and functions enabling them to live, grow, develop and exercise the full range of their natural capacities. This book is a companion to the exhibition ‘The Soul is an Octopus’ at the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité. It provides an introduction to ways of thinking about life, body and the soul in antiquity. It presents ancient texts, images and objects that allow us a glimpse into the fascinating world of anatomy, physiology and medicine as conceived by philosophers and physicians roughly 2,000 years ago. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE Gerd Grashoff, Michael Meyer MAPPING BODY AND SOUL. THE MAKING OF AN EXHIBITION Philip van der Eijk, Thomas Schnalke, Uta Kornmeier BODY, SOUL AND LIFE IN ANCIENT MEDICINE Philip van der Eijk DISSECTION AS A METHOD OF DISCOVERY Orly Lewis LOCALISING THE SOUL IN THE BODY Orly Lewis BRAIN AND HEART AS ORGANS OF THE SOUL Orly Lewis SUBSTANCES IN SERVICE OF THE SOUL Orly Lewis PHYSIOLOGY OF PERCEPTION Sean Coughlin REPRODUCTION AND THE SOUL Sean Coughlin NUTRITION, LIFE AND HEALTH OF THE ENSOULED BODY Giouli Korobili MOVEMENT AS A SIGN OF LIFE Ricardo Julião DISEASES OF THE SOUL, INSANITY AND MENTAL HEALTH Chiara Thumiger On Textual and Material Sources of Ancient Medicine Philip van der Eijk, Uta Kornmeier Appendix Chronological Table of Authors and Schools ; Glossary Catalogue of Images ; References to Ancient Texts ; Ancient Texts: Editions and Translations Used ; Select Bibliography
Hardly anything seems more ordinary than the extended, concrete bodies populating the world of experience. Yet in explaining their manifest properties, physicists must appeal to entities radically unlike the bodies of our experience. Medieval Aristotelians too struggled to resolve tensions between the characteristics of the bodies we experience (corporeality), and the principle that accounts for the way bodies are (matter). This panel uncovers key difficulties that theorists of the High Middle Ages encountered when deploying Aristotelian notions of body to account for the bodies we experience. It thus offers a new window onto the fraying and reweaving of medieval paradigms of the physical world in the thirteenth century. The first three papers examine tensions within medieval paradigms of corporeality. Neil Lewis will explore medieval attempts to fit ‘body’ into the Aristotelian categorial scheme by distinguishing body as substance and quantified body. David Cory will examine the emergence of a ‘dual explanation’ of physical phenomena in terms of materiality and corporeality. Nicola Polloni will show how this duality raised questions about matter’s (un)knowability, putting its physical function into tension with its metaphysical limitations. The last two papers treat two cases, concerning bodily properties, that challenged Aristotelian paradigms among thirteenth-century Christian and Islamic intellectuals. Therese Cory will examine how Parisian theorists sought to integrate light into their paradigm of corporeality. Emma Gannagé will examine how the post-Avicennian medical tradition handled the problem of bodies exhibiting secondary qualities (magnetism or healing properties) beyond those manifested by all bodies in common.
A History of Mind and Body in Late Antiquity
2018
What is a soul? What is a body? What is a mind? How do these relate within the human being? Is the soul-body relationship antagonistic or complementary? For example, is the soul weighed down and imprisoned by the body, or aided by it and defined in relation to it? How do we think, and how are we aware of our own thoughts? How should bodily pleasure feature in our lives? If the mind is supposed to focus on and contemplate intelligible reality, how can it achieve this? What is the role of God, of the body, and of literature in the soul's attempts at contemplation? Throughout late antiquity, philosophers and theologians grappled creatively with mind-body issues, asking a diverse range of questions and giving answers often of striking originality and of abiding significance. Philosophical anthropological reflections about the nature of body, soul, and mind prompted and interacted with ethical and epistemological questions. The aim of this volume is to present together pagan and Christian ideas about mind and body in late antiquity, from roughly the 2 nd through the 6 th centuries. The mind-body relation is broadly conceived to include the soul-body relation. We explore a wide, interacting community of thinkers, mainly writing in Greek and in some cases in Latin. Our primary focus is on philosophical approaches to mind-body questions; however, a chapter from Edward Watts sheds light on their historical setting, and some contributors deploy less self-consciously philosophical sources, such as sermons and liturgy. This breadth of approach demonstrates the widespread significance of mind-body questions, which extended far beyond philosophical communities, and helps to bring out the historical specificity of late ancient enquiry into mind-body questions. It will also widen the range of likely interest in our volume, to secondarily include those whose concern is more social and historical than theological and philosophical. The mind-body relation was at the forefront of philosophy and theology in late antiquity. In addressing it, late ancient thinkers were partly picking up on themes from earlier antiquity. However, new contexts and ideas cast these themes in a fresh light: Plotinus' thought, especially his metaphysics and cosmology, reinvigorated Platonism and arguably sent it in a new direction; the rise of asceticism in the third and fourth centuries both accentuated the ethical aspects of mind-body questions and further grounded them in an intensely practical context; late antiquity saw the growth of Christianity. It thus fostered a social and political context in which pagan and Christian authors existed side by side, engaging with, disputing, and influencing each other against the backdrop of each community's fluctuating political fortunes. Late antiquity is a period of unique import for Christian-pagan interaction. It is also, relatedly, a bridge between the ancient and medieval worlds. Late ancient ideas are of enduring importance. This volume addresses a vital section of them. Across the period in question, mind-body issues were bound up with cosmological ones: to ask how the soul relates to the body is partly to ask how an intelligible, rational entity exists in the physical world. In Neoplatonic thought, the cosmological framework of mind-body questions was being reconfigured, thanks partly to a renewed emphasis on divine transcendence. If the divine is removed from the intelligible sphere, the soul may then be far removed from the body as it stretches up towards the now-distant divine. The soul may, equally, be pushed closer to the body because both, together, are sharply distinguished from the divine. In either case, the soul must interact with the body. This plays out in various ways. Early Neoplatonism often exhibits a strong, though complex, anthropological dualism; this can be seen giving way to a more positive approach to embodiment in later Neoplatonism. Paralleling questions of downwards interaction – how do the soul and mind relate to the body? – were questions of upwards interaction – how do soul and mind relate to other intelligibles and to transcendent reality? Correspondingly, this period also saw increasing introspection about the
THE SOUL IS AN OCTOPUS ANCIENT IDEAS ANCIENT IDEAS OF LIFE OF LIFE AND THE AND THE BODY BODY
In antiquity, doctors and philosophers conceptualised the physical body as the space in which life was located. They used the word psyché or ‘soul’ to refer to the force inspiring, organising and energising the body. It was the soul that provided living beings with the structures and functions enabling them to live, grow, develop and exercise the full range of their natural capacities. This book is an introduction to ways of thinking about life, body and the soul in antiquity. It presents ancient texts, images and objects that allow us a glimpse into the fascinating world of anatomy, physiology and medicine as conceived by philosophers and physicians roughly 2,000 years ago.
History of the Body (Graduate Seminar)
This seminar seeks to explore the rich cultural history of the body by reading monographs in the fields of history, anthropology, and literature, which encompass both theoretical analyses and empirical studies of the body in varied contexts. The course focuses on, but not limited to the history of medicine, and scrutinizes issues of sick bodies, dissected bodies, gendered bodies, racial bodies, disabled bodies, among others. In addition, the course discusses extensively the history of the body beyond the Western world, and explores how the body is differently understood and practiced in Asia and in Africa.
MIND AND BODY - Some Aspects of Medieval Natural Philosophy
The Digested Mind: the Spirit as the highest Product of Digestion, 2019
Faculty of Philosophy and History of the University of Łódź ul. Lindleya 3/5 Aula im. prof. Iji Lazari-Pawłowskiej 14th June 2019 (Friday) 15:25 Katja Krause Albert the Great and Averroes' Capitulum de corde: Peripatetic Physiology Meets Scholastic Controversy 15:45 Michael W Dunne Geoffrey of Aspall's Questions on the De longitudine et brevitate vitae 16:05 Wanda Bajor Body and Soul vis-à-vis Birth and Death of Man in Scholastic Commentators of Aristotelian Theory of the Soul 16:25-16:45 Discussion 16:45 Discussion table
Jakob Tanner, History of Body, in: International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Amsterdam 2001, S. 1277-1282., 2001
The beauty that lies within: Anatomy, mechanics and thauma in Hellenistic medicine
forthcoming in: Maria Gerolemou and George Kazantzidis (eds.) Medicine and Mechanics in Classical Antiquity Towards an Early History of Iatromechanics, CUP (under review)
The great anatomical discoveries of Herophilus and Erasistratus are counted among the most distinctive features of Hellenistic medicine. These discoveries go hand in hand with an increasing assimilation, attested during this period, between parts of the human body and mechanical devices. While this mechanical model has been thoroughly discussed in scholarship, the emphasis has been usually placed on the interaction between the fields of medicine and mechanics in Ptolemaic Alexandria, and the ways in which this interaction helped doctors to understand the function and the properties of the human body better. In this chapter I will deal with a different, though closely related, question: I will set out to examine the extent to which the discovery of little 'machines' and 'sub-machines' operating within the body is also significant on an aesthetic level. Aristotle, as we shall see, claims that the interior of the human body looks messy and disgusting; still, as soon as a bodily organ is found to serve a specific purpose (assigned to it by Nature), it immediately claims a place in the realm of the beautiful. By focusing on the case of Erasistratus, I will argue that Hellenistic medicine nourishes a different aesthetic model: in this case, the expression of wonder for the artful design of the human body is not that much a matter of teleology but is more tightly linked to, and becomes consolidated on the basis of figural analogies and similarities with products of human ingenuity and craft. But this ingenuity involves also a considerable degree of deception-one that becomes manifest in a mēchanē's inherent capacity to instill feelings of bafflement and confusion. Unlike Aristotle who proposes that the body should be fully comprehended before we proceed to marvel at it properly, the machine-body analogy thus re-instates a more elusive kind of wonder in which informed admiration and a simultaneous sense of bewilderment blend inextricably.