Galen's criticism of Aristotle's conception theory

Abstract

Galen's treatise On Seed' is an attempt to explain sexual generation, and more than that it is, in typical Galenic fashion, a criticism and syncretism of inany earlier theories. He most often cites the Hippocratic texts, especially the Hippocratic "On Seed" and "On the Nature of the Child," and Aristotle's Generation of Atnimals (hereafter cited as GA), but he also uses other works which touch on propagation, particularly Plato's Timaeus. My major objective in this paper is to examine the sources and character of Galen's arguments in On Seed against Aristotle's theory of sexual generation.