 Thank you so much, Christopher, and thanks to Charles and Christopher for the invitation to be here. Can everyone hear me okay? Yeah. And thanks for coming out on the 4th of July, the on ramp to vacation. I was really excited by the invitation to come present today because of the interest in sort of creating dialogue and thinking across different forms of knowledge. And I expect to learn a lot today as much as I hope to share some of my own work with you because people often don't know that much about ancient Greek medicine, biology, philosophy. I'm going to spend a little bit more time in the talk today presenting some background. And so I will talk about Aristotle. I'll talk about Galen and Osteoics, but a little bit, I'm going to have to cut down a little bit on that in order to sort of give you the broad picture. The big question I think I have to answer for you at the outset is why are we talking about the ancient Greeks in the history of genomics? Genomics and biology more broadly in the ancient Greeks are a long way away. And I could give you answers about either origin stories or thinking about historical atavism and what we've sort of transcended. And I want to instead look at the kind of specific relationship of ancient Greek to the history of vitalism. So vitalism, ah, wow, it's a very agential computer, okay, is a strange kind of historical object. So in a famous essay by George Kangyam, who Charles Wolfe is going to talk about later, he talks about how vitalism is unlike other kinds of objects in the history of science because it sort of refuses to die. So it kind of keeps coming back and it has a persistence and a vitality. He talks about and so it defies obsolescence in a way, it defies transcendence. And if you think about vitalism as an object which is suspended between history on the one hand, the progress of time and philosophy as a sort of problem we keep grappling with, the Greeks occupy a very important role historically in how vitalism has been organized as this trans-historical problem, this recurrent historical problem. Now the claim about the Greeks importance at the sort of origins of this tradition does not necessarily have to be a claim about absolute origin. So there are difficulties that I'm not going to get into today about the story Kangyam and many other philosophers of the 20th century would tell you about the role of the Greeks as sort of the moment where human subjects sort of come into themselves as thinking objects, you know, thinking subjects that didn't happen in any other culture and before that we sort of weren't really human. That's not the claim that I'm making today. As we do more comparative philosophy, we think more broadly about the ancient world that's simply an untenable claim. That's not the claim I'm making. What I am claiming is that if we're thinking about vitalism as a tradition of thinking as a philosophical sort of conversation that takes place across time, we're really thinking about how it sort of manifests itself in texts that people write and then return to and comment on and come back to and debate with over many, many centuries. So we're talking about a sort of material tradition, text as a technology for transmitting ideas across time. And within this trans-historical tradition of conversation, the Greeks occupy an exceptionally important role. So the texts that are written, the names that are associated with those texts, apocrates, Aristotle, Galen, become consistent points of reference within the history of vitalism all the way up to the 20th century. And so that's the way in which I'm thinking about the Greeks. On the other hand, what I'm doing today is I'm not going to go back, I'm not going to assume that vitalism is something we should defend or validate. I'm not going to go back to the Greeks and say, look, everybody else has gone back to them. I'm going to go back to them too. Instead, what I want to do is sort of in the spirit of vitalism as this trans-historical sort of exercise, I want to go back to a handful of Greek sources to think about the emergence of philosophical problems that get sort of worked again and again and again, and to think about them as both sort of resonant with philosophical problems that we haven't sort of solved in thinking about bodies and nature and life, but they're also quite different. And so one thing is soul, right? Soul is not a concept that most scientists are going to be talking about today. So there's this interesting thing when we think about the Greek material where it looks both familiar and unfamiliar, and it's a good exercise as we try to sort of develop our conceptual resources to think with the Greeks. And so that's the experiment that I think has been happening over the history of vitalism, and that's what I want to do with you today. And I've got two main questions that I want to work through, and they're big questions, and I'm raising them. And I want to show sort of how they create certain traditions in the ancient Greek material. One is, does an account of life require unity? One of the things that we see when we get to Aristotle in particular, but also post-Aristotelian thinkers, is an obsession with unity. Life is a unity. And the two main substances are unities. It's a whole greater than some of its parts. It's a recurrent theme in vitalism. And the second question I want to ask is, how does this demand for unity come into conflict with different ways in which this thing we're calling life expresses itself? So those are sort of the two. I'm sort of watching how unity emerges as a solution or as a sort of desideratum, something you want to achieve, and then I'm looking at how, in fact, that's a really hard thing to achieve, unity. So I've got three parts, and I just want to give you a sense since people, and I put my bust of Aristotle up there so you know we're in Greece. So in the beginning, I want to sort of look at the prehistory of this two-soul, what I'm calling the two-soul problem in Aristotle. So I want to kind of retrace what I would call the emergence of the problem of life and the problem of the body. But I'll move over that relatively quickly given the amount of material I'm going to cover just to give you the background. Then I want to focus on Aristotle. And then I really want to also, I want to, even if I don't get to do a lot with the Stoics and Galen, I really want to look at them because a lot of times what happens when we go back to the Greeks is we pick a thinker like Aristotle and then we assume that, you know, I mean, it's great. We can have a conversation with Aristotle. We can think about Aristotle. We forget the fact that there was an enormously sophisticated engagement with Aristotle in antiquity that's very valuable to us as we engage with many of the problems that Aristotle raised. So that's why I want to make sure that I look at some of these later thinkers. A couple of things I want to point out. This is a huge span of time. I'm talking about a much greater span of time than I'm sure anybody else today. So 750 to 2000 years essentially, right? I'm talking about both physicians and philosophers. That's an important thing about the history of vitalism, the history of life is we're constantly tacking back and forth between conceptual speculative work and not just pragmatic work. I mean, not just empirical science but really thinking about life as an object of care and something you have to develop techniques for to take care of. And that's something that creates a little bit of this tension between different forms of life, life's agency. And the third thing that I want to point out is that what I had said earlier about talking about a tradition of a problem as being instantiated textually materially, this is very much the case. So particularly when we get to the Hippocrates and we get to Plato, we're talking the emergence of a body of text, a corpus of text that later thinkers are going to go back to again and again and again they're going to keep reading and keep questioning that body of text. So that is instantiated already in antiquity, that material embodiment of a way of thinking through problems. So I want to start with a claim that the philosopher Bernard Williams makes in order to sort of raise this question of body and soul. So we think we're in the world of the body. We think that the alternative is something like soul or something like mind, well what kind of a problem is this? How does it come about? So Williams makes this claim. We do indeed have a concept of the body. We agree that each of us has a body. We do not all agree we each have a soul. Soul is in a sense more speculative or theoretical concept of body. So this is Williams's claim. And I want to start by, and this is a lot of philosophers, a lot of people thinking about the history of dualism would make a claim like this. The problem is not the body, the body is given. The problem is when we start thinking about soul or mind or these kinds of speculative ideas. So is a concept of the body innate? Is it universal? Is body such a given idea? The second question, what is he talking about when he talks about soul? So he assumes that body is given. And once you assume body is sort of static and given, you're just automatically going to have this thing called soul. What is soul? And what is the soul that's at stake in the text that I'm looking at? And then the third question, what is it that makes a concept speculative or theoretical? So what if I framed it like this? We all agree we're all alive. Does that mean that life is not a speculative concept? So there's really this question of what's built into the very positing of something speculative or theoretical. So I put these questions up here because I disagree with Williams and I want to walk through first. I want to challenge this question of the concept of the body innate or universal and then I'll talk a little bit about soul and then we'll open into how a particular formation of the body soul problem creates what I'm calling the two-soul problem. So Williams is actually responding to a very famous book which was written in the mid-20th century by Bruno Snell which you may know called The Discovery of the Mind. And Snell made a claim actually that it had been noticed already in antiquity but Snell returns to it that he looks at the evidence from Homer and he notices one thing in particular, the first line on there, which is the word that means body in the tradition going forward. So every text that I talk about from basically once we get past Homer when you see body, the Greek word soma, this word does not appear in Homer to designate the living body. The soma is always dead in Homer and in fact it's not the usual word that the Homeric poets would have used to talk about the dead body. They have other words necrosis and opus that they use. Soma is a very weird word. And then there's a second thing that you can notice which is psuche, the word from which we get psychology, is also absent as life force or as mind or as anything it's going to come to mean in the later tradition. So psuche in Homer also has to do with death and it's a sort of slip, this little wisp that arises out of the corpse. You can see vase paintings where like the psuche sort of hovers over the corpse at death and sort of just disappears and that's the only sort of manifestation of the psuche. The other interesting thing is not only dasoma not mean living body in Homer, there's no other word that we could pick out which would sort of match the semantic field that gets attached to soma later on. Similarly there's nothing that you could attach to psuche. So there's no obvious dualism in Homer we could say. There's a ton of other words to talk about human embodiment. So there's two ways of taking this evidence. So Snell's claim is that Homer lacked a unified self so he don't have a notion of the soul. He thinks you can't really have a notion of the body as not soul and you can't and this is interesting because this is going to recur. You can't really have a unified notion of the self. The Homeric self is just a sort of collection of limbs and organs and things like that. So the Greeks on Snell's reading are going to discover this unified notion of the self. They're going to discover the mind. It's very Hegelian and they're going to sort of progress on this path of which we're the heirs today and thank God we're not Greeks. The second way of taking this piece of information is to say okay what in Homer we have is a way of thinking about embodiment, what we would call embodiment in selves which does not map onto the way that we are accustomed to do it where we sort of divide everyone into bodies and souls. And that's interesting because it means first of all there are other ways of imagining selves as embodied but the other thing that's interesting is then where does it come from? So the Greeks do have a notion of body and soul. Let's watch how it sort of emerges. So if we look on the soul side which is where people have been interested mostly we have to deal primarily with fragments. We have very little evidence for the soul before the corpus of Plato in the 4th century. So people latch on to a few fragments. So one of them is a fragment of Pythagoras who you probably notice the Pythagorean theorem in mathematics but Pythagoras is also primarily associated with metampsychosis and eschatology. So eschatology the life of the soul after death and metampsychosis the idea that souls can travel from one body to another. So I put a dog up there. This fragment B4 is supposedly about Pythagoras watching someone beat a dog and saying don't beat I think I hear in the cries of the dog the voice of a friend so that the soul of a friend is in the dog. So that metampsychosis is one way of imagining the soul as a more robust concept than just this kind of little cloud that emerges at death. Another really important moment are the fragments of Heraclitus. So these are the 6th century BC roughly into the early 5th where you get some fragments that suggest that the soul might be the locus of thought or mind or cognition. So people get very excited about these but there's only a couple of them and then there's ideas about the soul as a kind of life force. So we have these fragments that people have put a lot of effort into telling a story about as the beginning of the Greeks discovering mind and soul and all of the rest. There's something we say as classes we say it's difficult to ever what we would say is absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So if I say it's difficult to attribute a lot to these fragments we also have to recognize it just because we may not have the evidence to tell a better story but too much weight has been given to these little bits of evidence in part just because we think the soul is more important. What if we think about the body, the thing that was given and an object was given if we think about the history of the body it turns out we have a ton of evidence. We have 60 treatises, roughly 60 treatises from the 5th century that get gathered under the name of Hippocrates. I'll talk about them within the Hippocratic Corpus we don't know which of them were written by Hippocrates they date from about the second half of the 5th century to the beginning of the 4th century. So if we look at these texts we can see that a notion of what I call the physical body is not at all a given. It's very much conceptual so the physical body would be and this is what it's going to be really throughout the tradition that we're looking at over the next two days we'll talk about the nature. We'll talk about what a nature is but the idea that the Greeks create a notion of the body with a nature recurs it recurs in the Greco-Arabic translator it recurs in the early European sources this is what defines the body not secular but as a physical body a body with a nature. So what defines this body? So it's a body with a nature and it's made up of different stuffs which we come to know as humors and these themselves have humors they're predictable and they're subject to control. The physical body is an object of specialized knowledge so it's not something of which we all have an intuitive concept it's not something which we can all intuitively control so there's two important aspects of the physical body as it emerges as a concept within medicine the first is that its nature is largely hidden so there's an idea they get very interested in the idea which cannot be accessed cannot be seen and which only produces symptoms and only doctors know how to read this information the other thing that they're very interested in is that the things that control what happens there and in our embodied experience are these forces, things with natures that are not continuous with our own sense of agency I can't will the bile in my body to do certain things so there's a break in the body now between a form of what we could call impersonal agency that in previous ways of explaining disease might have been attributed to the gods now it's inside the self and then there's this person with cognition and emotion and perception which these faculties can be used to understand the natures of the things operating inside but these natures of say the humors can only be operated on technically so there's a split that's introduced with the idea of the physical body that will come back to us another thing that's really crucial about this concept of physical body is that it's susceptible to suffering we'll come back to this idea it's a volatile object and so it requires care and the last bit that we see in these texts is that if I can give an account in terms of the body in terms of the soma that may be sufficient to explain every aspect of human experience in a productive position and in some ways we could say that the way that the body emerges in the Hippocratic corpus is reductive if you think that there was a sort of plurality of ways of explaining human experience and life and our ability to do all kinds of things prior to this but in other ways we might think that reductivism already presumes the notion of soul or mind and what I want to say is actually the reverse is true in the Hippocratic corpus with a very robust attempt to give an account of life and human experience in terms of the body and the body's nature and it provokes a response and that response is is that all there is? really? is that all there is? is the body sufficient to give an account of life and human experience? and so the thing the soul that I'm interested in and the soul that is going to be relevant is really a soul that's produced in response to perceived insufficiencies in the body as an explanatory mechanism for human life and human experience and life also understood more broadly plant life, animal life, so on and so forth so there are two ways in which this response is that all there is gets articulated in the fourth century primarily the first is in Plato so most people would know or would assume you know Plato he's the body, he's the first somatophobe in history and we often will start the story with Plato but we have to think what is Plato responding to? so Plato is responding to the incredible cultural authority of medicine at the beginning of the fifth century he's responding to the incredible sort of prestige of this cultural institution but also the incredible power of its explanatory mechanisms and he stands up and says no, the body is not all there is there's another part of ourselves and we're going to call it soul, suke and we're going to make this suke not just a sort of interesting speculative object but it is itself an object of care now if we were going to get into the weeds we could say Socrates was really the first to say this one of the most famous things he says in the Apology so Plato's dialogue which purports to reproduce Socrates speech on his trial for death in 399 he says what did I do like what did I do now since I went around asking you to take care of your souls so very early on in the early platonic dialogues you get this idea that the soul is different from the body and it's itself an object of care but also this is attached to the idea if it's an object of care then there needs to be a technique there needs to be an art or a science a form of knowledge not you know it's not something we can just know to take care of our soul we need to have ethics we need to have philosophy like medicine to teach us how to take care of this particular object and not only is it different from the body but it's also the most important part of ourselves so this is the next thing that Plato and Socrates will say is that Plato has this really great scene in the Republic where Socrates talks about the elite so who's his audience right he says you know all the elites are going around and they're obsessed with every little symptom they think they're sick all the time you know they can't even focus they read and they say that reading is making them sick it's not healthy for them and so he's really saying you know they're just completely hypochondriacs and they need to be caring for their souls they're looking at the wrong part of themselves the soul is the real self right so this is not just a claim about difference it's a claim about priority who has the priority claim about the self but the soul is also subject to its own pathology so this is the rub of what we call pathology the medical analogy says the soul is different that's why there's an analogy but it's sufficiently similar that we can think about it having pathologies that are similar to those of the body so this is one way in which the soul gets put forward as something separate but on analogy with the body the second is what we start to see in the fourth century in medical texts themselves and this is really really important as well to the history of vitalism about Hippocrates as the kind of origin point for vitalism so in the fourth in the fifth century we largely see the body as something which needs help it needs care it's primarily thought of in terms of the humors in terms of fluids is something that has to be controlled and so it's a quote from the republic you know is it enough for a body to be a body no it needs medicine and then you start to get this idea which is put forward most clearly in a fourth century of Epidemic Six it says nature is untaught so in fact the body's nature is the physician, the disease and so what you're really starting to look at is how is it that in disease without medicine bodies still get better what is this thing that controls the body and that thing is called nature so I put that forward because it's going to come back as a kind of competitor to soul within the tradition so I want to turn now to Aristotle and Aristotle is himself embedded in this tradition he's responding to Plato and he has his own account of what a human being is in terms of Selma and Psuke a living thing is a partnership of the body and the soul just as in Plato but there are going to be some important differences with Plato now the first thing that I want to point out is that if we think about Selma and Psuke for Aristotle we really have to think about his broader ontology so an ontology is just what do you think exists in the world what is the kind of furniture of the world and for Aristotle there are two things primarily to think about one is matter, hulae and the other is morphos form and so hulae is not body it's something broader than body but it's the analog of body at a sort of metaphysical or broad-scale level I put a statue I didn't actually I put a statue not like praying to Aristotle's ontology but because hulae comes from the Greek word for timber and the paradigm for thinking about the hulae morphae relationship is a statue so we look at the bronze statue we say its material is bronze or its material is wood and it has a form put on it and so living things have to be understood hulomorphically which is to say in terms of their matter their body and their form and in fact many people would argue that living things are the primary things that Aristotle is trying to explain by his ontology so what is soul what is this thing form what is it meant to do for Aristotle Aristotle has some important differences from Plato I'm gonna come back to them in just a moment but let's look at his sort of this is like really rough and ready but I wanna look quickly at what his claim about soul so soul is form but more specifically in the Deonimah and the soul he says the soul is the first enteleche the first actuality of an organic natural body so what is an enteleche well enteleche already looks to the fact that when we're talking about a living substance a form is never static it's not a statue a statue is made and it just sits there a living being requires a form that's gonna be dynamic and it's going to have to maintain itself despite the fact that it's constantly exchanging matter with the outside world so enteleche means that an and soul body has an activity and that activity is life things with souls have life in Aristotle so a natural body possesses life for Aristotle if it has within itself its own processes of nourishment growth and decay so the bottom sort of wrong of the ladder for life which is a step up from having a nature is being able to maintain your own form dynamically in time to take responsibility for the maintenance of a life in time what is an organic natural body so this word organic we use it a lot what does it mean for Aristotle he's really the first to use it in this capacity in Oregon on in Greek is a tool an organic body retains the sense through Leibniz I think it's someone else can talk more about that but it's the way it's introduced with Aristotle an organic body is a body that is used by the soul in order to carry out its main activity which is life now what is Aristotle trying to get at with this notion of soul what is he responding to so we can say he's responding to two problems one is to go back to the question of materialism or using the body or matter to give a fully explanatory explanation of nature so in this sense he's still fighting the battle that we could say that Aristotle is giving an account trying to fight right like what is this thing that we can posit that will explain life that matter can't explain it but Aristotle adds something really important for the later history of vitalism which is the problem with materialist explanations is they can't make a one out of many they can't make a whole out of a heap so materialism can't explain what contemporary philosophers of parts and holes can't give a myriological explanation to explain structure and so a living unity has a problem with part hood in two ways that soul is going to have to solve one is they're made up of multiple parts so I love this word I had to put it in here they're not myriological atoms a myriological atom is something like parmedity and being where it has no parts no proper parts considering itself can't be a part so a myriological atom is just pure oneness living unities are not pure oneness they have parts I have all different I have the my arms my limbs my tissues I have so many different parts so how am I going to unify that how is soul going to unify that and the second thing that I've talked about is they have to sustain unity over time despite the exchange of matter so Aristotle introduces soul to address these two challenges to unity soul is going to do two things it's going to impose a single purpose a telos this is where we get the word teleology on all the parts all the parts are going to be oriented towards this one goal and that is life that this and the soul is what does that and so that purpose is imminent in every single part at every single moment so we could call that a kind of syncronic unity the second thing soul is going to do is just maintain diachronic unity so it's going to ensure that when I take in food and I convert whatever that food is into me that what it's converted into is in accordance with the unity so we could say that soul's second purpose is to recruit new matter to become part of the unity that is the single life of a living form a given nature so that's Aristotle's first hope for soul is to impose a unity that he thinks a body cannot supply a body is to fluid to messy to multiple to account for how a life has a form of structure and unity the second thing Aristotle is trying to do is he's actually fighting against Plato so he's not just responding to materialism he's responding to Plato and he's got two beefs against Plato the first is that Plato himself seems to advocate for a form of metem psychosis so the idea that souls travel from one body to another he puts this board in the Timaeus the second problem which is in some ways equally important for us today is that Plato as we could see as a somatophobe he doesn't like the body and he thinks that the body is subject like basically all the body's problem or the soul's problem sorry are because it's in a body a body is embedded in the material world things are going to infrow the soul is constantly fighting to impose its own order but the body is constantly disrupting that and so Aristotle is responding to these two ideas with two solutions so one is the idea of fit right so that's where the organic body really gets this is where you can see why he needs your organic body he says he has this great moment in the Deonimer he says none of my predecessors have given an account of the coinonia the partnership of the body and soul you can't just take Brook's soul and put it in a dog it doesn't work that way because a dog is not suited to be Brook so there has to be a partnership there has to be an adaptability and that's why the body and soul are so closely in partnership you can't even separate them in the mind the second thing he says is that the soul is of such a thing that it's not material and it can't be affected by the body so when I perceive it's not that like things are impacting me and the soul as the material body is affected that something kind of magical happens and my capacity to perceive is turned on so he restores the idea that the soul is sort of protected from the material flux of the body it has he wants to protect it sort of agency and therefore it can use the body it's not used by the body so this is where we're going to get the two soul problem right so I've just put out sort of two problems with materialism that Aristotle wants to respond to but in using soul to solve both those problems he produces what we could say is a non-unified object so on the one hand now we have a soul that imbues the body with a unifying form that's imminent and dynamic and that's holomorphism so we could say that in some ways he's taking over what for the physicians is the train of nature soul is a life force everywhere in my body at every moment in every cell there's something called soul organizing life and when holding me together and that you could never separate out it's just the form and the second is the soul is the user of the body so this is where Aristotle starts to look more like a dualist like he can't maintain holomorphism he talks about the soul as something that's localized it's cognition it's emotion that uses the body so Aristotle scholars struggle a lot with this the Aristotle seems to be sometimes when he talks about the soul using the body to perceive it's really hard to imagine how the soul simply is the form of the body it seems much more like a dualistic relationship again so we have a kind of holomorphic and an instrumentalist account so what I want to now take and I'm just going to take another five minutes I think we started five minutes late so I'm just going to take a look very quickly at what happens to this problem of the two souls so what we're going to look at the Stoics and Galen but just think about the problem is on the one hand you want it to unify matter but in unifying matter you produce two souls is essentially the problem so one response is the Stoics the Stoics come along and they say you know what a soul is not incorporeal a soul is a body it's affected by the body through the form of sympathy but as an Aristotle every living thing is a unity so they become even more obsessed with unity than Aristotle was the cause of what unifies it is nevertheless going to be material so they have this idea of something called Pneuma or breath which imbues the entire world and is imminent in all matter and organizes it with form and Pneuma is essentially going to be God or structure or something like that so we have a very big difference from Aristotle they're major corporealists but they run into the same problem because they want to posit unity and they've got kind of two ways of doing that on the one hand they're trying to talk about cohesion how does a body hang together how is it formed how can we even talk about body as matter body is itself already formed before it's ever a tool of the soul and so on the other hand they want to talk about how when you have a formed body there's something as soon as we get from stones to plants that has to figure out how to control the processes of nutrition and growth and reproduction and all the rest so they start to posit this thing called the hegemonicon the ruling part and so I'm going to not go there and so you already in this kind of difference between cohesion we can see what Aristotle is doing with the idea of a soul that organizes everything in the body is imminent everywhere versus soul is the locus of cognition and mind and emotion and all of these things and it's sort of organizing and running the whole operation now they do think that there are two that as you go up the kind of scholar nature the kind of ladder you have plants will have natures and that's what organizes in some way cohesion at the level of growth and nutrition but only animals will have souls so here's the problem that we see in the Stoics we want the soul to be the thing that unifies animals so they make this claim that once an animal is born soul is the thing that organizes the whole thing as a complex unity but then they run into this problem is what organizes the non-conscious work of life the kind of work of cohesion that's going on below the threshold of consciousness growth, nutrition, reproduction do we call that soul or do we call that nature so we call that nature in plants what do we call it in animals, what do we call it in humans can soul extend to cover that part of the self or is soul just how we feel and we perceive in our forms of agency do we have one soul or two the problem in the Stoics who are unitarians just like Aristotle comes up so when you get later antique sources sort of organizing doxographies ways of thinking out the world the Stoics are like Aristotle they think there's a single life a mead zoe of the soul but they also talk about the soul in two ways it's both the thing that holds us together and it's the thing that tells that thing that's been organized what to do Galen has a similar response but he goes into different interesting directions I'm going to close with Galen he doesn't know what the nature of the soul is he's an empirical scientist he's a physician and he basically says I can't subject to scientific demonstration experiments on the soul I don't know but he's certainly sure that the brain is the ruling part is responsible for cognition and all the rest and he's a teleologist so he thinks that the world is organized he thinks living beings are organized and he's very interested in what is this thing that's imminent in living things that organizes them that allows the plan of the demiurge he's Aristotelian in that sense so he's like the Stoics he's got different forms of unity he's got a cognitive soul that's responsible for mind and our emotional faculties and perception and he's got a kind of vegetal or plant body the idea of the natural faculties is how the teleological plan becomes imminent in a body and so he runs into this really interesting problem and I'll sort of end with this and then put forth just a really quick summary so unlike Galen I mean sorry unlike Aristotelian like the Stoics who are obsessed with unity Galen throws his hands up in this amazing text on the formation of the fetus where he's really struggling with this idea that he says he's worried about his whole life like everyone says there's this cause of the formation of the embryo which is the same thing that keeps our bodies alive without us wanting to keep them alive because everyone calls this nature and nobody knows what it is so on the one hand there's this thing called untaught nature that works through us that organizes our actions and tells us just what's beneficial what's dangerous that takes care of nutrition and that's what he calls untaught nature but then he also says how is it that even the smallest child can move their arms and be an anatomist to understand what the nerves are and how they connect to the brain and how is it that we can move our bodies but we don't understand them and so he says you know what people have talked about a world soul people have talked about one soul they say the rational soul controls everything he says I don't believe it because it doesn't know itself there's a fundamental blindness within the soul that therefore creates a division between the two so he's quite honest in a way about the impossibility of unity so essentially the two soul problem is how does a living unity sustain itself is one thing in time given that it's material and Aristotle says look a body is a limited explanatory mechanism we need structure and we need direction and soul is going to provide both those things and we went quickly over Galen and the Stoics but essentially what I wanted to put forth is they're both reacting to Aristotle's attempt to unify the body with soul and saying actually we need two different ways of explaining how unity is imposed one starts to look like nature, plant life, vegetality, cohesion and the other is the cognitive self sensation, perception this kind of self and so we have to ask what happens to unity in that picture I have one more slide but it fell out of this version and so the last thing that I want to say is essentially many of the problems in vitalism again they'll come back in Kangam they come back with this question of how do we reconcile technique and the desire to master life the desire to control life with life's ability to just do its own work to sort of live on its own and what we see in the kind of formation of these problems and antiquity is on the one hand a real push to unity to say a life is a unified thing and on the other hand we see this sort of recognition that technique itself is born out of a blindness of at least animals or complex animals like humans to the life that works within them and the need to sort of constantly be creating technique in order to control what is its automatic so I'll stop there so we have time for questions and thank you very much for your patience so questions ok Charles oh yeah so everybody speaking to a mic otherwise they can't hear us remotely and Brooke you have to come back to the mic I'm going to have a mic dialogue I don't think it's it is indeed on well hi everyone and thank you for a fantastic talk rather than engaging directly with the problem of the two souls and unity and bonding I have sort of two to contribute to some of our the exchanges or the resonances between our interests or our talks or what we talk about here two quick things one is this fascinating idea that you mentioned that Hippocrates and or the construct called Hippocrates gets to be a kind of perpetually recurring response alternate option reaction that one can you know play the Hippocrates card and you know some of us here know this story pretty well not everyone does and so I'll just quickly say there's the early modern there's an early modern version of this and then there's a sort of 18th century late 18th century version of it which I worked on and in the early modern case it's interesting because the prestige of what some people call scientific revolution science so mechanistic science is great it's a huge prestige but then you have these people saying oh you know I poo poo your funnels and polies and sieves and it's a mechanistic approach to the body I'm with the great Hippocrates and so it sounds archaic but then it's what used to be called postmodern it's deliberately archaic as a way of trying to be alter modern and so that's one thing where there's a, as you know very well this gets perpetually played out again and even it's not an aspect I've ever looked at very closely but even in Kongi M's own complicated interaction with the problem of mechanism and machines it's similarly again it's like well I don't really want to fully sign away everything to some kind of mechanistic authority and I too am going to advert or allude to Hippocrates the second thing so similarly is that just I've never thought of this resonance to listening to you vitalism in the mid to late 18th century in its first perhaps branded existence you know its existence bearing the name vitalism Montpellier School of Medicine France which I won't talk about especially in my talk but that form of vitalism is kind of beautifully symmetrically sandwiched or caught between two soul obsessions because on the one hand style so early 18th century important figure in medicine medical theory etc etc is soul obsessed strong explanatory appeals to the role of the soul in the body strong appeals to well to Aristotle and others and the these people who come one or two generations after him these vitalists are trying to push back trying to roll back some of this soul centrism or presence of a strong metaphysical we define stole as a medically explanatory principle so they have their own moment in history and in thought as they're fading away by the early 19th century the kind of minor residual members of their school so Montpellier faculty in medicine what do they do with explicit political overtones because there's at this point an emperor in France they say let's re-spiritualize so you know our our predecessors of Montpellier vitalism were great but they were a little too much on the body body body side we need to insist that the vital principle has a spiritual status and so it's as if the to me the interesting episode of Montpellier vitalism is stuck between two two kinds of soul obsessions and so it just has a very yeah no thank you so much for that because I'm really glad you fleshed that out and I hope that there'll be more resonances that sort of unfold and I I thought I can't do all that I want to just give you what I have so I can't do all of that the reception but what I want to say is one of the things as you pointed out that vitalism as a kind of historical moment in the in the 18th century in response to scientific revolution becomes a sort of historiographical strategy and looks and becomes sort of downgraded for being archaic and the problem with that is that even in in congyam at least especially in the later work is that Hippocrates becomes the name of this this the the untaught nature the whist mitigatrix naturi and you lose the sense that I tried to bring out that actually what we see when we go back to the Greeks is not a kind of archaic before the scientific revolution vitalism like let's embrace life actually what we see is we see the emergence of something called life or the body the living body as a problem in this historical record and what we see is the kind of emergence of the precisely this dialectic that starts to happen okay if we go materialist and we need to go back well what is that what is there anything else okay there's something else wait what is this other mystical thing I mean Galen will say that we all know their soul but I can't prove that okay so what how are we going to give an account he invents the idea of the natural faculties is his way of accounting for the kind of immanence of mindfulness and bodies that's not exactly soul so that you see these production of problems it's not just an oscillation between sort of I'm in one camp I'm in the other but it's the sort of production of a pletitude of conceptual possibilities that become generative in each generation and that we miss sometimes that the vitalist the 18th century or in the Greco-Arabic world I mean they're reading these texts really deeply and when they make these strategic claims to the Greeks from our vantage point we just think they look archaizing right they look like they're sort of just outdated we don't realize how much creative work is happening at that moment in going back to a problem that's helping them think through an intervention in the present in ways that aren't trapped in the myopia of whatever that polarization is in the present where in the living in the present you just see oh it's body oh it's mind or oh it's vegetable life oh it's and instead what they're doing is they're drawing on like the elaboration or the unfolding of a set of conceptual possibilities within this world and that's what they're using to intervene in the present so there's something really powerful I think about this merger of history and philosophy where you need both sides philosophy says hey these are resources that help us think right now in the present that's what historicism gets accused of not being able to do but on the other hand for that intervention to be productive you have to be grounded enough in historical difference so you don't just go to the Greeks to tell you what you already know and that's classism at its worst if I stood up and said here's what I already think and Hippocrates said it too and we can sometimes mistake what the vitalists are doing for that and I don't think that's what they're doing they do it it strategically okay this is how I'm going to play this game but they're actually engaged in a much more robust and creative thinking with these earlier traditions I would agree with that sometimes citations like that are polemical but other time but at the same time it can be substantive in a way that you would not necessarily think from it solely being it can be both at the same time substantive and polemical so just I broke my one rule where everyone let everybody know who they are and where they're from when you're asking a question so the next question Hi my name is Julia I'm a research fellow at NHGRI and my question is do you have a sense of how these conversations or debates influence the medical practice of the time or just other things about life in that time period like the societal organization? Yeah it's a great question and in fact what's interesting about Galen is that he himself is intervening at a historical moment where you have two camps that 500 years earlier had sort of evolved and both claimed Hippocrates as an heir and so on the one hand you had the empiricists who said you know what all that research into the hidden interior of the body and the natures that control it and basically all of research science is just garbage and what really matters is clinical experience and all you need to know is like okay did that dog have rabies? Yes okay we know this is the outcome if I use this treatment and the body becomes the black box that's sort of irrelevant to the practice of clinical medicine and so that's the kind of hardcore empiricist line that develops and then the people who are sort of carrying out what we could see as a Hippocratic inquiry into the body as an object with these hidden powers and hidden space and you have to know those natures, you have to know the natures of the patient you know the natures of the season all those things they become called dogmatists and so Galen emerges at a moment in the tradition where he says his sort of his brilliance is to say both of these people are crazy they're too extreme, they're too ideological I'm gonna try to take the best of both worlds so on the one hand he invests a lot of power and empirical evidence but on the other hand there's a great moment where he's doing an anatomical demonstration and a skeptic stands up and says well how can we trust the evidence of the senses? This is a really extreme position and you know and he says you know of course you have to trust the evidence of the senses and we have to trust the evidence of reasoning, we have to trust inferential reasoning so his clinical work is very informed by research and anatomical research in particular and philosophical research but he's constantly going back to the table of what is this thing on the body like what is this body and so and that's where he becomes very interesting because he's caught between the people who don't believe in medical research like empiricists but he's also going to be really critical of the Stoics because he says they don't have any acquaintance with the actual materiality of the body they haven't done anatomy they haven't gotten inside they can't really tell you anything about human nature so he becomes a kind of interesting moment where you're mediating so he kind of reminds me I have to say this is one last thing as a kind of modern thing I think particularly around like pregnancy and questions are pregnancy you get these ideological divides between let's do natural and then you have you know the kind of medicalized world and these two camps they become more polarized and Galen would be the sort of person who comes in and says yeah you know like the body does have ways of handling pregnancy we don't have you know but on the other hand medicine exists for a reason and he would be the person who would come in and try to sort of clinically mediate but also philosophically between those what have become really polarized positions so yes please this is a little too tall for me okay hi I'm Charity I'm actually I practice clinically as a nurse but I'm here in the clinic center with the nursing research translational science group and so you actually I don't know if you completely answered my question but your last comment got it what I was thinking about how do these philosophical ideals influence what modalities we see is acceptable in western medicine now because like exactly what you were saying how we have oh like more natural birth versus more medicalized interventions how have you have you been able to think about how is this influencing what we proclaim as healing for a medicalized way versus like other ways different cultures may view healing yeah thank you thank you very much I think that I mean pregnancy is one of those places where you get this question and naturally I would say a couple things one is that nature is a concept that we have to get past it's holding it's locking us into a very simplistic understanding of what humans are and how they you know how normativity works out and so it allows us to sort of be okay medicine versus nature is an artificial opposition you know I mean if pregnancy were natural like you know the chance of dying and child birth would be high and in some ways I mean so yes there are many abuses of medicalization I mean I could give you tons of them but I guess my point is that nature becomes an impoverished concept because it's doing oppositional work to a monolithic notion of medicine and what's interesting to me is that sometimes the greek material the same thing happens in the history of vitalism people go oh you know we think about western non-western and then people will make the ancient world sort of analogous to the non-western and say well in the past we had this very naturalized you know Hippocrates like let food be your medicine which is not really Hippocratic saying and actually what I wanted to show is again it's a similar way of saying we never have the emergence of the physical body without these problems of what is the relationship between technique and intervention and the doctor's knowledge and what is the place of life or the nature of the body or what organizes that and so that is a debate that gets played out in really interesting ways in antiquity that can help us get past the kind of monolithic nature versus medicine world that particularly obstetrics is caught with them I want to pay attention to the question on this side of the room go ahead please I'm Kedi I'm an intern in the policy branch of NHGRI and my question is about Lucretias or I guess Epicureanism from what I understand Epicureanism and Stoicism are kind of like opposite camps or like the different in a lot of ways it was running if we knew like what they thought about the soul right I I'm an Epicurean by compliment but what's really interesting is that and I was even surprised in my own research recently finding this that the Epicureans are in some ways as invested in the notion of a unity as the Stoics and so even though you have radically different accounts of how that unity is created so they're corpuscular theorists so they're not continuum theorists they still believe that there's something called soul and there's something called body and they really you know so Lucretias in book three of the Deurum Natura is this you know it's this constant really interesting discourse for a materialist of tacking between on the one hand saying well there are atoms and you know they could be dispersed in any moment and the body is different from the soul atoms but they hang together and the unity is actually really important for an ethical the ethics of Lucretias I mean if you have to think about the psychology of Lucretias this is interesting more broadly why does it matter so much that the body and soul create a unity because they really and sensation as we didn't talk about that sensation is a really important site of that unity because what they really want to insist on is when you die the unity that was you the self that was you that was a knitting together of body and soul is over so there can be no pain after death and there can be no you after death and that's the main ethical take away for Epicureans because the end of the day they're not doing research science they want you to believe that death is nothing to us so they've got a different system but the same commitment to unity hey my name is Noah I'm a summer student in the NHGRI and I was just wondering what do you think is the relevance of learning about these thinkers now that you know a lot of them were pretty critically wrong about a lot of their philosophical and medical theories I mean Galen's humors obviously not particularly relevant today and dualism is pretty fraught as a philosophical concept so yeah well I mean the question is yeah what's right and what's wrong so the humors might be wrong but in a way they're very strangeness to us and soul is the same kind of thing forces us to actually look at the material that looks that might help us get at our own problems from a different perspective so just to give you an example I mean one of the things that Galen's about the natural faculties pushes him to do is to think about a division in Aristotle between plant life and animal life so Aristotle says plants cannot have perception and Galen is looking at the capacity of plants to distinguish what's appropriate what can be beneficial and what can be harmful to them and can figure out can basically care for their own lives and he's very much opposed to a materialist position which says attraction, nutrition would all be like a vacuum he says plants are not like a bellows they're not like a vacuum they're able to perceive in their environment every time I listen to NPR there's a new thing about how we're thinking about plant cognition again I mean there's a place in Italy we're thinking about the neuroscience of plants which is a deliberately provocative term to say hey what we thought about intelligence and the brain and perception might be totally wrong because we were locked into a way of thinking about dualism that actually if we go back to the ancient material it's much richer than we had thought so in a way if we think they're wrong it's because we're constrained by our own prejudices and our own sort of failures to think creatively and if we really take seriously and I use that word from Eduardo Bavaris de Castro who uses that to think about sort of ontological experimentation we go to Amazonia and really try to make sense of what does a world look like without a concept of nature if we really don't start by thinking that's wrong and think about how could you organize the world in that way we may realize that the concepts we've been relying on as like the furniture in the room aren't helping us to actually think very well about the world we live in and generally most dichotomies are polemical anyway so so okay so Tano thanks hi sorry I feel really weird talking to you from the opposite my name is Tano I'm one of the workshop participants philosopher from Penn State I just wanted to return to the I think maybe one of the first questions you asked you sort of raised in fact which was do we require the concept of unity for the thought of life and as your talk developed you sort of produced the alternative you know there's kind of materialist no and the sort of whole list yes and just to maybe set up some of the talks that are to come I wonder maybe what you think in the context of these early discussions of the kind of myriological middle ground which is something like a non fully unified organic body so thinking maybe in terms of the microbiome a kind of myriologically promiscuous organic body and what that might do to these debates if anything or that might just be wrong headed yeah thanks I mean I find someone like Galen really provocative in that sense and that's why I included Galen because in that kind of prestige value of ancient material which is you know in these contemporary debates is you know here I am I'm standing up here telling you not obsolescent that Aristotle people go to Aristotle and say he's our main resource and Galen's really interesting because like he's down there you know he's doing experimentation with the body he's in the clinic and he has to confront a form of multiplicity a form of multiple agencies that he can't reconcile with his desire to understand from holism so he's constantly navigating so he is a holist in some ways he uses this Hippocratic phrase it's not it's from a late Hippocratic text so it's probably influenced by Stoicism that becomes important to a lot of early modernist right that all the parts are in sympathy and at key philosophical moments he'll rely on that and he uses it to describe all kinds of forms he's committed to teleology he's committed to the synthesis of say the nervous system all the systems but despite that holism he's constantly going back again and thinking about these multiple agencies and I think in Galen's writing what that produces is a way that says you know what that the problem with holism as a practice is that it assumes there's going to be a master discourse and so in fact the body may be a total system but we're never going to produce a discourse of knowing that's going to capture it in its complexity so we can do one of two things we can either pretend we're doing that and get sort of realistic about it or we can produce this thing called life which is always sort of ever beyond and I think what you know that's the opposition I take it you're trying to get past in some ways and what Galen is kind of doing is saying hey you know like when he talks about the soul people say he's very inconsistent about the soul but you know he talks as a doctor he says hey the people who aren't materialists like give me your I'm going to change your diet so you can start thinking better about Platonism and then in another text he'll say you know like I lost my whole library he's like Galen like how come you're not so depressed about that and he does this kind of stoic console audio thing and he talks about I mean we would look at him and say he's a research scientist who's going to turn around and write a book about psychoanalysis and so he sort of recognizes the plurality of discourses that are strategies for knowing something that isn't that's neither you know ephemeral nor totally contained by a technical you know like a control discourse okay so please go ahead hi I'm Kimia I'm an intern in bioethics and I study English at Columbia I had a question about the Homeric world that you introduced to us so you said that the body is usually seen in a dead state well the soma the soma so we can't really translate a body but yeah but what could the aesthetics of that dead state tell us about possibly about the psyche or the consciousness because we see it surrounded by plants it's honored in death what would you say about that I could go on forever so I'll give you a very kind of short answer the thing that's so cool about soma in the Homeric text which Snell didn't realize people don't realize is it's used in cases of bodies that are not recuperated for burial and so it's the body that could be thrown to you know the river the really key moment in book 22 when Hector says to Achilles if I die give my body back to my parents and Aristotle Achilles says I would eat you raw if I could and of course it foreshadows the fact that Achilles will not give his soma back that he treats it as something not subject to burial that I would argue that embedded in soma and I could go on even in some early references you already have the idea of of a form of matter of human of contingently human matter that is itself in a kind of larger material flux and that burial practices are some ways the early version of the soul there a way of repatriating this matter into human meaning and into kind of human life so it's already a word which bears within it I would say in Homer a sense of what it is in the Hippocrates which is something that kind of needs care thank you