The Symptom and the Subject

The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece

Brooke Holmes (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

384 Seiten

2014
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-0-691-16340-6 (ISBN)

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The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (soma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature. By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances hidden inside the person.
Imagining a daemonic space inside the person but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of the self. The Symptom and the Subject highlights with fresh importance how classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential ways of thinking about the human subject.

Brooke Holmes is assistant professor of classics at Princeton University.

Preface and Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii Note on Transliterations and Translations xxiii INTRODUCTION 1 Symptoms and Subjects 1 Seeing through Symptoms 9 The Physical Imagination 19 Rethinking S?ma and Psukh? 29 Telling Stories 37 CHAPTER ONE: Before the Physical Body 41 Daemonic Violence 48 The Seen and the Felt 58 The Boundaries of the Felt 64 Fear and the Visual Field of the Self 69 How Gods Act 73 The Seen Body and Social Agency 76 Interpreting Disease and Practices of Healing 79 CHAPTER TWO: The Inquiry into Nature and the Physical Imagination 84 Depersonalizing Causes 90 Natural Justice 95 Melissus and the Denial of Body 101 A Community of Objects 108 Bodies, Persons, Knowledge 116 CHAPTER THREE: Incorporating the Daemonic 121 Symptoms at the Th reshold of Seen and Unseen 126 The Interval 130 Explaining Disease 133 The Dynamics of the Cavity 138 The Automatic Body 142 CHAPTER FOUR: Signs of Life and Techniques of Taking Care 148 The Prognostic Symptom: Forces of Life and Death 150 Fragile Life 156 On Ancient Medicine and the Discovery of Human Nature 162 Embodiment, Knowledge, and Technical Agency 171 Taking Care 177 Shoring Up the Self 182 CHAPTER FIVE: Beyond the S?ma: Therapies of the Psukh? 192 Bodily Needs 196 Psychic Desires 202 Gorgias's Encomium to Helen and Human Diseases 211 Psychic Disorder in Democritus 216 CHAPTER SIX: Forces of Nature, Acts of Gods: Euripides' Symptoms 228 The Polysemy of the Symptom 233 Tragedy and the Interval 239 Euripides' Causes: Th e Madness of Heracles 242 Euripides' Causes: Th e Madness of Orestes 246 Realizing Disease in the Hippolytus 252 Daemonic Phusis 260 The Semantics of Suff ering 265 Conclusion 275 Bibliography 281 Index Locorum 325 General Index 349

Erscheint lt. Verlag	3.11.2014
Verlagsort	New Jersey
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 235 mm
Gewicht	567 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Altertum / Antike
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10	0-691-16340-5 / 0691163405
ISBN-13	978-0-691-16340-6 / 9780691163406
Zustand	Neuware