The symptom and the subject : the emergence of the physical body in ancient Greece

by: Holmes, B.

Price: 43,00 EURO

(in stock)

 The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (sôma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature. By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances hidden inside the person. Imagining a daemonic space inside the person but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of the self. The Symptom and the Subject highlights with fresh importance how classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential ways of thinking about the human subject

Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Note on Transliterations and Translations
INTRODUCTION
Symptoms and Subjects
Seeing through Symptoms
The Physical Imagination
Rethinking Sma and Psukh
Telling Stories
CHAPTER ONE: Before the Physical Body
Daemonic Violence
The Seen and the Felt
The Boundaries of the Felt
Fear and the Visual Field of the Self
How Gods Act
The Seen Body and Social Agency
Interpreting Disease and Practices of Healing
CHAPTER TWO: The Inquiry into Nature and the Physical Imagination
Depersonalizing Causes
Natural Justice
Melissus and the Denial of Bod
A Community of Objects
Bodies, Persons, Knowledge
CHAPTER THREE: Incorporating the Daemonic
Symptoms at the Threshold of Seen and Unseen
The Interval
Explaining Disease
The Dynamics of the Cavity
The Automatic Body
CHAPTER FOUR: Signs of Life and Techniques of Taking Care
The Prognostic Symptom: Forces of Life and Death
Fragile Life
On Ancient Medicine and the Discovery of Human Nature
Embodiment, Knowledge, and Technical Agency
Taking Care
Shoring up the Self
CHAPTER FIVE: Beyond the Sma
Bodily Needs
Psychic Desires
Gorgias's Encomium to Helen and Human Diseases
Psychic Disorder in Democritus
CHAPTER SIX: Forces of Nature, Acts of Gods
The Polysemy of the Symptom
Tragedy and the Interval
Euripides' Causes: The Madness of Heracles
Euripides' Causes: The Madness of Orestes
Realizing Disease in the Hippolytus
Daemonic Phusis
The Semantics of Suffering
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index Locorum
A
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General Index
A
B
C
D
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F
G
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J
K
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Subjects:
Civilization
Corps humain Grèce
Greece
Greece Civilization
Grèce Civilisation
HEALTH & FITNESS Diseases General
History, Ancient
Human Body
Human body
Human body Greece
MEDICAL Clinical Medicine
MEDICAL Diseases
MEDICAL Evidence-Based Medicine
MEDICAL History
MEDICAL Internal Medicine
Medicine Philosophy
Medicine, Greek and Roman
Médecine Philosophie
Médecine grecque et romaine
Philosophy, Medical
Signes et symptômes
Signs and Symptoms
Symptoms

The symptom and the subject : the emergence of the physical body in ancient Greece

by: Holmes, B.

• ISBN-13: 9780691138992
• ISBN-03: 0691138990
• Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2010

Price: 43,00 EURO

(in stock)