Galen’s Contribution to the History of Materialism

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AbstractGalen’s philosophical posterity tends to be associated with works like De usu partium, thanks to which scholarship on the concept of teleology has invented a category just for Galenic teleology itself (Hankinson, Class Q 39: 206–227, 1989). But Galen also contributed lastingly to the history of materialism, in at least two different ways. First and more generally, by his contribution to the figure of the doctor as atheist (as in the celebrated saying, tres medici, duo athei, where there are three doctors, at least two will be atheists: Mothu, La Lettre clandestine 8: 317–358, 2010; Wolfe, In: Distelzweig P, Goldberg B, Ragland E (eds) Early modern medicine and natural philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 343–366, 2015). But second and of more direct interest to me here, Galen’s late and rather provocative short treatise Quod animi mores, sometimes translated as The Soul’s Dependence on the Body, is the basis for a new and idiosyncratic humoral materialism (which can also be described as a specifically medical materialism, contradicting claims by some eminent scholars (e.g. Henry, In: French RK, Wear A (eds) The medical revolution of the seventeenth century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 87–113, 1989) that early modern debates over mind and body, or atheism, did not involve medicine). The latter is sharply different from more ‘physicalistic’ understandings of materialism which tend to be predominant in philosophers’ minds. Now, while it would be imprudent to claim that Regius, Gaub, Boerhaave, Lamy, La Mettrie and Diderot were all reading Galen and/or were crucially influenced only by Galen (the presence of Cartesian and Epicurean traditions also comes to mind), it is nevertheless the case that the Galenic idea of soul as mixture (krasis), or of direct identity between ‘ensouled’ mixtures and ‘embodied’ mixtures, is a powerful one in the constitution of what I have called elsewhere an ‘embodied materialism’ (Wolfe, In: Landers M, Muñoz B (eds) Anatomy and the organization of knowledge, 1500–1850. Pickering and Chatto, London, pp 129–144, 2012, Materialism: A historico-philosophical introduction. Springer, Dordrecht, 2016, ch. 4), in which animate properties are not denied so much as they are integrated (contrary to the rather quick dismissal of materialism in Hankinson’s overview of Galen’s philosophy of nature, Hankinson, Class Q 39: 206–227, 2008). It is this story that I would like to briefly reconstruct.