Trainers played an immensely important role in ancient sports. Yet, they often disappear in the descriptions of great athletic feats in epinician poetry, the poems of praise that celebrated great athletes in the ancient world. This paper examines the manner in which trainers fade from epinician narrative and argues that their disappearance may have to do with the nature of the body and the role of trainers and physicians in the Greek world. Admitting the importance of trainers might challenge the (...) notion that the greatness of athletes stemmed from birth and breeding. The fact that trainers sold their services as commodities would exacerbate this. (shrink)

This paper begins by examining the response of the organised scientific community to the claims of the indigenous knowledge lobby, and with some observations on the dichotomy between science and traditional technical knowledge. It reiterates the view that the potency of the distinction arises from a fusion of the general human cognitive impulse to simplify the processes by which we understand the world, reinforced by the socially-driven need of science to maintain an effective boundary around the practices which scientists engage (...) in. The paper goes on to argue that the existence of these two epistemological metacategories obscures the presence of different ways of securing predictive knowledge of the material world, each of which is characterised by a distinctive configuration of cognitive and technical features, and which in several ways cut across the usual dualism between science and traditional knowledge. The argument is illustrated using examples from the history of biology and the ethnography of ethnobiological knowledge. It engages critically with insights drawn from cognitive psychology, the philosophy and sociology of science, and cognitive anthropology, as well as with scientists' own descriptions of what distinguishes the mental operations in which they engage. (shrink)

Q: What did the elephant say to the naked man?A: It looks O.K., but can you breathe through it?Let me begin by justifying that joke for those of you didn’t find it funny. The relationship between the morphology of the physical organs and their activities has long been a vexed issue in the philosophy of biology: the question of whether structure determines function is of course of contemporary importance in evolutionary theory. That there was a relationship between structure and function (...) was not in general a matter of doubt to the Greek theoretical biologists: but both the extent, and crucially the direction, of the dependence was. And the question need not be restricted to a consideration of the function of a particular part in isolation: when Aristotle takes issue with Anaxagoras for asserting that humans are the most intelligent species because they have hands, claiming rather that they have hands because they are intelligent, he is making a claim not just about the direction of explanation involved, but he is also implicitly at least indicating the scope of such explanations. For Aristotle, intelligence is one of the human functions: and that function necessitates the existence and development of certain organic structures. (shrink)

Rufus of Ephesus's treatise Quaestiones Medicinales is unique in the known corpus of ancient medical writing. It has been taken for a procedural handbook serving an essentially operational purpose. But with its insistent message that doctors cannot properly understand and treat illnesses unless they supplement their own knowledge by questioning patients, and its distinct appreciation of the singularity of each patient's experience, Rufus's work shows itself to be no mere handbook but a treatise about the place of questioning in the (...) clinical encounter. This paper concentrates on two aspects of Rufus's thought that are unusual by comparison with other ancient medical texts: his distinctively person-centred rather than disease-based concept of questioning, and his extension of ‘habits’ beyond the dietary and occupational to include an indeterminate range of individual characteristics whose relevance to illness is not immediately obvious. In his quest for subjective information to set alongside ob.. (shrink)

The focus of this essay is on Xenophanes’ criticism of anthropomorphic representation of the gods, famously sounding like a declaration of war against a constituent part of the Greek religion, and adopting terms and a tone that are unequalled amongst “pre-Socratic” authors for their directness and explicitness. While the main features of Xenophanes’ polemic are well known thanks to some of the most studied fragments of the pre-Socratic tradition, a different line of enquiry from the usual one is attempted by (...) considering the multi-layered background of the religious beliefs revolving around the idea that the gods have human form as outlined in the tradition of epic poetry or represented in cult statues: in the light of this consideration Xenophanes’ text can take on some new characteristics. In the second part of the article, emphasis is put on the importance of the correlation Xenophanes established between the issue of the appearance of the gods and that of the certainty of knowledge, in terms that have exerted tremendous influence on later thought, most notably on Plato in the Timaeus. (shrink)

Traditionally, Ancient Mesopotamian epistemic practices resulting in the vast corpus of cuneiform ‘lexical lists’ and other, similarly formatted treatises have been conceptualized as “ Listenwissenschaft ” in Assyriology. Introduced by the German Assyriologist Wolfram v. Soden in 1936 , this concept has also been utilized in other disciplines of the Humanities as a terminological means to describe epistemic activity allegedly inferior to ‘Western’ modes of analytical and hypotactic scientific reasoning. Building on the exemplary evidence of a bilingual list of cuneiform (...) compound graphemes from the early 2nd millennium BCE as well as on recent conceptualizations of ‘epistemic cultures’ and the instrumental function of material ‘representations’ in the context of epistemic practices, the present paper attempts to replace the essentialistic and teleological concept of an Ancient Mesopotamian “ Listenwissenschaft ” with a new epistemological model describing the underlying epistemic practices as highly adaptive non-linear epistemic practices comparable to what has been described as ‘practices with »epistemic things«’ in recent epistemology and practice theory. (shrink)

To contribute to our understanding of the relationship between philosophical ideas and medical and healthcare models. A diachronic analysis is put in place in order to evaluate, from an innovative perspective, the influence over the centuries on medical and healthcare models of two philosophical concepts, particularly relevant for health: how Man perceives his identity and how he relates to Nature. Five epochs are identified—the Archaic Age, Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age, the ‘Postmodern’ Era—which can be seen, à (...) la Foucault, as ‘fragments between philosophical fractures’. From a historical background perspective, up to the early 1900s progress in medical and healthcare models has moved on a par with the evolution of philosophical debate. Following the Second World War, the Health Service started a series of reforms, provoked by anti-positivistic philosophical transformations. The three main reforms carried out however failed and the medical establishment remained anchored to a mechanical, reductionist approach, perfectly in line with the bureaucratic stance of the administrators. In this context, future scenarios are delineated and an anthropo-ecological model is proposed to re-align philosophy, medicine and health care. (shrink)

What role, if any, does dialectic play in Aristotle’s epistemology in the Topics? In this paper I argue that it does play a role, but a role that is independent of endoxa. In the first section, I sketch the case for thinking that dialectic plays a distinctively epistemological role—not just a methodological role, or a merely instrumental role in getting episteme. In the second section, I consider three ways it could play that role, on two of which endoxa play at (...) least a co-starring role. But in the third section, I argue that endoxa don’t play that co-starring role, by arguing for a deflationary account of what endoxa are. For that reason, the third view emerges as the most plausible; but the third view is, I’ll suggest, Platonic. (shrink)

The word euboulia, which means excellence in counsel or sound judgement, occurs in only three places in the authentic writings of Plato. The sophist Protagoras makes euboulia the focus of his whole enterprise : What I teach a person is good judgement about his own affairs — how best he may manage his own household; and about the affairs of the city — how he may be most able to handle the business of the city both in action and in (...) speech. Thrasymachus, too, thinks well of euboulia. Invited by Socrates to call injustice kakoetheia ’, i.e. as simple-mindedness), he declines the sophistry and says : ‘No, I call it good judgement’. But Plato finds little occasion to introduce the concept in developing his own ethical and political philosophy. The one place where he mentions euboulia is in his defence of the thesis that his ideal city possesses the four cardinal virtues. He begins with wisdom, and justifies the ascription of wisdom to the city on the ground that it has euboulia — which he goes on to identify with the knowledge required by the guardians: ‘with this a person does not deliberate on behalf of any of the elements in the city, but for the whole city itself — how it may best have dealings with itself and with the other cities’ . It is normally rather dangerous to draw an inference from the absence or rarity of a word to the absence or rarity of the idea expressed by the word. (shrink)

Q: What did the elephant say to the naked man?A: It looks O.K., but can you breathe through it?Let me begin by justifying that joke for those of you didn’t find it funny. The relationship between the morphology of the physical organs and their activities has long been a vexed issue in the philosophy of biology: the question of whether structure determines function is of course of contemporary importance in evolutionary theory. That there was a relationship between structure and function (...) was not in general a matter of doubt to the Greek theoretical biologists: but both the extent, and crucially the direction, of the dependence was. And the question need not be restricted to a consideration of the function of a particular part in isolation: when Aristotle takes issue with Anaxagoras for asserting that humans are the most intelligent species because they have hands, claiming rather that they have hands because they are intelligent, he is making a claim not just about the direction of explanation involved, but he is also implicitly at least indicating the scope of such explanations. For Aristotle, intelligence is one of the human functions: and that function necessitates the existence and development of certain organic structures. (shrink)

The core sense of pistis as understood in Posterior Analytics, De Anima, and the Rhetoric is not that of a logical relation in which cognitively grasped propositions stand in respect to one another, but the result of an act of socially embedded interpersonal communication, a willing acceptance of guidance offered in respect to action. Even when pistis seems to have an exclusively epistemological sense, this focal meaning of pistis is implicit; to have pistis in a proposition is to willingly accept (...) that proposition as a basis for some kind of activity (albeit possibly theoretical) as a result of some kind of communicative act. This is in accordance with Aristotle’s understanding of argumentation as a social practice, entered into in order lead others to certain actions, for certain ends. Understanding pistis in this way allows us to understand how it is that pistis admits of quantitative variation. (shrink)

Scholars looking back to the earliest stirrings of the philosophical tradition in ancient Greece have often seen a rational approach to nature cleaving itself off from an older approach, that of the mythographer. If this account were right, we would have here a major (and perhaps the ?rst major) drawing of an epistemic boundary. There are, however, mounting reasons to question this narrative that have been accumulating across several modern disciplines. This paper explores the most important challenges to the myth-to-science (...) narrative and suggests that the different ways of framing the ancient debates have much to do with the boundaries between modern disciplines and/or academic cultures. (shrink)

La interpretación de la metodología científica de Aristóteles, desarrollada en las últimas décadas, introdujo algunas modificaciones importantes en la imagen fundacionista-axiomática que tradicionalmente se le había adjudicado a la epistemología del estagirita. Sin embargo, tales modificaciones cond..

In this article, based on the second book of Galen’s De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, we analyze scientific method of the famous anatomist and philosopher. We discuss experimental, logical and philosophical argumentation that Galen employs in his proof that the rational part of the soul situated in human brain. We study his polemics with Chrysippus, who declares that the rational part of the soul is located in the heart, and conclude that the treatise by Galen sets the standards of scientific (...) studies in antiquity, which combines medical, philosophical and moral components. (shrink)