Journal of the History of Philosophy

Galen’s short disquisition on whether bodily actions like swallowing or micturating are voluntary or involuntary will be of interest to those working on the development of theories about the mind’s relation to the body, an area Galen and others in his period had begun to think about properly (see e.g. the essay “The Soul’s Dependence on the Body,” in P. N. Singer, Galen: Psychological Writings [Cambridge, 2013]). This is the “problem” of the title of the present work. Nutton provides three versions of the treatise, which is virtually lost in Greek, as well as an extensive introduction (1–117) to the textual history and reception. The three versions are the Latin of the fourteenth-century doctor and translator Niccolò da Reggio, which was hardly used, the earlier and much copied version by Mark of Toledo (d. ca. 1216), and the still earlier Arabic of the celebrated physician–translator, Ḥunayn ibn Ishāq (d. 873), with a text prepared by the orientalist Gerrit Bos. Niccolò is equipped with a parallel English translation, which is based on him but draws on Mark and through him on Ḥunayn.

Nutton examines the treatise against Galen’s general approaches and theories, briefly noting the main philosophical legacies at play. The bulk of the introduction is on the textual [End Page 481] tradition, specifically that of Mark, and here Nutton displays his commanding knowledge of manuscripts. He argues convincingly for two broad families (α and β), with the second circulating mainly in northern Europe and representing a revision by Mark, which brings some stylistic improvement and corrects errors. He also investigates Mark’s role in the Galenic syllabus of the universities and in the “momentous innovation” (110) of Mondino de’ Liuzzi around 1316, that is, the reintroduction of human dissection. Following the texts is a learned commentary devoted to philological matters and comparisons with Galenic texts.

For Galen the brain is here (as elsewhere) “the ruling part of the soul,” in which it is helped (according to his combination of Plato and Hippocrates) by the heart and the liver. Galen strongly opposed the Aristotelian position that the heart is the center of sensation. In De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, he also takes the Stoics to task for continuing to hold some views of this sort. ‘Voluntary’ in On Problematical Movements is the originally Stoic formulation kath hormēn. But we should note Galen’s caution at 1.20: “I have no intention here of going through the proof” (set out in other works). As Nutton remarks, Galen was actually unsure and his reluctance is strategic. He is also interested in “natural” movements. Heaping praise on his own anatomical knowledge as the answer to many questions in this regard, he cites the standard topic of the erect penis and the issue of involuntariness, which leads to a disquisition on the nature of the soul (chapter 4), for which there are many parallels in his writings. He moves on to other actions involving voluntary and involuntary movement such as excretion (chapter 8). There is an interesting discussion of pain (8.22–29) and how the brain may be distracted from feeling it. Once again he expresses uncertainty: “What I have said should be considered plausible rather than true in a philosophic sense” (8.29). Finally, there are involuntary movements like blinking, where there is also some control in some people (chapters 9–11). With responses like laughter even Galen gives up (10.5). The culmination of the treatise (chapter 11) is a detailed anatomical account of the process of swallowing. Here, as elsewhere, Nutton gives an impressively clear account of the parallels in Galen and others, and of Galen’s ultimate lack of success in pinning down his difficult problem.

Even for work of this quality, there are naturally areas where one may raise questions. Nutton focuses on the medieval reception of Mark. But in terms of finding out what Galen said, it...