Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Heart, brain, blood, pneuma 121any particular place, but that the entire body is ill and therefore the entirebody requires treatment. Another characteristic of the Methodists is thatspeculations on the location of the mind are rejected for being pointless, asit is impossible to reach conclusions on the matter on empirical grounds,and the doctor should abstain from expressing any opinions (‘first of all itis still uncertain which part of the body is the leading part’). This attitudeis inspired by the close connection between the epistemological views ofthe Methodists and those of the philosophical school of the Sceptics, whoon principle refuse to express opinions on any non-perceptible matters. Inaddition, the Methodists consider such questions irrelevant to therapeuticpractice, which they regard as the focus of medical science.Whether Caelius Aurelianus does justice to all his medical predecessorsby presenting matters as he does is very much the question. Recent researchinto the principles and methods of doxography (the description of the doxai,the characteristic doctrines of authorities in a certain subject) has revealedthat the question ‘What is the leading principle in man and where is itlocated?’ more or less assumed a life of its own in late antiquity, separate fromthe scientific context from which it originated. It became a favourite subjectfor practising argumentation techniques (comparable to questions such as‘Is an embryo a living being?’), 7 whereby contrasting views were takenin an artificial debate (sometimes even views that, although theoreticallypossible, have, as far as we know, never actually been supported), whichwere subsequently attributed to authorities in the field, and which served asexercise material for finding and using arguments both for and against. Such‘dialectic’ staging of a debate bears little relation to a historically faithfulrendition of a debate that actually took place in the past.It is most probable that Caelius Aurelianus’ summary of views as quotedabove is part of such a doxographical tradition, and therefore highly schematised.In his presentation, the views of those to whom he refers – withoutmentioning their names 8 – imply a number of presuppositions regardingempirical evidence and theoretical concepts in respect of which it is questionablewhether the authorities concerned actually held them. A questionlike ‘What is the leading principle of the soul and where is it located?’presupposes that there is such a thing as a leading ‘part’ or principle in thesoul and that it can be located somewhere. The debate to which Caelius7 On this see Mansfeld (1990), and for embryology Tieleman (1991).8 The doctors and philosophers to whom Caelius Aurelianus refers can be identified by studying otherdoxographic authors (for this purpose see the discussion by Mansfeld mentioned in n. 7). Furtherdown in the same book Caelius Aurelianus discusses the therapeutic views on phrenitis held byDiocles, Erasistratus, Asclepiades, Themison and Heraclides.