The symptom and the subject : the emergence of the physical body in ancient Greece / Brooke Holmes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Holmes, Brooke, 1976-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Symptoms.

Medicine, Greek and Roman.

Human body--Greece.

Human body.

Greece--Civilization.

Greece.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (382 p.)

Edition:

Core Textbook

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (sôma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature. By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances hidden inside the person. Imagining a daemonic space inside the person but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of the self. The Symptom and the Subject highlights with fresh importance how classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential ways of thinking about the human subject.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENT S

Preface and Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Note on Transliterations and Translations

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: Before the Physical Body

CHAPTER TWO: The Inquiry into Nature and the Physical Imagination

CHAPTER THREE: Incorporating the Daemonic

CHAPTER FOUR: Signs of Life and Techniques of Taking Care

CHAPTER FIVE: Beyond the Sōma: Therapies of the Psukhē

CHAPTER SIX: Forces of Nature, Acts of Gods: Euripides' Symptoms

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index Locorum

General Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612645037

9781282645035

128264503X

9781400834884

1400834880

OCLC:

650310348