| dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines the transposition of Hellenistic philosophy into the medical sphere, with a focus on the Stoic, Epicurean and Pyrrhonian traditions. The intersection of Hellenistic philosophy and medicine is especially abundant; the Hellenistic philosopher, with his eudaimonic orientation, presents himself as a physician of the soul. The τέλος of the medical art – the production and maintenance of health – served as a practical template for the philosopher’s administrations. As the Hellenistic period fades into the centuries of Roman hegemony, Stoic and Epicurean doctrines find their way into the medical tradition per se via the theories of Athenaeus of Attalia and Asclepiades of Bithynia respectively. However, despite the oft-stated affinity of philosophical and medical objectives, Stoicism and Epicureanism are refashioned as they cross disciplinary boundaries – in the case of Epicureanism, radically so. My thesis is that these adjustments are most intelligibly read as attempts by doctors to signify the capacity of their τέχνη to generate new ideas by disentangling their theories from the philosophies to which they were intellectually indebted. The method by which this is achieved, I will argue, is in large part dependent on the nature of the philosophy at root, the ‘mother-doctrine’. Athenaeus was able, through selective adoption, to delineate a technical epistemology within the greater architecture of Stoic theory; Asclepiades, by contrast, was motivated to adapt the physical system he sought to appropriate. The Pyrrhonists, who interface with the medical sphere via their affiliation with the Empiricist sect in the second century AD, represent an alternative mode of interaction between the philosophical and medical traditions – the alliance of independent, differently oriented sects, the integrity of which, I will propose, depends upon the preservation of that independence. The Pyrrhonian Empiricists grant us further insight into the boundary between philosophy and τέχνη as disciplines in antiquity, a boundary which is also central to understanding the medical adoption/adaptation of Stoicism and Epicureanism. | en_GB |
