This paper aims to assess the epistemological value of the notion of sympathy in Galen’s thought. It first shows that Galen makes use of two different concepts of sympathy: the ambient concept, according to which the human body manifests a harmonious part-whole relationship, and the technical concept, with which one connects two pathologies on the basis of the fact that the cause of the ailment is elsewhere than where it surfaces. Neither of these sympathies constitutes in itself a causal explanation (...) of reality. The first merely acknowledges an obvious interrelationship, the second acts as an epistemic tool to shift the focus of diagnosis away from the place where the condition manifests itself. However, the two concepts are not absolutely unrelated; and they come together when the sympathetic paradigm is used to understand the unifying action of the psychic and natural faculties. Very significantly, Galen then provisionally defines the cause as a power or faculty (δύναμις) not out of theoretical necessity but for practical reasons. (shrink)

In a late treatise, That the Capacities of the Soul Follow the Mixtures of the Body, Galen of Pergamum infamously offered the view that the substance of the soul is identical with a bodily mixture. This thesis has been found radical and extreme in modern scholarship and is generally considered to be at odds with Galen’s ‘agnosticism’ on the substance of soul. In this paper I propose a close reading of QAM that allows us to make sense of it in (...) terms of Galen’s other work, including his late work On My Own Opinions. (shrink)

This paper attempts to trace part of the history of medical and philosophical exchanges within the materialist tradition. I focus on this decisive role that they play on the emergence of organismic conception of the body. From its very beginnings, medical thought as the thought of mixture and as psychophysiology has been in close connection with the pre-Socratic tradition, and with Empedocles in particular. Both of them propose accounts of the blending as protoconceptions of an organic model of the body. (...) In the regard, the Stoic conception of krasis and the new model of the organismic individuality that it defines indebt to this medical and philosophical account. In this regard, the Galenic thought of mixture as an immanent and dynamic unity is also part of this materialistic and corporeist tradition. Within it, individual identity is conceived as fundamentally relational. It benefits from an undeniable Stoic account, while giving it an unprecedented medical extension. (shrink)