Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

130 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystuscall focused anatomical research. 28 More elaborate views on the network ofcognitive faculties in the body are only rarely based on empirical observations,as in the case with the above-mentioned Alcmaeon, who is believedto have arrived at an encephalocentric view on the mind on the basis ofthe connection between the eyes and the brain. Yet the fact that this observationwas known both to the author of the Hippocratic work On Fleshesand to Aristotle, who nevertheless do not attribute any significant rolein cognition to the brain, proves that it might equally give rise to otherinterpretations.The authors mentioned do in fact employ rather sophisticated terminologyfor what we would call psychological, mental or spiritual faculties,but they assume a close connection between these faculties and anatomicaland physiological factors. When speaking about exercising these faculties,they virtually always do so in terms of certain substances (such as blood, airor water) or qualities (hot, cold, dry, wet) and of processes such as flowingand distributing or, in case the psychic faculties have been disturbed, ofstagnation, constipation, blockage, and so on. Another recurring elementis the emphasis on balance (isonomia, summetria, eukrasia) and on the riskof an excess or shortage of a certain substance or quality.An exception to this rule is Aristotle’s idea that the highest cognitivefaculty, thought, is not bound to a physical substrate. It is a kind of epiphenomenonthat, although it is unable to function without sense perception(and therefore without physiological processes), cannot be located in a particularplace of the body. 29 For this reason it is, strictly speaking, not correctto attribute a cardiocentric view on the mind to Aristotle, as has frequentlybeen done both in antiquity and in modern literature. 30 The only text inwhich the mind is explicitly located in the heart is in the Hippocratic workOn the Heart, which offers a remarkably detailed description of the anatomyof the heart. The author of this presumably post-Aristotelian writing claimsthat gnōmē (‘mind’, ‘insight’) has its seat in the left ventricle of the heart,from where it issues its decrees about ‘the other (part of the) soul’ (allēpsuchē), which is situated in the rest of the body. To prove his stance, theauthor argues that if autopsy were carried out on a body of a living beingthat had just been killed, the aorta would still contain blood, but the left28 See Lloyd (1979) 146–9; for views on the vascular system see the studies mentioned in Harris (1973)and Duminil (1983).29 De an. 429 a 23–5, 27–8. As stated above, the heart is given a leading role in co-ordinating perception,movement and nutrition (see Part. an. 3.4 and De iuv. 3–4).30 For instance by Duminil (1983) 310; on the absence of statements by Aristotle on the location ofthe mind see, e.g., Mansfeld (1990) 3212–16. For the problems raised by Aristotle’s view see Barnes(1971–2) 110–12, reprinted in Barnes, Schofield and Sorabji, vol. iv (1979) 39–40.