Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity

Philip J. van der Eijk is Professor of Greek at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published widely on ancient philosophy, medicine and science, comparative literature and patristics. He is the author of Aristoteles. De insomniis. De divinatione per somnum (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994) and of Diocles of Carystus. A Collection of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (2 Vols., Leiden: Brill, 2000-1). He has edited and co-authored Ancient Histories of Medicine. Essays in Medical Doxography and Historiography in Classical Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1999) and co-edited Ancient Medicine in its Socio-Cultural Context (2 Vols., Amsterdam - Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995).

Acknowledgements; Note on translations; Note on abbreviations; Introduction; Part I. Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystus: 1. The 'theology' of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease; 2. Diocles and the Hippocratic writings on the method of dietetics and the limits of causal explanation; 3. To help, or to do no harm: principles and practices of therapeutics in the Hippocratic Corpus and in the work of Diocles of Carystus; 4. The heart, the brain, the blood and the pneuma: Hippocrates, Diocles and Aristotle on the location of cognitive processes; Part II. Aristotle and His School: 5. Aristotle on melancholy; 6. Theoretical and empirical elements in Aristotle's treatment of sleep, dreams and divination in sleep; 7. The matter of mind: Aristotle on the biology of 'psychic' processes and the bodily aspects of thinking; 8. Divine movement and human nature in Eudemian Ethics 8.2; 9. On sterility ('Hist. an. 10'), a medical work by Aristotle?; Part III. Late Antiquity: 10. Galen's use of the concept of 'qualified experience' in his dietetic and pharmacological works; 11. The Methodism of Caelius Aurelianus: some epistemological issues; Bibliography; Index of passages cited; General index.