Great Ideas of Philosophy

Lecture ElevenHippocrates and the Science of LifeScope: One of the signal achievements of the classical world of the Greeks was the naturalization of what hadlong been absorbed into mysticism, superstition, and magic. The perspective of the natural scientist isnowhere more evident, however, than in the commonsense approach of the Greek medical writers andpractitioners whose teachings come down to us in the form of “Hippocratic” treatises. In other societies ofthe ancient world, medicine was regarded as a part of religion; even among the mass of Greeks, mostconsulted oracles and believed that disease was visited on the body by the gods in punishment for wrongdone (the Christian era would take up this view again). But the Hippocratic empirikoi, or empiricalpractitioners, believed no disease was more divine than another; observation and clinical practice were ofthe essence; and health was a matter of balance, diet, and the right kind of life.OutlineI. Hippocrates (469–399 B.C.) falls between Plato and Aristotle and should be dealt with between them, in part,because he and his school promoted a perspective on life that points to Aristotle: the perspective of naturalisticscience.A. Unlike the civilizations of Persia and Egypt, Hellenism conferred on the priesthood no special insight intomatters of a scientific, medical, or philosophical nature.B. In all other early societies, medicine was inseparable from magic and religion; in Hellenic society, whichnever had a religious establishment, it was not.1. The ancient Greek medical perspective is nothing short of amazing. The idea that the conditions ofhealth and disease must be understood in a naturalistic, systematic, and scientific way is a great leapforward in the history of ideas.2. Even in Homeric epics, one finds a matter-of-fact biology as a means by which to understand complexpsychological processes: what drives us are conditions in our bodies.3. The school of Pythagoras, who was, of all the early Greeks, most focused on the abstract and the divine,applied Pythagorean scientific precepts to medicine, treating the soul through the body by diet and atherapeutic regimen.II. Hellenic society was singular in the ancient world for its tendency to objectify itself—its beliefs, its practices,its thoughts—for the purpose of scrutiny.A. In doing so, it stands in vivid contrast to an understanding based on revelation or the canons of a religiousfaith. For the Hippocratic physician, there is no scriptural authority or divine voice to settle naturalisticquestions.B. Note that Hippocratic medicine comes to us in the form of “Hippocratic writing,” treatises that weredeveloped over a period of time and not necessarily written by Hippocrates himself.C. According to these writings, the power of the gods can exert itself in any and all medical conditions; thus,there is no reason to regard any disorder as any more or less “divine” than any other. No disease (e.g.,epilepsy) is any more “sacred” than any other.D. This perspective is available only to those who have not accepted priestcraft as having epistemologicalauthority. Whatever problems are to be addressed by oracles and priests, the problem of knowledge is notone of them, at least as this problem arises from the facts of the natural world.1. If the chief knowledge claims of a society are religious in nature, progress is difficult.2. Interpretations of reality are in the hands of the priests, and scholarship is confined to the analysis ofdivinely inspired texts.E. The Greeks did not lack religious impulses even in their science and philosophy (vide Pythagoras), butinquiry was seen as an essential feature of rationality.1. The Hippocratic doctors were not skeptical about the gods but about their power in the body.2. This is part of the process of the secularization of knowledge that the Greeks would bequeath tophilosophy and science.28©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership