Some scholars have tried to distinguish between historical fact and legend in the biographical information about al-Fārābī that can be gleaned from medieval Arabic sources; by reinterpreting accounts in the bio-bibliographical literature and by presenting new evidence from a contemporaneous medical source; this article argues that such a distinction is problematic. In the eyes of some of his contemporaries, al-Fārābī exemplified the character type of the melancholic thinker, who succumbs to the disease because of excessive study. Arguing that the poetry (...) attributed to al-Fārābī fits well with the picture that the new medical source paints of him, the article also underscores that the topics of literature are the topics of life, and that it is therefore doubtful whether we will ever be able to disentangle myth from reality in the biographical information about al-Fārābī. (shrink)

Aristotle Poetics: Editio Maior of the Greek Text with Historial Introductions and Philological Commentaries. Edited by Leonardo Tarán and Dimitri Gutas. Mnemosyne Supplements, vol. 338. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. xiii + 536. $226, €162.

Publishing a collection of fragments from a classical author is a risky business: the moment the book appears in print, it may already be outdated, as new fragments could have come to light. Or, in the words of Ecclesiasticus 18:7: ‘When a man hath done, then he beginneth; and when he leaveth off, then he shall be doubtful’. The same fate befell me shortly after the publication of my collection of fragments from Rufus of Ephesus' On Melancholy. Manfred Ullmann wrote (...) to me that the late Rainer Degen had discovered a new fragment; in the course of my research, I came across some relevant quotations in the Hippocratic Treatments by the tenth-century author aṭ-Ṭabarī; and recently, Klaus-Dietrich Fischer published two related fragments. The following short note contains these new fragments together with an English translation and commentary. At the end, I also offer some addenda and corrigenda, partly in light of the reviews that have since appeared. (shrink)

Hippocrates is a towering figure in Greek medicine. Dubbed the 'father of medicine', he has inspired generations of physicians over millennia in both the East and West. Despite this, little is known about him, and scholars have long debated his relationship to the works attributed to him in the so-called 'Hippocratic Corpus', although it is undisputed that many of the works within it represent milestones in the development of Western medicine. In this Companion, an international team of authors introduces major (...) themes in Hippocratic studies, ranging from textual criticism and the 'Hippocratic question' to problems such as aetiology, physiology and nosology. Emphasis is given to the afterlife of Hippocrates from Late Antiquity to the modern period. Hippocrates had as much relevance in the fifth-century BC Greek world as in the medieval Islamic world, and he remains with us today in both medical and non-medical contexts. (shrink)

Al-Kindī, honoured as the 'philosopher of the Arabs', was the first philosopher of Islam. His pioneer philosophical writings engage with ideas that became available through the Graeco-Arabic translation movement. This volume makes his entire philosophical output-some two dozen works-available in English, most of them for the first time. An overall introduction, introductions to each work and extensive notes explain al-Kindī's ideas, sources, and influence.

The production of manuscripts can be an indication for the scientific, linguistic or medical interests of a community. In this paper the author argues that Parisinus Graecus 2293, a bilingual Greek-Arabic manuscript, containing parts of the first three books of Paul of Aegina's medical encyclopaedia, was produced in Sicily or Southern Italy, probably in Palermo during the reign of the Hohenstaufen. It is thus a testimony to the fervent scientific and medical interest of the Swabian court which promoted cultural exchange (...) between the East and the West. The purpose of the manuscript was not so much to help medical practice but rather to further bilingualism by giving the reader a tool with which he could improve his knowledge of either language. (shrink)

Summary The pharmacological tradition in the medieval Islamic world developed on the basis of the Greek tradition, with the works of Dioscorides and Galen being particularly popular. The terminology was influenced not only by Greek, but also Middle Persian, Syriac, and indigenous Arabic words. Through recent research into Graeco-Arabic translations, it has become possible to discern the evolution of pharmacological writing in Arabic: in the late eighth century, the technical terms were being developed, with transliterations being used; by the mid-ninth (...) century, many standard Arabic translations for Greek words have been established. Various authors, however, expanded the pharmacology inherited from the Greeks. Galen had established a system of degrees of primary faculties (dry or moist, and warm or cold) that various physicians in the Islamic world modified. Al-Kindī, for instance, invented a theory of how to calculate these degrees in compound drugs, whereas ar-Rāzī criticised the epistemology that underlies Galen's theories. Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) complemented the various degrees in his description of simple drugs. Furthermore, both Ibn Sarābiyun and al-Kaskarī integrated new drugs from the Islamic heartland, and the Far East into the Greek system. In these ways, the Arabic pharmacology developed in a creative tension of tradition and innovation. (shrink)

Ibn Sarābiyūn is one of the last exponents of classical Syriac medical writing, and one of the most influential authors for the development of medical theory and practice in late ninth-century Baghdad in particular, and for the Arabic medical tradition in general. During the last thirty years, three important studies have been published regarding the life and work of Ibn Sarābiyūn, each of which dealing with a different aspect of the transmission of this important author’s œuvre. Likewise, during the last (...) twenty-five years, a number of texts associated with Ibn Sarābiyūn's works have been edited, allowing us today to shed new light on the relation between the original Syriac and the numerous translations into Arabic, Latin and Hebrew. Furthermore, through analysing and comparing a number of manuscripts containing different parts of Ibn Sarābiyūn's work which have not hitherto been considered together, progress can be made towards answering the question how Ibn Sarābiyūn was translated and used during the medieval period. (shrink)

Galen's highly influential treatise On the Affected Parts is currently being critically edited by the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Over the last decade, a team of scholars, including the present authors as well as the late and lamented Aḥmad ʿEtmān, have worked on producing a critical edition of the Arabic translation of this text, and their efforts are now drawing to a close. Here we present new insights into how this Arabic translation relates to the (...) Greek textual tradition. (shrink)

When did historians begin to put quotation marks around the wordreal? There are many examples of this habit and some of them will be set forth as evidence in what follows. But before doing so we might ask a preliminary question: What are the quotation marksthemselvessupposed to mean? Today we find them so familiar they hardly need to be written and they are more frequently consigned to the everyday repertoire of silent gesture: two fingers on either hand clutch at the (...) air as if they meant to tickle the flanks of the invisible beast between them. The popular term is “scare-quotes,” a pun on the word “scarecrow.” Its etymology is revealing: just as a mere representation of a body in a field may scare off birds, so too scare-quotes permit someone to deploy a word without sincere commitment to what it normally means. But further reflection tells us that the effects are not so similar after all: To use a term without sincerity robs it of its original meaning and holds up its lifeless corpse to ridicule. The more knowing sort of crow can settle on the shoulder of the figure on the pole precisely because it recognizes that such a sorry excuse for a man can in fact harm no one. Similarly when one putsrealityin quotation marks we are put in mind of the living concept but we are immediately alerted to the fact that, for the user at least, the new term enjoys no metaphysical prestige. How did this happen? When and why did the single most privileged word in the entire lexicon of metaphysics begin to lose its authority such that in certain spheres of intellectual sophistication its sincere use would only seem an embarrassment and a sign of naïveté? (shrink)

The literature on deep brain stimulation (DBS) and adaptive DBS (aDBS) raises concerns that these technologies may affect personality, mood, and behavior. We conducted semi-structured interviews with researchers (n = 23) involved in developing next-generation DBS systems, exploring their perspectives on ethics and policy topics including whether DBS/aDBS can cause such changes. The majority of researchers reported being aware of personality, mood, or behavioral (PMB) changes in recipients of DBS/aDBS. Researchers offered varying estimates of the frequency of PMB changes. A (...) smaller majority reported changes in personality specifically. Some expressed reservations about the scientific status of the term ‘personality,’ while others used it freely. Most researchers discussed negative PMB changes, but a majority said that DBS/aDBS can also result in positive changes. Several researchers viewed positive PMB changes as part of the therapeutic goal in psychiatric applications of DBS/aDBS. Finally, several discussed potential causes of PMB changes other than the device itself. (shrink)

This paper introduces two newly discovered epistles by the celebrated physician and philosopher Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī. The first epistle addresses the question of why and how clothing can be used both to stay warm and to stay cool, drawing on the Aristotelian tradition of problem literature. The second epistle arises out of a court polemic and treats the question of whether one should consume mulberries after watermelons. This study offers analysis, editions, and translations of these previously unknown (...) epistles, situating them within their broader literary and cultural contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in ContextPeter E. KnoxKathryn J. Gutzwiller. Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. 358 pp.Cloth, $45.The publication of Alan Camerons The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes in 1993 set a coronis upon one stage in the efforts of modern scholars to sort out the untidy garden that we know as ancient Greek epigram. We now (...) know as much about the history of this corpus as we are likely to discover without the introduction of new evidence, and scholarly attention might logically be expected to return to the interpretation and criticism of these poems. Transmitted for the most part in the socalled Palatine Anthology and filtered through the agency of anthologists ancient and medieval, the epigrams of the ancient practitioners of this minor genre have tended to be studied individually, [End Page 628] like gemstones dislodged from their original settings. The luster of each piece may be easily admired, but what has been lost is the color and clarity that is imparted by the contrast with its neighbors. The ambitious task that Kathryn Gutzwiller has set herself in this closely argued and learned book is no less than to recover from the collecta membra of the Palatine Anthology the contours of the epigram books of nine poets from the early Hellenistic period to Meleager in the first century B.C.E.The opening chapter provides an introduction, which, taken together with the following chapter ("Hellenistic Epigram Books"), lays the foundation for the remainder of the work and establishes its basic premise, that all the Hellenistic epigrammatists composed their work for "publication" in carefully constructed books, arranged on principles which Gutzwiller can recover. This is the basis for what she terms "a new interpretative strategy" in the criticism of Hellenistic epigrams, "to read them as if"—her emphasis—"we knew their place in historical collections" (7). The remainder of the book is occupied by her reconstructions of the epigram books of Anyte, Nossis, Leonidas of Tarentum, Asclepiades, Posidippus, Hedylus, Callimachus, Antipater of Sidon, and Meleager. Readers who are convinced by her arguments in these opening chapters will be swept along by her hypothetical arrangements, which she supports with close readings of individual poems set in their new contexts. Others, myself included, will remain suspicious of the solidity of the foundations of this edifice, while still finding much to admire in her sophisticated interpretations of individual poems.Much of Gutzwiller's theoretical underpinning depends upon rather strict adherence to the orthodox view of what she characterizes as the "Callimachean aesthetic preference for the miniature, the intricate, and the fragmented" (4). The Hellenistic epigram books that she posits correspond neatly with Callimachean aesthetics so described. She rejects out of hand Cameron's arguments for the social role of epigram in a sympotic setting, in favor of the bookish background described by (e.g.) Peter Bing. The hypothesis of a neat and well– ordered world of Hellenistic poetry books, as outlined by some modern scholars, is not undisputed, but readers will not hear much about that here. Gutzwiller sweeps aside skeptical challenges to this picture, and the possibility, for example, that Callimachus produced a collected edition of his poetry, advanced only as a hypothesis by Rudolf Pfeiffer, is here (19) represented as "the probability... that Callimachus published his complete oeuvre, ordered and divided into books." Her summary of the papyrus evidence paints a far more stable picture of the situation of books in the manuscript culture of the Hellenistic world than the evidence safely allows. For Gutzwiller, any references to the of a poet "indicate an authorially compiled epigram book" (20). This naïve extension of Pfeiffer's theory of the composition of a "Collected Works" of Callimachus, and unswerving allegiance to the communis opinio of Callimachean aesthetics, are recurring themes in Gutzwiller's reconstructions of ancient epigram books. Having settled upon the essential aesthetic that determines the [End Page 629] configuration of the book, it remains only to attach the surviving poems to this framework. Not surprisingly, the reconstructed books then offer further confirmation of the underlying assumptions. On this shaky foundation, for example, Gutzwiller... (shrink)

This chapter is intended to provide the reader with a brief biographical overview of Adorno's life and thought, with an emphasis on the key turning points in his career. It discusses his childhood, his education in Frankfurt, his musical studies, his emigration first to Oxford and then to the United States, his return to Germany after the Second World War, his tenure as professor at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt and his prominence as a public intellectual, and his confrontation with students. (...) Together with biographical details the chapter also offers a simple overview of Adorno's major concerns as a philosopher. (shrink)

"Science and Theology in Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy" has two primary goals. The first is to establish Descartes' understanding of the primary purpose of the Meditations . The second is to determine the meaning, status, and purpose of the fundamental Cartesian theological and scientific principles employed in the Meditations. ;Descartes makes two distinct and explicit statements of the primary purpose of the Meditations. The first statement, made in the dedicatory epistle to the Meditations, claims that the primary purpose of (...) the Meditations is to establish the truth of the Christian religion on the basis of demonstrative proofs of the existence of God and of the immortality of the human soul. The second statement, made in the First Meditation, claims that the primary purpose of the Meditations is the establishment of "unshakable" foundations of the sciences. Descartes compels the reader to determine whether the Meditations is primarily a work of Christian theology or a scientific treatise dedicated to establishing the certitude and indubitability of its primary concepts. The dissertation defends the view that only if the Meditations' "theological" purpose is understood to be subordinate to and in the service of advancing its "foundational" purpose is a coherent interpretation of the Meditations possible. ;The second goal of the dissertation is advanced through the study of the fundamental Cartesian theological and scientific principles in relation to "Cartesian doubt." These principles are shown to be advanced and defended by Descartes in order to establish the foundations of a comprehensive science of nature directed toward the unification of the human and the non-human order. The sought for derivation of the human from the non-human order is shown, however, to be in principle impossible on precisely Cartesian grounds. Cartesian "First Philosophy" demonstrates that what is "first for us" and what is "first by nature" are necessarily the same. The foundations of the sciences prove to be the very experiences of pre-scientific consciousness that are regarded as "patently false" by Cartesian doubt. The dissertation concludes with the suggestion that the possibility of philosophy itself is grounded in the unity and difference between pre-scientific "awareness" and scientific "cognition.". (shrink)

When did historians begin to put quotation marks around the wordreal? There are many examples of this habit and some of them will be set forth as evidence in what follows. But before doing so we might ask a preliminary question: What are the quotation marksthemselvessupposed to mean? Today we find them so familiar they hardly need to be written and they are more frequently consigned to the everyday repertoire of silent gesture: two fingers on either hand clutch at the (...) air as if they meant to tickle the flanks of the invisible beast between them. The popular term is “scare-quotes,” a pun on the word “scarecrow.” Its etymology is revealing: just as a mere representation of a body in a field may scare off birds, so too scare-quotes permit someone to deploy a word without sincere commitment to what it normally means. But further reflection tells us that the effects are not so similar after all: To use a term without sincerity robs it of its original meaning and holds up its lifeless corpse to ridicule. The more knowing sort of crow can settle on the shoulder of the figure on the pole precisely because it recognizes that such a sorry excuse for a man can in fact harm no one. Similarly when one putsrealityin quotation marks we are put in mind of the living concept but we are immediately alerted to the fact that, for the user at least, the new term enjoys no metaphysical prestige. How did this happen? When and why did the single most privileged word in the entire lexicon of metaphysics begin to lose its authority such that in certain spheres of intellectual sophistication its sincere use would only seem an embarrassment and a sign of naïveté? (shrink)

This rejoinder is a reply to the authors' criticisms of Vedder's original review of Norms of Liberty that seeks to clarify why the difficulties present in their attempt to establish the modern right to liberty on the foundation of Greek nobility and Aristotelian eudaemonism are insuperable.

"Many of today's moral conflicts concerning family values and medical ethics have their basis in different conceptions of man and the nature and purpose of human life. Fr Bristow argues that contemporary utilitarianism and the various forms of permissive morality are insufficient for dealing with these matters and that only a natural law morality is adequate to the needs and dignity of the human person. He goes on to apply its principles to the issues that derive from advancing technology, such (...) as genetic engineering, in vitrio fertilization, embryo research, drugs and painkillers and ecology."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

SummaryIn this article, I offer a series of responses to comments by four scholars on my book, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. In my remarks, I take up various questions of both methodology and interpretation, clarifying, for example, why the term “Continental” still seems to me an apt description for the philosophies of both Cassirer and Heidegger, how the two thinkers related to the tradition of philosophical anthropology, how each philosopher conceived of the relation between myth and science, and so (...) forth. Along the way, I also clarify why the terms “spontaneity” and “thrownness” still strike me as helpful for distinguishing between the two rival philosophies, and I explain why it is misguided to believe that philosophical disputes must conclude in dialectical reconciliation. (shrink)