RESEARCH SEMINAR ON THE ROLE OF THE BRAIN IN EARLY GREEK MEDICAL THEORY
Date 2 March 2010, 18:00 – 2 March 2010, 20:00
Location Topoi Building, Hannoversche Straße 6, 10115 Berlin, Room 1.03
Contact Professor Philip van der Eijk ()
Abstract
The Hippocratic treatise On The Sacred Disease represents a milestone in the ancient medical inquiry into the physiology of sense-perception and the seat of human cognition, as it fits into the debate between the encephalo-, haemato- and cardiocentric theories and offers a medical apology for the centrality of the brain in the cognitive processes.
The seminar will address the issue of the functional and physiological connections established, in On the Sacred Disease’s theory of cognition, between the body and the brain, which is defined as “the hermeneus of the things coming from air”. The seminar will be divided into three parts: in the first, I shall focus on the semantic field of hermeneuein and try to determine the cognitive status of the hermeneus; in the second part, I shall try to determine the linguistic context in which the hermeneutic performance takes place, as well as the nature of such performance; in the third part, I will argue for a biological representation of the brain’s hermeneutic function as it is described in On the Sacred Disease and pose the question of the rise and the limits of a ‘material semantics’.
The speaker
Roberto Lo Presti is Research Fellow in Greek and History of Medicine at the University of Palermo. At present he is visiting scholar of the Department of Classics of Leiden University and the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Science, Utrecht (January-July 2010). He studied at the Universities of Palermo, Newcastle (School of Historical Studies), Sorbonne Paris IV. In 2008 he was fellow of the Scaliger Institute of Leiden University Library. In 2009 he worked as chercheur invité at the CNRS, Unité de recherché ‘Médecine grecque’, and at the Institute of History of Medicine of the University of Lausanne. He is the author of In forma di senso. L’encefalocentrismo del trattato ippocratico Sulla malattia sacra nel suo contesto epistemologico, Roma: Carocci, 2008.