Classical Philosophy (A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps #1)

by Peter S. Adamson

This is a book about the history of philosophy, so why am I talking about medicine? Well, as I said at the end of the previous chapter, philosophy and medicine were very closely related in the Greek world. This is an example of something I’ve mentioned before: the close relationship between ancient philosophy and science in general. Medicine makes a particularly good example, because it was a preoccupation of so many philosophically-minded authors, and because we can actually trace the impact of philosophy on medical ideas.

In Homer, Asclepius seems to be a human, albeit one whose father was a Centaur. Later on in Greek history, though, Asclepius will be seen as a god of medicine. This is already one way that medicine is like philosophy: the seeds of a tradition are already planted in the Homeric poems. Another striking parallel is that Greek medicine is associated with the same region of the Greek world as gave birth to philosophy: the far eastern Mediterranean.

In a sense all diseases are sacred, because they are brought about in our bodies by natural forces like the winds or the sun, and these forces are themselves divine.

Respect for the gods doesn’t mean thinking that they intervene randomly in human life to strike certain people down with an illness. It means seeing all of nature as divine, or as having a divine source.

with human emotions and irrationality. Xenophanes, like the author of The Sacred Disease, saw rationality as the correct religious attitude, not as a complete departure from religion.

religion was one part of the world that generated Hippocratic medicine. But a still bigger influence came from Pre-Socratic philosophical and scientific ideas.

As we saw, for Empedocles everything is made of the four

elements, air, earth, fire, and water; for instance, bone or the eye: in both cases, he explains how these body parts arise out of the four elements. And for Empedocles, blood and flesh are made of nearly equal proportions of the four elements. That makes blood and flesh something like an ideal physical stuff, from Empedocles’ point of view. The medical application for this idea is obvious: if you’re sick, it’s because your proportions are out of balance. We find another thinker, the much more obscure Philistion of Locri, making precisely this point.

He says that since your body is made up of those four elements—fire, air, earth, and water—we get sick because some of the elements dominate so that our bodies become too hot, cold, dry, or wet. The trick is to get these qualities into balance.

He also put a lot of emphasis on breath—the Greek word for breath is pneuma, which is where we get words like “pneumatic.” Aristotle explains that, according to Empedocles, there is a kind of interplay between breath and blood

Another Pre-Socratic philosopher who was fascinated by breath was Diogenes of Apollonia. Ancient authors tended to see him as somewhat derivative (§598). His big

thing was the principle of air, which seems to be a throwback to Anaximenes (§§602–3). Diogenes was more influenced by Anaxagoras than Empedocles, and identified his airy principle with the cosmic Mind of Anaxagoras.

Dying is, quite literally, running out of breath, and being intelligent is basically a matter of having more air in your physical make-up—so that he explains the fact that plants can’t think in terms of their not taking in and retaining air (§612).

Many later thinkers will go further, and say that the soul itself is made of some kind of breath which pervades the body, and perhaps even circulates through what we now know to be blood-vessels or nerves.

Hippocratic corpus.

One text, called On Ancient Medicine, actually defends what the author considers to be traditional medicine against newfangled theories which invoke the contrary properties hot, dry, cold, and wet.

“Life is short, but the art is long.”

the Hippocratics talk about the well-balanced proportion of bodily humors, meaning the various fluids in the body. You may well have heard of the four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. The parallel with the four elements of Empedocles is not a coincidence—and the humors could likewise be associated with the elemental properties, heat, cold, and so on.

The humors are already starting to be associated with specific diseases. The best example is “melancholy”: the word comes from the Greek words for “black bile.” When you have too much black bile you are melancholic—which for the ancients involves a complicated set of symptoms, and not just sadness, as the word has come to mean in English. The meanings of the English words “sanguine” and “phlegmatic” also refer to humors recognized by ancient and medieval thinkers—“sanguine” is an allusion to blood and “phlegmatic” to, well, phlegm. The fact that these English words refer to personality traits, and not diseases, shows that the tradition extended the humoral theory to explain not just disease

but a wide range of human behavior.

But let’s leave to one side the implications of Hippocratic practices for modern medicine, and ask instead where all this leaves us in terms of early Greek philosophy. For one thing, it reminds us that the Pre-Socratics applied their general theories to very specific problems. As I mentioned earlier, they saw the body as a

“microcosm,” a little version of the whole universe. The rules that apply to the cosmos apply to the human body as well, an idea which is used to explain even things like respiration and the ingredients of blood and bone. Something else we’ve learned is that the Pre-Socratics managed to influence their culture more broadly. They didn’t see philosophy as a narrow, cloistered discipline, and their breadth of vision meant they could influence authors with other interests, like these doctors, who took Pre-Socratic ideas seriously and put them to use.

The word “sophist” is, nowadays, a term of abuse. If you call someone a sophist, you’re accusing them of using bad arguments, arguments which are deceptively plausible but in fact totally bogus. Worse still, sophistry is arguing badly on purpose, trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes by weaving a web of confusing and misleading words.

Plato wrote dialogues named after four of the most important sophists: Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, and Euthydemus.

Athens’ democratic constitution. In this regime persuasion was the key to political power. If you wanted to advance in Athenian society and become an influential gentleman, you needed to be able to speak well in order to sway the assembly. This is

what the sophists taught their students to do: to speak persuasively on any topic.

a sophist named Prodicus. His speciality was carefully distinguishing the meanings of words; for example, Plato depicts him insisting that in order to be civil one should “debate” but not “argue,” with the result that the audience is “gratified” but not “pleased” (Plato, Protagoras 337a–c).

Socrates’ constant search to define what virtue is, what courage is, and so on, could be seen as a development of the linguistic precision urged by Prodicus.

The best example of the sophist as an all-around wise man was Hippias.

from a philosophical point of view the sophists’ most relevant ideas all relate somehow to the value of persuasion. They were not dispassionate seekers of truth, but advocates and word-smiths, more akin to political advisors or spin-doctors than to academic researchers. At their most radical, the sophists could occasionally be moved to

suggest that there is no absolute truth to be found, and that persuasion is all we have.

This idea is associated especially with the greatest of the s...

If you wanted to know how to make a convincing speech, he could certainly help. But he offered more: he offered virtue.

Protagoras portrays political virtue as a gift from gods to men, which is shared out equally to all—that is, everyone can partake of virtue, unlike more specialized skills, like flute-playing. It’s for this reason, says Protagoras, that we punish people when they fall short of what virtue would demand. On the other hand, not everyone is equally virtuous, and this is where Protagoras comes in—he, after all, is able to teach people how to be more virtuous than they are by nature.

famous remark that “man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not.”5 In this brief statement we have the roots of an ancient and, to many, disturbing philosophical tradition: relativism. This is how Plato understood Protagoras: he was saying that each man judges what is true for him, but no one is in a position to judge what is true for anyone else. On this interpretation, Protagoras was saying that truth is always something’s being true for someone,

Protagoras answering that virtue is really what is advantageous to me. What Protagoras teaches me is not what would be best absolutely, but what would be best for me, meaning from my point of view.

In yet another dialogue, the Gorgias, Socrates battles against the claim that virtue is the advantage, not of just anybody, but of those who are naturally stronger.

application of Protagoras’ position to the sphere of morality: if there is no absolute truth, then

there is nothing but advantage, and by rights what should happen is that the strongest people should get the best rewards. But why think the strongest people should get more than the weak? In fact, how can the sophists even use the word “should” if they reject absolute morality? Here the sophists could turn to a distinction they liked to draw between custom and nature. It is only by custom that there are social rules and laws of justice, and these laws may or may not reflect the natural order of things. It’s natural for the strong to dominate the weak, whereas it’s a mere custom for the weak to band together and restrict the power of the strong. Thrasymachus and other radical sophists saw themselves as speaking up for nature, and unmasking morality as nothing but social convention.

Protagoras himself probably drew more benign conclusions from his “man is the measure” doctrine. For Protagoras, the point ...

their lives seem better, that is, more advantageous. If he could make your life seem better to you, then would you really care whether ther...

Protagoras had ways of showing that you aren’t going to get at reality even if you insist on trying. He was a pioneer in the paradigmatically sophistic activity of ...

if one can always argue with equal plausibility on both sides of any question, then arguing won’t get us to the truth. We’re only going to be persuaded by whichever argument is presented more effectively. The sophists were duly renowned for claiming they could

“make the weaker argument the stronger.”

Gorgias.

Unlike Protagoras, however, Gorgias went out of his way to deny that he could teach virtue, and in fact stressed the moral neutrality of his art of rhetoric.

The central part of the speech argues that if Helen was persuaded to go off to Troy, then she was helpless to resist. Persuasive speech, says Gorgias, is like a drug. If a skilled user of words really wants you to do something, you will do it, as surely as if someone were to come along and use physical force on you.

Gorgias doubtless had a serious point too. Like Protagoras, Gorgias was hoping to pull the rug out from under

philosophers, with their ambitious theories of underlying reality. If there is no reality to get at, and in fact no unreality either, as Gorgias argues in On Non-Being, then we are left only with the way things seem to us.

sophist outlook was the diametrical opposite of Platonism.