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eBook details
- Title: Soul, Seed and Palingenesis in the Hippocratic de Victu.
- Author : APIERON
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 229 KB
Description
The Hippocratic treatise de Victu is one of the most interesting but also one of the most obscure texts included in the Corpus Hippocraticum. It presents a unique combination of medical, philosophical and religious ideas that are integrated within an explicitly articulated theory of human nature. On the one hand, the treatise is one of the best examples of Greek 'rational' medicine, and it has even been suggested that it might be an authentic work of Hippocrates, (1) on the other hand, it is the only treatise in the Hippocratic Corpus that recommends prayers to gods as part of dietetic treatment, (2) and that attributes the arrangement of the phusis of all things to gods. (3) Supposing that the treatise was written at the end of the fifth or in the first half of the fourth century BC, (4) we may regard it as probably the oldest surviving ancient work to offer not only a detailed account of regimen (5) and zoological taxonomy, (6) but also a profoundly elaborated account of the body-soul relationship. (7) In this study I will challenge two earlier, and radically opposite suppositions concerning the notion of soul in this treatise that are decisive for a general reading of the text as a whole. Some modern scholars have interpreted the treatise as advocating a kind of dualism, (8) in particular between body and soul. (9) This interpretation was based largely on one passage in Chapter 86 at the beginning of Book IV, which was considered to be influenced by 'Orphic' or 'Pythagorean' ideas (10) and believed to express a hostile relationship between body and soul. (11) Other interpreters have tried to show that the relation of body and soul within the whole treatise is explicitly non-dualistic, (12) that body and soul cannot be separated from each other, (13) that there is a continuum between the psychological and the physical (14) and that the Orphic hypothesis is improbable. (15)