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This book offers the first extended study published in English on the Hippocratic treatise On Regimen, one of the most important pre-Platonic documents of the discussion of human nature and other topics at the intersection of ancient medicine and philosophy. It is not only a unique example of classical Greek dietetic literature, including the most elaborated account of the micro-macrocosm and phusis-technē analogies, but it also provides the most explicit discussion of the soul-body opposition preceding Plato. Moreover, Bartoš argues, it is a rare example of an extant medical text which systematically draws on philosophical authorities, such as Heraclitus, Empedocles and Anaxagoras, and which had a decisive influence on both physicians, such as Galen, and philosophers, most notably Plato and Aristotle.
The first volume to examine theories of soul in Greek philosophy using an approach drawn from the history of science.
Both our view of Seneca’s philosophical thought and our approach to the ancient consolatory genre have radically changed since the latest commentary on the Consolatio ad Marciam was written in 1981. The aim of this work is to offer a new book-length commentary on the earliest of Seneca’s extant writings, along with a revision of the Latin text and a reassessment of Seneca’s intellectual program, strategies, and context. A crucial document to penetrate Seneca’s discourse on the self in its embryonic stages, the Ad Marciam is here taken seriously as an engaging attempt to direct the persuasive power of literary models and rhetorical devices toward the fundamentally moral project of healing Marcia’s grief and correcting her cognitive distortions. Through close reading of the Latin text, this commentary shows that Seneca invariably adapts different traditions and voices – from Greek consolations to Plato’s dialogues, from the Roman discourse of gender and exemplarity to epic poetry – to a Stoic framework, so as to give his reader a lucid understanding of the limits of the self and the ineluctability of natural laws.
In Ancient Concepts of the Hippocratic, Lesley Dean-Jones and Ralph Rosen have gathered 19 international authorities in ancient medicine to identify commonalities among the treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus which led scholars of antiquity to group them under the single name of Hippocrates. Most recent scholarship has drawn attention to the divergences between individual treatises and groups of treatises, emphasizing the agonistic facet of the ancient medical profession. In contrast, in this volume contributors look to find points of agreement between the writings that go beyond claims of rationality. Topics considered include ontological claims about the discipline of medicine itself, the view of the patient as a perceiving unity, theories on the function of glands and the importance of regimen.
What is religion? How is religion constituted as a social entity? Is religion a useful category for historians, anthropologists, and sociologists? In History and the Study of Religion Stanley Stowers addresses these questions and discusses examples from ancient Greek, Roman, Judean and especially early Christian religion to illustrate a theory of religion as a social kind. He explains how ancient Mediterranean religion consisted of four sub-kinds: the religion of everyday social exchange, civic religion, the religion of literate and literary experts, and the religion of literate experts with political power. Through these categories he shows how Christianity arose and succeeded.
McCoy examines how Greek epic, tragedy, and philosophy offer important insights into the nature of human vulnerability, especially how Greek thought extols the recognition and proper acceptance of vulnerability. Beginning with the literary works of Homer and Sophocles, she also expands her analysis to the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle.
The studies included in the Care of the Self: Ancient Problematizations of Life and Contemporary Thought focus on different manifestations of “taking care of the self” present in ancient and contemporary thought. Each of these studies approaches the issue of taking care of the self from a different perspective: Part I by Vladislav Suvák focuses on Socrates’ therapeutic education; Part II by Lívia Flachbartová centres on Diogenes’ ascetic practices; and Part III by Pavol Sucharek concentrates on Henri Maldiney’s existential phenomenology. Taking care of the self (epimeleia heautou) is not just one of a great many topics associated with ancient ethics. Echoing Michel Foucault, we could say that the care of the self applies to all problematizations of life.
This volume is a detailed study of the concept of the nutritive capacity of the soul and its actual manifestation in living bodies (plants, animals, humans) in Aristotle and Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s innovative analysis of the nutritive faculty has laid the intellectual foundation for the increasing appreciation of nutrition as a prerequisite for the maintenance of life and health that can be observed in the history of Greek thought. According to Aristotle, apart from nutrition, the nutritive part of the soul is also responsible for or interacts with many other bodily functions or mechanisms, such as digestion, growth, reproduction, sleep, and the innate heat. After Aristotle, these con...
This volume aims at exploring the ancient roots of ‘holistic’ approaches in the specific field of medicine and the life sciences, without, however, overlooking the larger theoretical implications of these discussions. Therefore, the project plans to broaden the perspective to include larger cultural discussions and, in a comparative spirit, reach out to some examples from non Graeco-Roman medical cultures. As such, it constitutes a fundamental contribution to history of medicine, philosophy of medicine, cultural studies, and ancient studies more broadly. The wide-ranging selection of chapters offers a comprehensive view of an exciting new field: the interrogation of ancient sources in th...