Journal of the History of Philosophy

(Full disclosure: Philip van der Eijk was the external examiner for my Ph.D. dissertation.) This immaculately edited volume usefully collects ten significant articles by van der Eijk, together with one chapter (six) based on other previously published material. They appear here slightly revised, bibliographically updated, and with an introduction that provides an excellent guide to current issues and lines of approach in modern scholarship on ancient medicine. The explicit aim of the volume is simply to make these more accessible (1). [End Page 151] Although not, of course, conceived of as a unified analysis, all the papers here both individually and cumulatively do have something to say about the classical relationship between the two subjects we divide into medicine and philosophy, but which, as van der Eijk shows, are often co-dependent and overlapping, albeit in highly flexible ways.

The first part of a broadly chronological tripartite division frames a diverse set of subjects: the theology of The Sacred Disease, Diocles' methodology in dietetics, the role of dietetics in curative therapy versus managing the sick and the well, and a survey of earlier views on the nature of the soul and its physical placement. Similarly, in the third part, Galen's notion of experience rubs shoulders with apparent epistemological tensions in Caelius Aurelianus, and perhaps in Methodism more generally. (This section is titled 'Late Antiquity'—an odd location for Galen and a rather comprehensive term for two papers on two authors).

In between, five papers on Aristotle fit well together, drawing heavily on the Parva Naturalia and the Aristotelian Problemata, and often picking up on passages and ideas explored from a different viewpoint in the other chapters. Van der Eijk is repeatedly concerned with what he calls Aristotle's 'psycho-physiology,' defined as "an analysis of both the formal and the material (i.e., bodily) aspects of psychic functions" (207). In discussing Aristotelian views on melancholy, sleep and dreams, thinking, the relationship between intellectual ability and the theology of eutucheia, and whether On sterility (Hist. An. 10) can be reconciled with apparently divergent Aristotelian gynecology elsewhere, van der Eijk argues convincingly that there is a more material basis for Aristotle's thought on psychic functions than is often allowed, and for the connections of the physiological and zoological material to Aristotle's ethical and theological arguments. He accomplishes this not as a general claim in the way I have just stated it, but by making several extremely careful analyses of specific inconsistencies and ambiguities in or between texts. In considering, excluding, or acknowledging all alternative possibilities in reading and interpretation, he builds often highly persuasive cases, even when one is initially skeptical. (The defense of On sterility as possibly by Aristotle may well be his least convincing argument. Van der Eijk can provide reasons as to why none of the divergences is a knockout blow to the hypothesis of Aristotelian authorship, and shows how ancient tradition supports Aristotle as the writer of such technical medical works, but he has to do a great deal of work to leave the possibility merely open).

Each paper in this collection is precise, plausible, intelligent, clearly written, and eminently sensible, albeit in a more traditional mode than one might expect from van der Eijk's approving discussion in the introduction of methodological changes in the history of philosophy and science and modes of analysis garnered from outside traditional classical scholarship, such as medical anthropology. In the chapters themselves, the question of who came up with the most convincing kind of theory in modern terms still seems to be a dominant impulse, notwithstanding his exemplary attention to detail, nuance, and genre. (For instance, van der Eijk points out that Aristotle is often concerned, in his more physiological works, with variations in and problems with the normal psychic functions that show up as empirical phenomena and require explanation, and not with giving a normative...