R J Hankinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 1058515 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R J Hankinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | R J |
| FAMILY NAME | Hankinson |
| SIGNATURE | HANKINSON R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Discovery, Method, and Justification
Galen insists that genuine epistêmê, in the Aristotelian sense of securely-founded scientific understanding, is available to the serious medical investigator. The foundations consist in propositions that are evidently true, and hence require no further support. These come in two types: those evident to the senses and those evident to reason, and these are ex heautôn pista, self-crediting, intrinsically trustworthy. On the basis of such propositio…
Galen
Mixtures is of central importance for Galen's views on the human body. It presents his influential typology of the human organism according to nine mixtures (or 'temperaments') of hot, cold, dry and wet. It also develops Galen's ideal of the 'well-tempered' person, whose perfect balance ensures excellent performance both physically and psychologically. Mixtures teaches the aspiring doctor how to assess the patient's mixture by training one's sens…
Galen on Hippocratic Physics
Lucretius, Epicurus, and the Logic of Multiple Explanations
Avant nous le déluge
Aenesidemus and the rebirth of Pyrrhonism
PRELIMINARIES Some time early in the first century, Philo and Antiochus, the two leading philosophers of the Athenian Academy, had a serious philosophical falling out. Philo advocated an externalist epistemology, holding that it was reasonable to suppose that things could be known, even though they could not, individually, be known to be known; Antiochus responded that the only way one could know that one knew anything was by knowing of some part…
The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism
This volume offers a comprehensive survey of the main periods, schools, and individual proponents of scepticism in the ancient Greek and Roman world. The contributors examine the major developments chronologically and historically, ranging from the early antecedents of scepticism to the Pyrrhonist tradition. They address the central philosophical and interpretive problems surrounding the sceptics' ideas on subjects including belief, action, and e…
Causes
This chapter contains sections titled: Aristotle and His Predecessors The Theory of the Physics The Model Applied: Causation in Nature The Relations between the Causes Chance and Explanation Explanation and Generality Explanation, Necessity, and Finality Bibliography
Galen on the limitations of knowledge
INTRODUCTION Galen was no sceptic. On several occasions he refers derisively to ‘boorish Pyrrhonists’, suggesting that scepticism, at least in its more extreme forms, is a matter of a lack of culture, an intellectual infantile disorder. Time and again, he stresses that, if only the inquirer is blessed with diligence, honesty and intelligence, and armed with the proper logical tools of rational discourse, he can aspire to a genuine understanding o…
The man and his work
Galen was born in September AD 129, in Pergamum on the Ionian seaboard of Asia Minor. He died sometime in the second decade of the third century, probably in Rome. He lived, and worked, until well into his eighties; and over the course of that long and productive life wrote (or rather dictated, sometimes more than one treatise at a time, to relays of slaves) a vast number of works on a wide variety of topics, ranging from medicine, through logic …
The Cambridge Companion to Galen
Galen of Pergamum (AD 129–c.216) was the most influential doctor of later antiquity, whose work was to influence medical theory and practice for more than fifteen hundred years. He was a prolific writer on anatomy, physiology, diagnosis and prognosis, pulse-doctrine, pharmacology, therapeutics, and the theory of medicine; but he also wrote extensively on philosophical topics, making original contributions to logic and the philosophy of science, a…
Philosophy of nature
I use the term 'philosophy of nature' in a broad sense, to include most of the topics which would have belonged in the Hellenistic category of physics; because, although Galen was a physician rather than a physicist, he was far from being merely a doctor. Indeed, he considered it to be impossible to be a successful doctor without a thorough grounding in all of the then canonical branches of philosophy, namely logic, physics and ethics (see The Be…
Epistemology
If there's one thing that Galen thinks he knows, it is that human beings are capable of knowing things. Indeed, if they are intelligent, industrious and uncorrupted by base physical desires, then they are capable of knowing quite a lot. On the other hand, there are inherent limitations to what human beings can know; and speculative philosophy has tended to over-estimate its ability to discover truth, or even plausibility, in its more abstruse rea…
Self‐Refutation and the Sorites
This chapter examines a passing hint of Cicero's — one which has generally been either ignored or treated simply as a joke — that the sorites may be applied to itself, or to the more general notion of coherent argument, with potentially devastating results. The term ‘potentially devastating’ is used since it is unclear whether the threatened disaster must occur, and if it does, which of the opposing sides in the dispute it is potentially disastro…
Body and Soul in Galen
Central Works of Philosophy
CENTRAL WORKS OF PHILOSOPHY is a multi-volume set of essays on the core texts of the western philosophical tradition. From Plato's Republic to the present day, the volumes range over 2,500 years of philosophical writing covering the best, most representative, and most influential work of some of our greatest philosophers. Each essay has been specially commissioned and provides an overview of the work and clear and authoritative exposition of its …
Stoicism and Medicine
The histories of philosophy and medicine in the ancient world are deeply intertwined. Some individuals we think of as philosophers had serious medical interests (Empedocles and Sextus Empiricus, for instance); rather more doctors exhibited a more than merely avocational interest in philosophy (Alcmaeon, Diocles of Carystus, Herophilus, Erasistratus, Asclepiades, Menodotus, and preeminently Galen). The treatises of the Hippocratic corpus are full …
The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy
The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy is a wide-ranging 2003 introduction to the study of philosophy in the ancient world. A team of leading specialists surveys the developments of the period and evaluates a comprehensive series of major thinkers, ranging from Pythagoras to Epicurus. There are also separate chapters on how philosophy in the ancient world interacted with religion, literature and science, and a final chapter traces …
Stoic Epistemology
Stoic Sages never make mistakes. Secure in their understanding of the providential structure of the world, which is identical with fate, which in turn is identical with the will of Zeus (DL VII 135, =SVF 2.580; Plutarch, St. rep. 1049f, 1056c = SVF 2.937; cf. 2.931, 2.1076), Sages order their lives in accordance with it, assimilating their will to the will of Zeus, living in accordance with nature, and so achieving the smooth flow of life, the eu…
The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics
This unique volume offers an odyssey through the ideas of the Stoics in three particular ways: first, through the historical trajectory of the school itself and its influence; second, through the recovery of the history of Stoic thought; third, through the ongoing confrontation with Stoicism, showing how it refines philosophical traditions, challenges the imagination, and ultimately defines the kind of life one chooses to lead. A distinguished ro…
Xenarchus, Alexander, and Simplicius on Simple Motions, Bodies and Magnitudes
Aristotle accounted for the fundamental dynamics of the cosmos in terms of the tendencies of the various elements to distinct types of natural motions, and (in the case of the sublunary elements) to rest in their natural places. In so doing, he introduced a fifth element, the ether, with a natural and unceasing tendency to revolve, as the matter for the heavenly bodies. This paper deals with some of the objections raised to this model, and to its…
Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought
Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought
In this book, R. J. Hankinson traces the history of investigation into the nature of cause and explanation, from the beginnings of Ancient Greek philosophy in 600 bc, through the Graeco‐Roman world, to the end of pagan antiquity in c.500 ad The book consists of chapter‐length studies of the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle (two chapters), Atomism, Stoicism, Scepticism, and Neoplatonism, as well as the Sophistic movement, and Ancient Medicine. Hanki…
The Epistemology of the Cyrenaic School
Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought
Galen and the Best of All Possible Worlds
Voltaire's Pangloss, the man who held among other things that noses were clearly created in order to support spectacles, is the very archetype of the lunatic teleologist; a caricature of sublimely confident faith in the general and undeniable goodness of the world's arrangement, a faith that managed astoundingly to survive the Lisbon earthquake and his own subsequent auto dafé . Voltaire, of course, is poking fun at such conceptions; and, no doub…
Xenarchus, Alexander, and Simplicius on Simple Motions, Bodies and Magnitudes
Aristotle accounted for the fundamental dynamics of the cosmos in terms of the tendencies of the various elements to distinct types of natural motions, and (in the case of the sublunary elements) to rest in their natural places. In so doing, he introduced a fifth element, the ether, with a natural and unceasing tendency to revolve, as the matter for the heavenly bodies. This paper deals with some of the objections raised to this model, and to its…
Saying the Phenomena
This book' has been an unconscionable time arriving. I first heard tell of it a decade ago as an Oxford undergraduate; rumours of its imminence (in that geological sense of imminence peculiar to academic publishing) reached me while a student in Cambridge a couple of years on; and I saw samizdat pages from some of its parts a little later still (when, I was reliably informed, it was virtually in the press). And, so I discovered, the saga of the G…
Notes on the Text of John of Alexandria
John of Alexandria is an obscure figure. Little is known of his life: his floruit is placed in the first half of the seventh century A.D. He was a practising doctor; the exact significance of the epithet ‘sophista’ which is found on the superscription to his commentary on the sixth book of Hippocrates' Epidemics is uncertain: but it may indicate an interest beyond the purely medical. Apart from the commentaries on the Epidemics and De Sectis , th…
Evidence, Externality and Antecedence
I want to tackle two related problems in the analysis of later Greek causal concepts. Firstly, what is the distinction, in Hellenistic theory (in particular medical theory), between aTtta tQoxaTaQXTLXa' and acTLca n3Qo?yov'1Eva, between antecedent and preceding causes? And secondly, what exactly is the connection between the three notions of the title, evidence, externality and antecedence, in relation to the concept of antecedent causation? Both…
Aristotle's universe
Causes and Empiricism
Causes and Empiricism
Evidence, Externality and Antecedence
I want to tackle two related problems in the analysis of later Greek causal concepts. Firstly, what is the distinction, in Hellenistic theory (in particular medical theory), between aTtta tQoxaTaQXTLXa' and acTLca n3Qo?yov'1Eva, between antecedent and preceding causes? And secondly, what exactly is the connection between the three notions of the title, evidence, externality and antecedence, in relation to the concept of antecedent causation? Both…
Owen's Remains
Gwil Owen died suddenly in July 1982 in Cambridge, where, after many years as Professor of Ancient Philosophy in Oxford and Harvard, he had made his last academic home. With tragic irony, his death coincided almost exactly with the publication of a Festschrift' in which a generation of classical philosophers celebrated his unique influence on the development of the study of ancient philosophy since the war. Such volumes are frequently notable for…
Galen Explains the Elephant
Q: What did the elephant say to the naked man? A: It looks O.K., but can you breathe through it? Let me begin by justifying that joke for those of you didn’t find it funny. The relationship between the morphology of the physical organs and their activities has long been a vexed issue in the philosophy of biology: the question of whether structure determines function is of course of contemporary importance in evolutionary theory. That there was a …
Science in the Early Roman Empire
Galen and the Best of All Possible Worlds
Voltaire's Pangloss, the man who held among other things that noses were clearly created in order to support spectacles, is the very archetype of the lunatic teleologist; a caricature of sublimely confident faith in the general and undeniable goodness of the world's arrangement, a faith that managed astoundingly to survive the Lisbon earthquake and his own subsequent auto dafé . Voltaire, of course, is poking fun at such conceptions; and, no doub…
Aristotle Today
Aristotle
Saying the Phenomena
This book' has been an unconscionable time arriving. I first heard tell of it a decade ago as an Oxford undergraduate; rumours of its imminence (in that geological sense of imminence peculiar to academic publishing) reached me while a student in Cambridge a couple of years on; and I saw samizdat pages from some of its parts a little later still (when, I was reliably informed, it was virtually in the press). And, so I discovered, the saga of the G…
Perception and Evaluation
In recent years, Aristotle's treatment of the imagination has become the subject of renewed interest. A pioneering paper by Malcolm Schofield argued that, far from being the rag-bag of widely separate and more or less unrelated concerns that it had previously been generally taken to be, phantasia was, for Aristotle, a ‘loose-knit family concept’ covering all aspects of what Schofield labelled ‘non-paradigmatic sensory experience’. With that concl…
Aristotle on Imagination and Action
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Notes on the Text of John of Alexandria
John of Alexandria is an obscure figure. Little is known of his life: his floruit is placed in the first half of the seventh century A.D. He was a practising doctor; the exact significance of the epithet ‘sophista’ which is found on the superscription to his commentary on the sixth book of Hippocrates' Epidemics is uncertain: but it may indicate an interest beyond the purely medical. Apart from the commentaries on the Epidemics and De Sectis , th…
Das Prognosticon wurde nicht vor, sondern nach den Epidemienbüchern III und I verfasst
Cosmic Problems
Galen
Aristotle's universe
Method, Medicine and Metaphysics
Galen's Theory of Causation
La Physique d'Aristote et les conditions d'une science de la nature. Francois de Gandt , Pierre Souffrin
Natural Criteria and the Transparency of Judgement
The Sceptics
The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy
A full account of the philosophy of the Greek and Roman worlds from the last days of Aristotle (c.320 BC) until 100 BC. Hellenistic philosophy, for long relatively neglected and unappreciated, has over the last decade been the object of a considerable amount of scholarly attention. Now available in paperback, this 1999 volume is a general reference work which pulls the subject together and presents an overview. The History is organised by subject…
Explanation and causation
Our principal topic will be the views of the Stoics and Epicureans, and the various sceptical attempts to undermine their pretensions to explanatory understanding. Much of this is the history of polemic and dispute; but we may at the outset identify certain points of contact shared by all or most of the adversaries.
Determinism and indeterminism
The notion of universal causation was ubiquitous in later antiquity; to loosen those ties threatened the irruption of chaos. How could the evident continuity and regularity of the world survive the intervention of casual elements into its structure? Still, there is a clear distinction, one exploited by the Epicureans, between the assertion of a universal principle of causation and any determinism. It is one thing to accept that every event is cau…
The sceptics
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