Pub Date : 2020-11-23DOI: 10.1163/9789004443143_006
Hippocratic Holisms, H. Bartoš
The aim of this essay is to identify three different pre-Platonic forms of holism: the ‘therapeutic’, the ‘environmental’, and the ‘cosmic.’ With the help of passages from the Hippocratic On the Nature of Man , On Regimen , and On Sevens , on the one hand, and from Plato, the earliest independent authority on the holistic nature of Hippocratic medicine, on the other, I make the case that all three forms of holism play significant roles in dietetic medicine, that they are complementary, and that aspects of them can even be combined into a single account.
{"title":"Hippocratic Holisms","authors":"Hippocratic Holisms, H. Bartoš","doi":"10.1163/9789004443143_006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004443143_006","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this essay is to identify three different pre-Platonic forms of holism: the ‘therapeutic’, the ‘environmental’, and the ‘cosmic.’ With the help of passages from the Hippocratic On the Nature of Man , On Regimen , and On Sevens , on the one hand, and from Plato, the earliest independent authority on the holistic nature of Hippocratic medicine, on the other, I make the case that all three forms of holism play significant roles in dietetic medicine, that they are complementary, and that aspects of them can even be combined into a single account.","PeriodicalId":179586,"journal":{"name":"Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127147277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-23DOI: 10.1163/9789004443143_003
Chiara Thumiger
‘Holism’, strangely enough, given the absolute quality it indicates, is a concept that can only be grasped through negative examples: what it is contrary to, the paradigms to which it constitutes an alternative. Definitions of ‘holism’ thus usually involve the interdependence among the parts composing an individual object; their relationship with that object as their container and sum; its insertion within a context, environ-mental or cosmic; and crucially, the existence of an additional quid which defines that object as a totality independent of its components – the idea that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ In all these senses, the significance of the relationship between ‘parts’ and ‘whole’ can be much broader than the medical and anatomical discussions with which we would most immediately associate it, and which are under the spotlight in this vol-ume. The breadth and malleability of the concept are key to a cultural history which is extremely long, despite the fact that ‘holism’ itself, like many such labels, can easily be seen as anachronistic if applied to the pre-modern world. This chapter aims to offer a glimpse of this long history and to illustrate the relevance of the Graeco-Roman past to our understanding of the idea of holism, and to its various manifestations throughout the centuries which separate us from the ancients.
{"title":"Holism, Parts, Wholes","authors":"Chiara Thumiger","doi":"10.1163/9789004443143_003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004443143_003","url":null,"abstract":"‘Holism’, strangely enough, given the absolute quality it indicates, is a concept that can only be grasped through negative examples: what it is contrary to, the paradigms to which it constitutes an alternative. Definitions of ‘holism’ thus usually involve the interdependence among the parts composing an individual object; their relationship with that object as their container and sum; its insertion within a context, environ-mental or cosmic; and crucially, the existence of an additional quid which defines that object as a totality independent of its components – the idea that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ In all these senses, the significance of the relationship between ‘parts’ and ‘whole’ can be much broader than the medical and anatomical discussions with which we would most immediately associate it, and which are under the spotlight in this vol-ume. The breadth and malleability of the concept are key to a cultural history which is extremely long, despite the fact that ‘holism’ itself, like many such labels, can easily be seen as anachronistic if applied to the pre-modern world. This chapter aims to offer a glimpse of this long history and to illustrate the relevance of the Graeco-Roman past to our understanding of the idea of holism, and to its various manifestations throughout the centuries which separate us from the ancients.","PeriodicalId":179586,"journal":{"name":"Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130918077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-23DOI: 10.1163/9789004443143_004
B. Holmes
{"title":"Holism, Sympathy, and the Living Being in Ancient Greek Medicine and Philosophy","authors":"B. Holmes","doi":"10.1163/9789004443143_004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004443143_004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":179586,"journal":{"name":"Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125953942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-23DOI: 10.1163/9789004443143_012
S. Coughlin
This paper is about the history of a question in ancient Greek philosophy and medicine: what holds the parts of a whole together? The idea that there is a single cause responsible for cohesion is usually associated with the Stoics. They refer to it as the syn ectic cause (αἴτιον συνεκτικόν), a term variously translated as ‘cohesive cause,’ ‘containing cause’ or ‘sustaining cause.’ The Stoics, however, are neither the first nor the only thinkers to raise this question or to propose a single answer. Many earlier thinkers offer their own candidates for what actively binds parts together, with differing implications not only for why we are wholes rather than heaps, but also why our bodies inevitably become diseased and fall apart. This paper assembles, up to the time of the Stoics, one part of the history of such a cause: what is called ‘the synechon’ (τὸ συνέχον) – that which holds things together. Starting with our earliest evidence from Anaximenes (sixth century bce), the paper looks at different candidates and especially the models and metaphors for thinking about causes of cohesion which were proposed by different philosophers and doctors including Empedocles, early Greek doctors, Diogenes of Apollonia, Plato and Aristotle. My goal is to explore why these candidates and models were proposed and how later philosophical objections to them led to changes in how causes of cohesion were understood.
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Pub Date : 2020-11-23DOI: 10.1163/9789004443143_008
P. Singer
The chapter attempts to analyse what can sensibly be understood by the term ‘holism’, which is very frequently used in relation to ancient medicine. It identifies three fundamental senses of the term – (1) unity of mind and body, (2) a unitary conception of the body itself, (3) unity of the body with its larger environment or cosmos – and considers ways in which both ancient medical theory and ancient diagnostic and clinical practice do or do not correspond with those conceptions. The paper focuses on Galen, but also contextualizes his approach within the Graeco-Roman medical and philosophical tradition, and compares it with others available in the ancient world, including those of Celsus and the Methodists. It is argued that a complex and nuanced picture emerges, within which, however, attention to overall states of the body tends to predominate over localization, and there are intricate accounts of the mutual dependence of ‘soul’ and ‘body.’
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Pub Date : 2020-11-23DOI: 10.1163/9789004443143_013
J. Rocca
{"title":"Pneuma as a Holistic Concept in Galen","authors":"J. Rocca","doi":"10.1163/9789004443143_013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004443143_013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":179586,"journal":{"name":"Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125604630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-23DOI: 10.1163/9789004443143_009
{"title":"Holism of Body and Mind in Hippocratic Medicine and Greek Tragedy","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/9789004443143_009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004443143_009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":179586,"journal":{"name":"Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123159019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-23DOI: 10.1163/9789004443143_014
{"title":"Humoralism in Āyurvedic Medicine","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/9789004443143_014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004443143_014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":179586,"journal":{"name":"Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131266147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-23DOI: 10.1163/9789004443143_017
{"title":"Mind-Body Interaction: The Influence of Ancient Ideas in Twelfth-Century England","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/9789004443143_017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004443143_017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":179586,"journal":{"name":"Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125371528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-23DOI: 10.1163/9789004443143_005
{"title":"‘Holism’ in Cognitive Approaches to the Ancient Emotions","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/9789004443143_005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004443143_005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":179586,"journal":{"name":"Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133350734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}