Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: This is a humanist's book and readers of Aestimatio will want to know up front that the original claims are less about the scientific knowledge or reasoning of classical Greece than about the role of medical discourse in the development of mainstream Athenian classical thought, literature, and philosophy, as it has more traditionally been defined.Since most scholarship on the rich and well preserved Hippocratic corpus is all too isolated, and since ambitious syntheses of Greek intellectual history like those of Bruno Snell (in the mid-20th century) and G. E. R. Lloyd (early 1960s to present) can always be supplemented, not least by integration of the prolific research in ancient medicine from the last 30 years, Holmes provides a timely new avenue for putting ancient medicine centrally on the map of classical Greek thought.Rosalind Thomas' Herodotus in Context [2000] can be compared; and Holmes exceeds Thomas in range and ambition by virtue of her forays into core ideas of tragedy and philosophy, where she establishes the influence of medicine, not for the first time, but as a turning point in a new master-narrative and in a setting accessible to a broad audience.Perhaps inevitably, given the range of the book and its proposal of a continuously developing story from Homer to Plato, Holmes' explanations can fall short of Thomas' precedent in precision and rigor.Yet these explanations are interesting and they intersect with modern issues that both are and ought to be philosophical in so far as we can accept Holmes' quest to historicize and so destabilize the conception of a passive, automatic human body continuous with inert matter (and so with robots and other artificial life forms), such as might be assumed in some modern schools.1 See esp.pp. 2, 15, 22, 85-87, 189-191, 193-195, 225-227, 237-39, 273-274, 275-276.13 There are scattered references in ch. 4 and six pages in ch.5: 201, 206-211.She promises more in a separate study [Holmes 2010].14 This is by distinction with, e.g.,Thucydides' Melian dialogue, where 'advantage' is counter to justice and the conflict is between parties to the situation rather than between values or forces within one person's consciousness.15 Of course, we come up again against the possibility that a text such as On Ancient Medicine is post-Platonic and one hopes this question can be settled decisively.
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W648133328