Galen

Galen's Anatomy of the SoulAuthor(s): R. J. HankinsonSource: Phronesis, Vol. 36, No. 2 (1991), pp. 197-233Published by: BRILLStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4182386 .

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Galen's Anatomy of the Soul

R.J. HANKINSON

This paper presents the first half of a two-part investigation into the nature and coherence of Galen's philosophical psychology. In it, I shall consider Galen's account of the structure of the soul, his vigorous defence of a Platonic tripartitional psychology in contrast to the unifying account of the Stoics, paying particular attention to his attempted demonstrations of the distinctness and various locations of the soul's parts, and to the epistemological and methodological principles he brings to bear in this effort. Part of the purpose of this will be to demonstrate in some detail how Galen's twin professions of philosopher and physiologist combine to inform his particular treatment of these issues. In the second part,' I shall turn to the moral aspects of Galen's philosophical psychology, and in particular to his account of the passions, and the question of whether they can be tamed, or whether rather they require root-and-branch eradication; and I shall attempt to show how Galen's physicalism is to be made compatible with his belief that, at least in their general condition, our passions, and the extent to which we are the slaves of them, are up to us. From all of this, I hope, there will emerge a picture of Galen engaged in what Fodor has called 'speculative psychology',2 that is the attempt to steer a middle course between a purely empirical and hence potentially impoverished approach to the science of psychology on the one hand, and an overly aprioristic and rationalistic psychology of the mind carried through with no regard for empirical adequacy on the other. And, I hold, Galen engaged in it in a sophisticated manner - for, properly carried out, such a project need be neither bad science nor inadequate philosophy, but indeed the only fruitful and intelligent way of going about either.3

1 To appear as 'Actions and passions: emotion, affection and moral self-management in Galen's philosophical psychology', forthcoming in Passion & Perception (the procee- dings of the Fifth Symposion Hellenisticum), edd. J. Brunschwig and M.C. Nussbaum. 2 See J. Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge Mass: 1975), p. vii. 3 This is a strong, some may think lunatic, claim, which I cannot defend here. Of course,

Phronesis 1991. Vol. XXXV1/2 (Accepted February 1991) 197



1. A Cautious Syncretism

Galen is at least to some extent a Platonist,' although scholars have sometimes allowed that fact to obscure the degree to which Galen was, in the best possible senses of the words, an eclectic and a syncretist;' he made use of the wide variety of materials available to him in the tradition to weave a compound cloth of great strength from a variety of strands.6 It is important to stress against its detractors that such an eclecticism is not necessarily simply a type of sophisticated plagiarism - on the contrary its results can be, and in Galen's case to my mind are, powerfully original.

One of the areas in which he both evinces and acknowledges most generously his debt to Plato is in his psychology. Like Plato of the Republic he is committed to tripartition as a necessary condition for explaining the phenomena of psychic conflict; he follows the Timaeus in his assignment of the three parts of the soul, rational, spirited, and appetitive, to the brain, the heart, and the liver respectively; and he takes over Plato's terminology for the faculties.7 Indeed, Galen wrote a massive work On the Doctrines of

as Fodor himself points out, the best form for such a defence consists simply in applying the model, working it through, and showing that the results are fruitful.

See P.H. De Lacy, 'Galen's Platonism', AJP 1972. See my article 'Galen's philosophical eclecticism', forthcoming in Aufstieg und Nieder-

gang der Romischen Welt, 1I, 36 4; I couch the last remark carefully because there seems to be a divergence of opinion as to which of 'syncretism' and 'eclectism' is the commenda- tory and which the pejorative term. Dillon and Long, in their recent collection The Question of "Eclecticism" (California, 1988), tend to reserve the latter for reasoned, principled selection of the best elements from a variety of traditions, leaving the former for uncritical rag-baggery; my own intuitions regarding usage tend the other way, although nothing really hangs on that - as Galen himself would have said, provided we know what we mean the rest is futile quibbling over words. Perhaps we should have 'eclecticism' cover the culling of diverse materials from different sources, while reserving 'syncretism' for the project of attempting to show that, surface differences notwith- standing, the various strands of the tradition in fact turn out to say the same thing. Whatever the truth of the linguistic matter, Galen was certainly not merely an om- nivorous intellectual magpie creating a pot-luck supper out of the offerings of his predecessors. 6 In his philosophy of science, as well as in his general metaphysics, Galen owes more to Aristotle than Plato: see my op.cit, n. 5 above. 7 logistikon, thumoeides, epithume'tikon: see Plato, Rep. 434-441; and see also Galen's On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato (PHP = CMG V 412, De Lacy 1978-84) V 307, 338, 363-5, 382, 516-18, etc. PHP was also edited for the Teubner series by 1. Muller (Leipzig, 1874); Muller's text is a huge advance on Kuhn, but is no substitute for the magnificent CMG edition of P.H. De Lacy (3 vols, including English translation, commentary and indices): Berlin, 1978-84; 'De Lacy, 1984' refers to the third volume of commentary and indices.

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Hippocrates and Plato the main purpose of which was to demonstrate the harmony of the views of its two principal subjects, and to show, inter alia, the empirical inadequacy and methodological disreputability of the competing Stoic account.

But Galen's Platonising is neither slavish nor unthinking; and in his characterization of the psychic faculties, he deliberately avails himself of Aristotelian and even some Stoic elements in addition to his Platonic inheritance (although he is to take issue with Aristotle's assignment of the reasoning faculty to the heart, as well as with much in the Stoic treatment): for instance, he considers (at least in some contexts) nutrition, reproduc- tion, and the threptike dunamis to be psychic in category.8 Galen, in common with most Greek thought on the subject, considered there to be no radical distinction of type between the physical and the mental (or more properly, the psychic). The body contains organs (organa), properly consti- tuted, goal-directed, anhomoeomerous physical structures which severally have functions (chreiai) that are contributory (and hence teleologically posterior) to the overall functioning of the organism as a whole; and these functions are expressed in the characteristic activities, or energeiai, which these organs perform. A disease consists in the impairment of one or more of these activities; hence therapy involves the removal of the impediment

8 PHP V 521; cf. 533, 658; although characteristically he doesn't want to make an issue out of this: cf. MM X 635: 'it makes no difference whether you call it desiderative, natural, or nutritive, nor whether you call it a soul or a power' (see also P.H. De Lacy, 'The third part of the soul', in P. Manuli and M. Vegetti (eds.) Le Opere Psicologiche di Galeno (Naples, 1988), pp. 43-63, esp. pp. 52-5). On the general issue of Galen's divisions of the soul, see De Lacy, 1988, who rightly stresses the flexibility of Galen's thought behind the dogmatic facade, and notes that in De Semine (Sem.) Galen alters his account of the partition of the soul to allow the gonads a share as the fourth part of it (Sem. IV 570, 572f., 622; cf. Ars Medica I 319, and De Methodo Medendi ad Glauconem XI 97); and see also De Naturalibus Facultatibus (Nat.Fac.) 11 1-2, where Galen sides with the Stoics against the Peripatetics in assigning the vegetative functions not to soul but to nature (cf. 6-7, 10, 12, 15, 17-18, etc.; however, at ib. 28-9, his language suggests a general indifference to such terminological distinctions). Jaap Mansfeld, in an un- published manuscript entitled 'The idea of the will in Chrysippus, Posidonius and Galen' detects a further move too in Galen's De Moribus (a work lost in Greek but which survives in an Arabic epitome, translated into English by J.N. Matlock, in S.M. Stern et al. (edd.) Islamic Philosophy and the Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1972) ), away from the concept of a soul divided into parts and towards a more Aristotelian notion of a variety of psychic functions; however, I do not find the passages he quotes convincing as evidence that Galen ever abandoned tripartition; nor do I share Mansfeld's view that such an abandonment was more or less forced upon him by the fact that his 'physiology on the one hand and his moral philosophy and philosophy of mind are not co-ordinate'.

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and the strengthening of the natural functional capacity of the organ or organs in question.9 Many such functions and activities are assigned by Galen to the soul (as I shall standardly but with all the usual caveats continue to render psuche), indeed to the rational or hegemonic soul;'0 Galen lists those of the imagination, memory, recollection, knowledge, thought, consideration, voluntary motion and sensation." Other faculties, such as anger and states of passion in general, are to be assigned to the thumoeides;`2 while the third part of the soul is that in charge of

nutrition in the animal, the most important feature of which in us and all blooded animals is the production of blood. To this power also belongs the enjoyment of pleasures; and when it is moved by enjoyment more than is fitting, it produces incontinence (akrasia) and licentiousness (akolasia). (PHP V 601; trans. here and passim after De Lacy; cf. Symp.Diff. VII 55; MM X 636; note the Aristotelian terminology for weakness of the will.)

9 Galen works this out in detail in the first two books of MM (see n. 5 above); but cf. particularly MM X 78-81. On the issue of the nature of psychological afflictions, and the extent to which they are to be described as diseases, see PHP V 432-54; and see p. 203 below. '? Galen uses both logistikon and hUgemonikon interchangeably; he repeatedly em- phasizes the fact that terminology itself is unimportant, provided that you provide a clear indication of the referents of the terms in your usage; hence this indifference as to whether to adopt Platonic or Stoic terminology is not simply carelessness on Galen's part - it is part of his theory of scientific language; see my art.cit., n. 5 above. "phantasia, mnemme, anamnesis, episteme, noesis, dianoesis, PHP V 600; see also On the Differences of Symptoms (Symp.Diff.) VII 55f; and see MM X 636:

The third part, the logical soul, is located in the brain, and it controls the activities in accordance with choice as well as perceptions, making use of the nerves as conduits, and sending perception and movement to the whole animal by way of them.

and compare the remarks in On Habituations (Eth.: this does not appear in the Kuhn edition; it is edited by Muller in SM 2 9-31):

As the hegemonic soul has capabilities (dunameis) directed towards all the technai, it is necessary that there is one (sc. dunamis) with which we understand consequence and conflict, and another with which we remember; and we are cleverer in respect of the first mentioned, but more retentive in respect of the second. (Eth. 4, = SM 2 25)

The distinction between intellectual sharpness and retentive ability is an ancient commonplace: see in particular the Hippocratic text On Regimen 1 35. 12 PHP V 601; cf. Symp.Diff. VII 55-6; and see MM X 635-6:

a second part of the soul belongs to us not in virtue of our growing or being alive, but because we are animals, it is located in the heart and is the source of the innate heat; the arteries are the conduits for this source, which has many names: it is called the living power (dunamis z6tike), the spirited power (dunamis thumoeides), the living soul, and the spirited soul.

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So Galen draws on a diverse range of previous theories in order to construct his own account; but it is important to stress that the theory that results is no mere haphazard porridge of badly-digested and ill-assorted scraps from the table of his predecessors. He is not afraid to take issue with them on matters of substantial importance, and to take issue with them in his own characteristically, indeed uniquely, polemical style.

For instance, he will not say, as Plato does, that any part of the soul is demonstrably immortal. Indeed, in his pronouncements on the matter he exhibits an admirable caution, unwilling to commit himself with any degree of certainty on matters which he views as being by their very nature resistant to secure demonstration."3 Thus at PHP V 791-2, Galen writes:

Plato said that the cause who made us, the demiurge who fashioned the universe, commanded his children to make the human race by taking . .. the substance (ousia) of the immortal soul from him and adding it to what was generated. But we must realise that there is no formal similarity between proving and positing the fact that we were made in accordance with the providence of some god . . ., and knowing the substance of the maker or even of our own soul ... [T]he statements of the most divine Plato about the substance of our soul . .. and still more all that he says about our whole body, extend only to plausibility and reasonableness (achri tou pithanou kai eikotos).

That last remark is important (indeed Galen, perhaps excessively char- itably, takes Plato himself to be committed to it by his remarks about the eikos muthos [Tim. 29c-d]). There is a class of things about which we can at best speculate, and most particularly these are the preserve of the philosophers:

In philosophy it is not surprising that most disagreements have not been resolved, as the matters it deals with cannot be clearly judged by experiment (peira); thus some say that the universe is uncreated, others that is created, some say that there is nothing outside it, others that there is something, and of the latter, some say that what surrounds it is a void that has no substance in it, others that it is surrounded by incalculably many other universes. Such a dispute (diaph6nia) cannot be settled by evident perception (aisthesis enarges) (PHP V 766)14

The case is not the same as it is in medicine, where theoretical pronouncements can, and indeed should, be made answerable to the tribunal of experience.15

3 On these issues in general, see Frede, 1981. 14 On these questions, cf. De Peccatorum Dignotione (Pecc.Dig., = SM 1 45-81 Mar- quardt [1884], = CMG V 411, De Boer [1937];) V 67, 98-9; On the Affected Parts (Loc.Aff.) VIII 158-9; Pecc. Dig., on the diagnosis and cure of the soul's errors, is the companion volume to Aff. Dig., and is also translated by Harkins, 1964. '" This view has a long and respectable pedigree in Greek medicine - indeed it is traceable (in a stronger form) to the early Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine

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So Galen holds that the questions of the soul's substance and its mortality are ones that at best admit of plausibility, and not certainty (PHP V 791-3); and that in any case they are extraneous to the concerns of the medical practitioner (PHP V 794-5).16 In On the Formation of Foetuses (Foet. Form.) IV 700-2, apparently referring to PHP (although he mentions another lost work, On the Forms of the Soul; cf. PHP V 803, and the notes of De Lacy, 1984, p. 708), he writes in an even more aporetic vein:

in default of finding any scientifically demonstrated opinion, I owned myself at a loss with regard to the soul's substance, being unable to advance even as far as the plausible . . . I made no attempt to assert anything regarding the soul's substance in any of my work. For I was unable to find out by means of linear demonstrations'7 whether it was completely incorporeal, or if some part of it was corporeal, or whether it was completely eternal, or if it was corruptible.

Similar avowals of ignorance are to be found in De Usu Partium (UP) III 452, and De Utilitate Respirationis IV 472, 501. It appears that the real nature of the soul is not merely not susceptible of precise, scientific demonstration (I shall treat of Galen's notion of scientific demonstration a little later on); we cannot even arrive at a plausible, if fallible, view about it.'8

Elsewhere, however, he allows himself to draw at least conditional conclusions regarding the soul's nature. In That the Powers of the Soul Depend upon the Temperament of the Body (QAM)'9 IV 774-5, he writes that 'if the rational part is a form of the soul, then it is mortal: for it is a temperament of the brain' (cf. QAM IV 781-3), even though a page or so

(VM) chs. 1 and 2. For Galen's own views on the relations between logos, reason, and peira, experience, cf. MM X 33ff.; In Hippocratis de Victu Acutorum Commentaria (HVA, = CMG V 91, Helmreich [1914]) XV 446ff. 16 See also De Simplicium Medicamentorum Temperamentis ac Facultatibus XI 731; and In Hippocratis Epidemica XVIIB 247; on this issue, see L.G. Ballester, 'Soul and body, disease of the soul and disease of the body', in Manuli and Vegetti (eds.) 1988, pp. 124-8; but Ballester seems to me to overstress the differences between Galen's pronouncements on the matter in different texts - they seem to me at least, taken together, to constitute a coherent and interesting epistemological position. '' 'linear demonstrations' are geometrical arguments: cf. Lib. Prop. XIX 40-1; PHP V 656. 18 See also in this context the fragmentary On the Substance of the Natural Faculties (Subst.Nat.Fac.) IV 761-4; Subst.Nat.Fac. reproduces in part Galen's On His Own Opinions (Sent.), which survives only in Latin, and is being edited for CMG by Vivian Nutton. 19 Quod Animi Mores Corporis Temperamenta Sequuntur IV 767-822: it appears in SM 2 32-79, Muller (1891); there is an Italian translation of and interpretative essay upon QAM (as well as Aff. Dig. and Pecc. Dig.) in M. Menghi and M. Vegetti, Le Passioni e gli Errori del' Anima (Venice, 1984).

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earlier he has said that in spite of Plato's conviction of the soul's immortality, he himself has no firm views about it one way or the other (772-3: note however that he does think that it is better to consider the rational soul to be both mortal and corporeal, on the grounds that the alternative would entail the unappetising conclusion that something divine and incorporeal would be the slave of the body: 782, 787). Galen's caution on the issue is both remarkable and admirable. However, he implicitly relies on the principles that nothing happens without a cause,20 and that all causing is bodily,2' to reject the possibility that the soul could be (at least in its entirety) immaterial:

all of this creates a strong presumption with regard to the whole of the soul that it is not incorporeal; for how could the soul be driven into an unnatural state as a result of its association with a body, unless it were some quality of a body, or some form, or some affection, or some power of a body? (QAM IV 788)

And Galen admits that even after much reflection he is unable to form any clear conception of what incorporeal souls could really be, and how they might be differentiated (776-7).

Whatever one thinks of those robustly anti-Cartesian intuitions, however, Galen once again reaffirms the point that, for the doctor and physiologist at any rate, such enquiries are as superfluous as they are inconclusive (QAM IV 788). He cannot say anything with certainty about the nature or essence of the soul:22 but qua doctor he does not need to (cf. in this context Subst.Nat.Fac. IV 759, 763-4).23 What is obvious, on his view, is that some conditions which are clearly mental in nature (at least as regards their effects or manifest phenomenology), such as delirium, depression, drunk- enness, 24 and insanity, are consequent upon physical alterations in the body, and consequently susceptible of physical cures:

so even those who postulate a special substance for the soul will have to agree that it is subordinate (douleuein) to the temperaments of the body (QAM IV 779; cf. 777-9, 788),

' This principle is stated frequently throughout his works: see particularly in our contexts PHP V 389-90; 544, where it is described as 'one of the things known to everybody'; cf. MM X 36, 50, where it is cited as a basic axiom. 21 For this Stoic commonplace: SVF 1 89, 2 336, 340, 341, etc.; cf. Sextus Empiricus Adversus Mathematicos (M) 9 232ff; Galen himself subscribes to it explicitly at PHP V 567; and the rejection of action at a distance forms the backdrop to what I call his 'general causal axiom': see below, p. 222. 2 See also On the Formation of the Foetus (Foet. Form.) IV 699. 3 See Ballester, 1988, pp. 124, 126.

24 He expends a great deal of time expounding Plato's views on the subject; QAM IV 808-12.

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although it should be stressed that Galen nowhere explains the nature of the dependence.25 Indeed, this is something that Plato agrees with (QAM IV 789-91),26 as does Aristotle,27 and 'the divine Hippocrates'.28 The sum- phonia of the great authorities, so dear to Galen's heart and the principal probandum of QAM29 (as indeed it is of PHP), is not threatened.

Yet, for all that he is concerned to point out the basic agreement of the great men of the past, Galen is not blind to their genuine differences. His syncretism is neither utterly uncritical nor wholly desperate. Indeed, the purpose of invoking the 'divine Hippocrates' is to reinforce the claim that not merely the lower parts but the rational soul too is dependent upon the constitution of the body (QAM IV 804-5), which is something that Plato, at least in the Phaedo (90-95), is at pains to deny (although he appears not to do this in Timaeus: see n. 26 above; and cf. Rep. 10, 610aff.), as well as to emphasize that not only are local disturbances in the proper regulation of the soul attributable to environmental influences, but its basic character- istics (ethe) are as well.A0

See Ballester, 1988, pp. 131-3. 2 Galen quotes Timaeus 86c-e in this regard, perhaps a little tendentiously (so thinks D.S. Hutchinson: see his 'Doctrines of the mean in fourth century medicine, rhetoric and ethics', in R.J. Hankinson [ed.J Method, Medicine, and Metaphysics [Edmonton 1988: Apeiron Supp. Vol. XXI], on the grounds that Plato means only to emphasize that the cases of the mind and the body are parallel (Tim. 87c-89d is at least neutral in this regard); but Plato expressly says at ib. 86b: 'such is the manner in which bodily diseases arise; the disorders of the soul, which depend upon the body, originate as follows'; and so Galen's reading of him seems justified (for Galen's Platonic inheritance in regard to the question of responsibility, see my art. cit., n. 1). Galen quotes further from Tim. 24c and 80b (as well as from Laws 5 747d), in order to show that the 'Platonists' are unfaithful to their master in regard to the question of whether the environment is responsible for our characters. On Galen as a reader of Plato and Aristotle in QAM, see G.E.R. Lloyd, 'Scholarship, authority and argument in Galen's Quod animi mores', in Manuli and Vegetti, 1988, pp. 11-42. 7 Galen proves this at length in QAM IV 791-8, with extended quotations from de

Partibus Animalium 2 2-4, and the Historia Animalium 1 8-10. 2 QAM IV 798-803, by way of extended quotations from Airs, Waters, Places; and from the Epidemics, ib. 803-4. 9 Lloyd, 1988, has rightly emphasized, however, the indeterminacy of the exact nature

of Galen's probandum in QAM: pp.33-9. 3 But once again Lloyd's remarks (see n. 26 above) are important here: '[f]or some of his weaker claims that MB [i.e. the mixtures of the body] are signs of CS [i.e. the capacities of the soul], that MB may influence CS, he can quote supporting texts and give some evidence, though both texts and evidence are already interpreted in a distinctive Galenic manner. At the same time the generalisations about CS following MB and MB even constraining CS allow the impression to be created that causal links between the two might be established with some systematicity and in some detail.' (1988, pp. 38-9).

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The soul, for Galen, is a locus of capacities:

Everyone knows that we possess souls: for we plainly see the things that are activated through the body, walking, running, wrestling, the many varieties of perception; and we know on the basis of an axiom that commends itself naturally to all of us that there is some cause for these activities - for we know that nothing comes to be without a cause. But because of our ignorance as to exactly what the cause of these things might be, we assign it a name on the basis of its capacity to do what it does, a capacity productive of each of the things that comes to be.3 (Subst. Nat. Fac. IV 760)

It may turn out to be impossible to establish, on the basis of secure demonstrations, what the physical, causal bases for these capacities are (Galen once more runs through the gamut of competing views about the nature of the soul and its powers); and in those cases it is better not to delude yourself that you have secure knowledge of something for which you don't possess a firm demonstration (Subst.Nat. Fac. IV 761), although it may even so be possible to arrive at a more or less plausible account. But that there are causes, and separate causes for separate powers, can be inferred a priori.32

3' Cf. in this context NatF.ac. II 9-10: all capacities (dunameis) fall within the class of relative concepts; and they are primarily the cause of activities (energeiai), but also incidentally the cause of their (sc. the activities') effects; but if the cause is relational, since it is of what comes to be from it and not of anything else, then it is clear that the capacity too is relational. And so long as we are ignorant of the nature of the productive cause, we call it a capacity. Thus we say that there exists . . . in each of the parts a special capacity corresponding to the activity of the part. So if we are to investigate methodically the quantity and quality of the capacities, we need to begin from their effects.

32 QAM IV 769-72 spells this out; see in particular 770-1: whenever we say 'the rational soul which is located in the brain is able to perceive through the medium of the sense-organs, while it is able remember in and of itself as a result of seeing consequence and conflict in things, of performing analyses and syntheses', we are pointing to nothing other than if we were to say compendiously that 'the rational soul has many capacities (dunameis): perception, memory, intellect and each of the others' (cf. MM X 13-14, quoting Plato's Phdr. 270c-d, on the individuation of dunameis; Eth. 4 [SM 2 25, quoted above, n. 19] and Rep. 5, 477d).

Galen goes on to make the interesting claim that each section of the soul has its own desires (epithumiai): the rational part for truth, understanding, memory, knowledge etc., and the spirited for liberty, victory, reputation and honour; we call the lowest part 'desiderative' simply on account of the greater variety and range of its desires, in much the same way as 'the poet' means Homer, and 'the poetess' Sappho, 'calling the principal representatives of the genus by the name of the genus itself' (ib. 771). The basic source for this (although not for the remarks about naming and genera) is Plato once more: Rep. 9, 580d-e.

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In this vein, Galen rejects the straightforward assimilation of the soul's substance to the pneuma (PHP V 605, 609; SMT XI 731; see Ballester, 1988, pp. 135-7), although he agrees that the pneuma is the organon of the soul, the means by which it communicates its power: we shall return to this later on. Galen clearly owes something here to Aristotle, who first raised the question (in extremely general terms) at the beginning of de Anima (1 1, 402bl-403a2) of whether one should first examine the effects (erga) of the soul, or whether rather one should start by investigating its parts.

Epistemologically and scientifically, then, Galen steers a middle course between excessive and unfounded dogmatism on the one hand, and a complete scepticism on the other. He is prepared to speak of matters even when knowledge of them is not necessary for physical or moral health (the two are considered in Subst. Nat. Fac. to be if not indissoluble, then at the very least closely related), as long as they

bring adornment to it as a result of knowing them precisely (provided that they are indeed securely known), and bring both medicine and ethical philosophy to com- pletion. (PHP V 762; cf. 794)

Such things are both useful, and accessible to anyone prepared to take trouble to practise in it. And Galen proceeds to give a demonstration of his epistemological stance:

that every body in our part of the universe [i.e. the sublunary part] comes to be as a result of the mixture of elements I hold to be securely known . . . but whether as a result of complete intermixture of the elemental bodies themselves, or whether of their qualities only, I do not think it necessary to know, nor do I pronounce on the matter (although I think it more plausible that the mixture are mixtures of qualities). But as for the soul, whether it is immortal and directs animals in conjunction with bodily substances, and whether there is any substance of the soul as such, I assert that these things cannot be securely known. (PHP V 762-3)

Furthermore, ignorance of 'ensoulment' and 'metempsychosis' is of no consequence to medical practice. We can see how various sorts of physical treatment affect the soul; but it is impossible to know whether the soul can be separated from the body (PHP V 763-4).3

Thus a moderately clear picture of Galen's theoretical attitude to pronouncements about the soul (and indeed on all other controversial matters) emerges; and it is one which is consistent with what he says elsewhere about science and epistemological justification (notably in de Methodo Medendi (MM) X 31-40). Broadly, we can know things either because

3 See also in this regard Sent. 3, 7; cf. Ballester, 1988, 126-6, 135.

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(I) they commend themselves indubitably to the senses,'

or because

(II) they do so to the intellect,35

or because they are suitably derived from these two types of basic premiss. It is important, Galen thinks, to keep these two methods of coming to

know separate, and not to confound them - but they are both equally serviceable. Now, this epistemological dualism is designed partly to fit into Galen's syncretic project of deriving the best features from both the Ratio- nalist and the Empiricist schools of medicine; but there is nothing disrepu- tably ad hoc or indiscriminate about the procedure. For Galen, certain knowledge rests on evidence in at least one of its senses - everything that we know will either be, or be derived from, a phainomenon (or a set of phainomena) that comes to us enargos. But crucially, phainomena are not merely perceptual - even axiomatic truths of geometry count as phainomena in this sense (MM X 36). It is vain to pretend that anything arrived at by any other route can meet the strict requirements for knowledge. Put in this light, Galen's position has both structural clarity and methodological cau- tiousness to commend it - indeed, it sounds almost proto-Humean; and Galen might well agree with Hume about the appropriate questions to ask of any text of 'school metaphysics':

3' An example of this class in what follows is the claim that 'vocal sound comes out of the windpipe' (256: see p. 215 below); at 766-7, Galen contrasts the case of medicine with that of speculative cosmology, in which 'matters cannot be clearly adjudicated by empirical test (peira)' and where 'such a dispute cannot be decided by clear sense- perception'. Galen evidently means also to include in this class the proposition 'the ears touch the brain' (240), and no doubt more controversially that 'irrational animals feel desire and anger' (211). 3 Examples of this class include Plato's 'Principle of Non-Contradiction' (Rep. 4 436b): 797. Other examples given elsewhere include mathematical truths ('equals subtracted from equals leave equals'), as well as metaphysical claims ('nothing comes to be from nothing') and logical and semantic principles ('it is necessary that everything be either affirmed or denied'): see MM X 36-7, and my notes ad loc. in my Galen on the Therapeu- tic Method, Books I and 2 (Oxford, 1991). At 240-1, in a passage to be considered below, Galen rejects an opponents' premiss ('all things that are active have their source nearby') on the grounds that it 'is neither evident to the senses nor to the mind, so as to be primary and credible in itself (ex heautou piston)'. At 358, he apparently allows a third category of epistemologically respectable premiss: 'he [i.e. the genuine scientist] should inquire which premisses . . . should be taken from simple sense-perception, which from experience (empeiria), either of life or the arts, and which from truths which are clearly apparent to the intellect'; but note that the category of truths derived from experience is not an immediate one.

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Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion;'

None the less, the seeker after an authentically Humean, scientifically sceptical Galen will be disappointed - for his actual practice fails (as actual practices will) to meet the severe theoretical standards he sets himself; since he claims that

while I am not so foolish as to make rash assertions about these things [i.e. the substantial nature and possible immortality of the soul], still I do claim to have proofs that the forms of the soul are more than one, that they are located in three different places, that one of them (the reasoning part) is divine, while the other two are concerned with affections, such that we are angry with one of them, and desire those pleasures that come through the body with the other (which we share with plants) - and further that one of these parts is situated in the brain, one in the heart, and one in the liver. These facts can be demonstrated scientifically. (PHP V 793)

We shall look at those 'demonstrations' in a moment; but before we turn to them, and to a detailed analysis of the types of argument which Galen brings to bear in his discussion of the shortcomings of Chrysippean moral psychology and their respective strengths, let us conclude this section with some Galenic remarks in summary. Immediately after the passage quoted above, Galen continues:

I made my case for this in the first six books of this treatise; but I said nothing about the substance of the three forms of the soul, nor about their immortality . . . the knowledge that the forms of the soul are situated in three places, of what their powers are and how many they have, is useful for medical science and for that part of philosophy called moral and political . . . but the further inquiry whether the spirited and appetitive parts happen to be immortal .. . is of no use either to medicine or to moral and political philosophy; and many philosophers and doctors have passed over it, reasonably enough; it belongs to the theoretical rather than the practical branch of philosophy. (PHP V 793-4)

And for Galen psychology is, properly regarded, a part of practical philosophy.37

I Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sect. XII, Part III (p. 165, Selby- Bigge). Galen, no less than Hume is concerned with the uncovering of sophistry (see below, pp. 209ff.). For his views on sophisms in general, and the general structure of sophistry, see On Linguistic Sophisms (Soph.) XIV 582-98, edited by R.B. Edlow: Galen on Language and Ambiguity (Leiden, 1977); and cf. Pecc.Dig. V 62ff. " Again relevant is the discussion of Ballester, 1988, pp. 124ff.

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2. Science and Sophistry: the Role of Argument

At the beginning of the second book of PHP, Galen writes:

I began with the doctrine that is of most importance ... namely their [i.e. Plato's and Hippocrates'] teaching about the powers that govern us, their numbers, the nature of each, and the place that each occupies in the body. And . . . I took greatest care to avoid making assertions contrary to what is plainly apparent ... Perhaps . . . it is better to distinguish the different arguments people use when they argue badly about absolutely anything. With references to their premisses .. some are patently false, while others are inappropriate to the matter in hand. Patently false are those such as . . . when one says that none of the irrational animals feels desire or anger, as the Stoics do, or that the nerves have their origin in the heart. Inappropriate premisses were dealt with it length in my On Demonstra- tion. (PHP V 211-13)

The Stoics in general (and Chrysippus in particular) are Galen's target for much of PHP; but Galen is not, as is sometimes supposed, uniformly hostile to orthodox Stoicism, even to orthodox Stoic psychology: at QAM IV 783-4, for example, he is friendly to their elemental account of the soul's composition, and Chrysippus is described in this connection apparently without irony for once as 'wise (sunetos)'. However Galen is implacably hostile to the orthodox Stoic line on the position and number of the soul's parts, hymning Posidonius for having returned at least partially to the Platonic way of truth on the issue: PHP V 390.38

38 Cf. also QAM IV 819-20, where Galen praises Posidonius for going against the orthodox Stoic line on the uncorrupted nature of children (see further my art. cit., n. 1). Posidonius of Apamea (fl. 1st Century B.C.) was an 'Aristotelizing' Stoic according to Strabo, II 3 8. Strabo, speaking as an orthodox Stoic, actually says: 'there is a great deal of aetiologizing and Aristotelizing in him, to which our school objects on the grounds of the non-evidence of the causes'; this has been taken to imply that 'Aristotelizing' means 'aetiologizing', i.e. supplying recondite causal explanations - and hence that the orthodox Stoics were opposed to such explanatory manoeuvres: but those implications are justified neither by the text, nor by what we know of orthodox Stoicism and of Posido- nius; see J. Barnes, 'Ancient skepticism and causation', in M.F. Burnyeat (ed.) The Skeptical Tradition (California, 1983). The fragments of Posidonius are collected in L. Edelstein and 1.G. Kidd, Posidonius: The Fragments, (Cambridge, 1972: hereafter 'EK'); the references above feature respectively as T 83 (PHP), F 35 (QAM), T 85 (Strabo), EK. For an instance of Galen's partiality towards Posidonius in other contexts, see his Introduction to Logic (Inst. Log., ed. K. Kalbfleisch, Leipzig, 1896) 18 8. Here, as elsewhere, Galen's enrollment of Posidonius into the camp of the Platonic eclectic may not be entirely justifiable: see in the context of the psychology, I.G. Kidd, 'The Stoic intermediates and the end for man', and 'Posidonius on emotions', both in A.A. Long (ed.) Problems in Stoicism (London, 1971), pp. 150-72, 200-15; and cf. M.C. Nussbaum, 'The Stoics on the extirpation of the passions', Apeiron XX 2, 1987, pp. 129-77 (p. 145-6).

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Galen thinks that the tnpartition and differential location of the soul can be demonstrated scientifically (PHP V 793); the Stoics by contrast held out for both the functional and positional unity of the soul (actually, this claim requires care: the Stoics after all distinguished seven distinct types of psychic pneuma: SVF 2 826, 836, 879; but they held that there was no distinction between the rational and the emotional parts of the soul). But the crucial feature of Galen's attack is his sustained deployment of formal techniques of logic and analysis in his attempt to show that the Stoics fail to offer scientific demonstrations of their position. It is not, of course, that they don't offer arguments - they do. But the arguments they deploy are, in Galen's view, unperspicuously formulated: they rely for their apparent validity on hidden ambiguities and equivocations in their premisses, and on premisses that fail to meet the standard of rigour appropriate to scientific reasoning. Galen's strategy is to bring this out by dissecting the arguments and showing how they should be rigorously formulated, and subjecting the alleged justifications of their assumptions to severe critical scrutiny. This strategy is employed in the service of a further, fundamental contention of Galen's: it is only by so doing, by clearly exhibiting the logical structure of argument, that one may hope to purge science of plausible but fallacious reasoning. Time and again throughout his works, Galen stresses the importance of training in logic39 to anyone who wants to engage in scientific reasoning: if one is not prepared to do this, or lacks the prequisite innate intelligence to do it, they should confine themselves to simple Empiricism.' Let us then examine the development of Galen's attack.

First of all, he seeks to dissect and criticize the types of considerations they themselves employ in support of their position. Their premisses, he says, can either be inappropriate (ouk oikeia), or 'patently false' (antikrus pseude: 212, quoted above; cf. 286). I deal with the latter class first. It will be remembered that Galen invokes two distinct criteria for the acceptance of propositions as being true (labelled (I) and (II) above), although both involve the notion of clear appearance, enargeia. The Stoics' view, that 'none of the irrational animals feels desire or anger' (212-13, quoted

3 See particularly Pecc.Dig. V 61-93, esp. 72-5; cf. PHP V 222, 732-3, 783; MM X 18, 39; On Hippocrates' 'Epidemics' (Hipp. Epid.) XVIIB 61-2; Soph. XIV 582-98; On Antecedent Causes (CP) I 35, VIII 106, XI 142, XIII 170-2 (CP exists only in a mediae- val Latin translation; it was edited for CMG [Supp. II] by Bardong [Berlin 19371; 1 have prepared a new edition, translation and commentary, Galen on Antecedent Causes, to be published by Cambridge [forthcoming, 1992J: see my notes ad.locc.). ' See MM X 28-39.

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above),4" clashes with what is plainly apparent, and hence cannot be true. It is supposed to be a datum of observation, a type (I) proposition, that animals have desires and emotions: just take a look at the family dog. But such observations are incompatible with the Stoic account - for they hold that the rational and irrational soul are one and the same (more precisely, they hold that there is no irrational soul), and hence if animals lack reason they must lack emotion and desire; thus are the Stoics led to contradict an evident datum of experience.42 But in what sense it is 'patently false' that the nerves have their origin in the heart? Surely that is not supposed to be something that we can simply observe.

No indeed: but on Galen's view it is, or at the very least ought to be, directly inferrable from propositions that meet one of the two criteria for certainty, that fall into either class (I) or class (II); and hence will itself become patent. It is important that for Galen truths can become self- evident - in a methodologically significant passage (De Dignoscendis Pulsi- bus VIII 786-802), Galen describes how he trained his own faculty of touch so that he became able to detect the faint trace of the arterial systole; but crucially once he had done this, it was to him enargos phainomenon. And hence it is possible for a truth to be self-evident in this way even if few (indeed, in the limiting case, none) appreciate it as such. Much of the rest of PHP is devoted to showing how these truths may become self-evident.

But before we turn to an examination of how that is to be done, let us consider the other class of inadequate propositions, those that are 'inappropriate'. In Galen's view both arguments and the premisses of which they are compounded fall under four general headings. In the first place, they can be 'scientific' (epistemonikon), i.e. such as to be

41 Cf. 211, and 309: 'Chrysippus .. . holds that none of the irrational animals has the spirited or desiderative or rational part; as I said also in the first book [now lost], virtually every Stoic deprives them of all these parts' (= SVFII 906). See also 338, 370-1, 32, 431, 459-60, 476, 484, 500. 42 Of course the extent to which it is an evident datum of experience may be disputed, and certainly would have been by the Stoics themselves - they are perfectly willing to allow perceptual and discriminatory faculties to animals, as well as according them impulse (horne) and impression (phantasia): see SVFII 714, 83, III 169. What they deny the aloga z6a is assent to the content of an impression, which they take to be characteristic of the rational soul; thus there need be no problem for them in accounting for how irrational animals behave as if they had emotions and desires (and perhaps even as if they could reason: this may have been the original point of Chrysippus's dialectical dog: Sextus, PH 1 69, cf. M 8 271). This is a case where Galen's own argument outruns its evidential base.

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found in the very essence (ousia) of the matter under consideration . . . we should first state the essence and definition of the thing under investigation, and then use it as a standard (kan6n) and a target (skopos).43 (PHP V 219, cf. 220)

Anything else is

superfluous and irrelevant; and this is how a premiss that is (a) scientific differs

from one that is either (b) rhetorical, or (c) used for training (gumnastikon), or (d) sophistical. (PHP V 220; cf. 221-4)"

By 'stating the essence and definition', Galen means that we should attend to what he elsewhere refers to (borrowing a Stoic term) as the 'common conception' (koine ennoia) of the matter in question,45 and spell out exactly what that conception amounts to. This is essentially a matter of conceptual analysis:

the governing part of the soul as even they Isc. the Stoics] allow is the source of sensation and drive (horme). Therefore the demonstration that the heart is the location of the governing part must not start from any other premisses than that

(1) it initiates every voluntary motion in the other parts of the animal's body, and

(2) every sensation is referred to it. (PHP V 219-20)

One begins with what everyone (more or less) would agree to be the essential features of the concept under investigation, what is in other words analytically true of the concept. In our case, these turn out to be (1) and (2); this is why Galen holds that, in proper scientific demonstrations, it is frequently necessary to replace names with definitions (MM X 50), real definitions that explicate and make patent the natures of their definienda in

" For Galen's use of the term skopos, see e.g. the first sentence of On Sectsfor Beginners (SI, = SM 3 1-19 Helmreich [1893]) I 64: 'the target (skopos) of medical science is health, its end (telos) is the achievement of it'. Although Galen does not always rigorously distinguish skopos from telos (cf. Stobaeus, Ecl. 2, = SVF 3 2-3), where he does so his distinction corresponds to this characterization. Cf. MM X 217-23 for an account of the different skopoi in medicine. 4 The classes (a)-(d) form, in Galen's view, a descending sequence of increasing disreputability, although the proper order of the sequence is (a), (c), (b), (d) (in the recapitulation of PHP V 221, and at ib. 222 where they are treated in reverse order, the proper sequence is established); premisses that are 'dialectical' or 'gymnastic' are to be preferred to those which are merely rhetorical: ib. 221. The typology is clearly Peripate- tic in inspiration (see in particular Top. 1 1, 100a18-101a8; and cf. Rhet. 1 1-2, esp. 1356a33ff.): Galen views the Analytics as being concerned with (a), the Rhetoric (obviously enough) with (b), the Topics with (c), and the Sophistici Elenchi with (d): see ib. 222. Aristotle himself calls type (b) 'contentious' (eristikoi: Top. 1 1, 100b24), and type (d) 'paralogisms' (ib. 101a7). Cf. Albinus, Epit. 3 2; 6 4. 45 See MM X 43ff.

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causal terms.46 That much is (at least in Galen's view) uncontroversial. But he proceeds:

what can this be shown from? From what else apart from anatomy? For if it supplies the power of sensation and movement to all the parts of the body, then it is necessary that there be some vessel growing out of it to perform this service. (PHP V 220)

So detailed examination by dissection is essential to the investigation. Galen's argument here rests on some not perhaps altogether innocent

assumptions; for instance, that the transmission of any power must be a physical process mediated by some organ (essentially that all causing is, on analysis, causing by contact: I shall analyze this assumption further later on). But what matters is Galen's insistence that the premisses of the argument should belong to class (a): that they should be properly scientific. As a consequence, argument based on anecdote and authority should be eschewed as falling under rhetoric, dialectic, or even sophistry:

all the premisses that are taken from men's opinions, whether those of non-experts, poets, or philosophers . . . belong to the third [i.e. rhetorical]47 class. (PHP V 227)

One of the principal objections Galen has to Chrysippus' method of trying to demonstrate that the heart is the seat of the rational faculty is that he relies on quotation from the poets and dramatists in support of his position. Galen points out that such 'authorities' tell just as often against the Chrysip-

4 On these issues, see my opp.cit., nn. 1 and 3 above; in the context of inquiry into the soul, see once again Aristotle, deAn. 1 1, 402bl2-403a2, esp. 21ff: 'and contrariwise the attributes contribute greatly to an understanding of the essence (to ti einai): for when we are able to give an account of the appearance of either all or most of the attributes, we will be in a position to talk in the best possible way about the essence (ousia). For the essence (to ti estin) is the starting-point of all demonstration, so that those definitions which don't allow us to know the attributes, or at the very least make a reasonable estimation of them, are all clearly enunciated for dialectical purposes and are without content.' Malcolm Schofield has asked whether '(i) a premiss of the type evident to sense perception is the same as (ii) a scientific premiss' (since Galen apparently urges us to make use only of (ii) in demonstrations, and then spends some time dealing with (i); and he further wondered whether Galen was simply confusing (a) Stoic and (b) Aristotelian styles of demonstration, where (a) is an inference from the phenomena to the best explanation ('there is sweating - so there are invisible pores in the skin'), (b) a deduction from axiomatic first principles to a conclusion. I think Galen can be acquitted of this confusion, although admittedly his language is unhelpful. Basically, Galen will admit both (a) and (b) into his science - (a) as a means of arriving at the first principles, (b) as a systematization of the science that results from them (see particularly MM X 37-50, and my notes ad loc. in my op.cit. n. 35). '4 See n. 40 above.

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pean view as they do in favour of it (he gleefully seizes on the Homeric account of Tityus's punishment in Tartarus [Od. 11 576-811 as support for his belief that the liver is locus of the desires: PHP V 583-5 - at any rate if the punishment is to fit the crime). Such 'witnesses' are not only demonstratively useless (although Galen allows that they may be brought in to back up a claim already demonstrated [PHP V 585], or to draw attention to some obvious fact, e.g.about the phenomenology of anger: PHP V 302-10,338) ;8 they also engender the famous prolixity of which Galen has the gall regu- larly (and apparently unselfconsciously) to complain. In fact

with regard to the types of premiss, Zeno and Chrysippus taught us no method and gave us no training, and consequently they are all jumbled together ... Often they will begin with a rhetorical argument, follow it with a gymnastic and dialectical one, follow that with something scientific, and finish with a sophistry; for they have no idea that scientific premisses refer back to the essence of the matter under investigation, having it as their target (skopos: cf. 219, above, p. 210, n. 39); everything else is irrelevant. (PHP V 221)

The fundamental charge levelled by Galen against his Stoic opponents is that they pay insufficient attention to the differing demands placed upon argument by different argumentative contexts and purposes; and that they foul things up as a result of sloppiness both in their deductions and in their deployment of logico-scientific vocabulary. In consequence, Chrysippus adduces arguments which have no probative force. For instance, he argues that its central position in the body implies that the heart is the controlling organ (PHP V 228-9); Galen replies that first of all centrality doesn't necessarily entail control (that is, it does not follow simply from conceptual analysis of the notions 'centrality' and 'control' - at the very least, further premisses are required); and secondly that the heart is not in the middle in any case: the navel is.49

48 Galen's use of authority is a subject in its own right, and is independently of great interest: see Lloyd, 1988. A particularly vivid case is that of the opening pages of MM (X 1-20: see my remarks ad loc. in my op.cit. (1), n. 5, forthcoming), in which Galen imagines Thessalus arguing his claims to medical supremacy in front of a tribunal comprising the great doctors and philosophers of the past; Galen claims that not one of them could be found to agree with his position. But this is not simply an appeal to authority as such - rather Galen's position here as elsewhere is that agreement among the great men of the past is a consequence of the truth of their views, and hence a weak indication of it: but is no substitute for actual scientific investigation. Cf. Nat. Fac. II 140-1, 178-80. 4 These 'arguments' are treated by Galen as being on a par with the claim that 'because the brain, like the Great King, dwells in the head as in an acropolis, for that reason the ruling part of the soul is in the brain', and others of that ilk: PHP V 230-1.

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But Chrysippus's championship of the claim of the heart to be the seat of the hegemonic soul does not rest solely on such sandy foundations. He offers an argument that at least purports, on the typology established above, to be scientific in nature, although it too, on Galen's analysis, rests on a faulty 'axiom' about the relations between location and causal influence (PHP V 240: see further below). The main argument in the Stoic arsenal for the primacy of the heart is given in three distinct versions by Galen (PHP V 241-3), those ascribed to Zeno of Citium, to Diogenes of Babylon, and to Chrysippus himself. Here is Zeno's argument:

[A] (i) voice (phonW) passes through (chorei dia) the windpipe. (ii) If it were passing from the brain, it would not pass through the windpipe. (iii) Voice passes from (apo) the same region as discourse (logos). (iv) Discourse passes from the mind (dianoia). Therefore (v) the mind is not in the brain. (PHP V 241)

That argument, however, is enthymematic; after a lengthy discussion (some of which we shall return to below), Galen concludes that

Zeno's argument lacks some of the premisses required for a complete formulation. This will be more evident if we rephrase them for greater clarity, so that the argument would be as follows: [B] (vi) voice is sent out through (ekpempetai dia) the windpipe. (vii) If it were sent out of (ek) the brain it would not be sent out through the windpipe. But (viii) voice is sent out of the same region as discourse. (ix) Discourse is sent out of the mind. Therefore (x)[= (v)] the mind is not in the brain. (PHP V 256)

The difference between [A] and [B] rests on the substitution of the more causally loaded 'is sent out' in [B] for the neutral 'passes' in [A]; and in Galen's replacement of Zeno's preposition 'apo' with 'ek'.52 Galen's dissection of [A]'s failure turns on the idea that it confuses the notion of causal origin with that of simple immediate place of origin, and that this confusion

5 I translate 'phong' here and throughout as 'voice' rather than 'speech' (as DeLacy renders it), as it is the standard Greek for any animal noise (even fish have it, according to Aristotle: De An. II 8,), and as the Stoics clearly use the term thus: 'voice and speech (lexis) differ, because even noise is voice, while speech is always articulate' (DL 7 57); none the less, speech is sometimes clearly indicated. S1 dianoia is usually rendered 'thought', and sometimes De Lacy will translate it thus (e.g. PHP V 243, in a citation from Chrysippus, where the context virtually demands it); but in general De Lacy's rendering of 'mind' seems to fit the sense better - what is referred to in general in these passages is not the operation, but what operates: cf. 257-8, where Galen writes 'it is clearly possible to substitute the word "sovereign part (ku- rieuon)" for dianoia'. 52 This substitution is not entirely gratuitous: both Diogenes and Chrysippus use 'ek' rather than 'apo' in their formulations of the argument PHP V 241-3; and Galen at least claims that it is less prone to an ambiguous interpretation. But see n. 56.

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is fostered by an ambiguity in the preposition 'apo'. But this is not all there is to the analysis. Galen continues:

Now the first premiss [(vi)] is of the type evident to sense-perception, so that it requires no proof; for everything evident to the senses is credible in itself (pista ex heautin). But the second premiss [(vii)] belongs neither to the class of things evident to the senses nor to that of those evident to the intellect, since it is not one of the primary axioms. 3 The argument should have had the following form, if it was to start from primary and demonstrative premisses: [Ci] (vi) voice is sent out through the windpipe. (xi) All that is sent through something is sent out of the parts continuous with it. (xii) The brain is not continuous with the windpipe. Therefore (xiii) voice is not sent out of the brain. (PHP V 256-7)

(vi) and (xii) fall into class (I), as self-evident truths of observation. By contrast (xi) is a truth of type (II) (or is at least supposed to be), and hence (I suppose) knowable a priori. Together, (vi), (xi), and (xii) entail (xiii). However, the argument still requires the proof of a further lemma 'using the conclusion [sc. of the previous argument: (xiii)] as a premiss':

[Cii] (xiv) From the region from which voice is sent out, meaningful voice is sent out; (xv) meaningful voice is discourse, (xvi) [= (ix)]. Discourse is sent out of the mind; (xvii) discourse is not sent out of the brain; hence (xviii) [= (v), (x)] the mind is not in the brain. (PHP V 257; there are, Galen notes, other ways of formulating the argument: 257-8).4

So where does this leave us? We need to go back a few stages into Galen's refutation in order to find out. But first of all we should note the effect of the reformulation on the argument: [A] was enthymematic, lacking the necessary axiom to articulate the inference. [C], by contrast, is fully spelled out; and the difference is made by premiss (xi) (or (C2) in the formal version of the Appendix), which purports to be a universally true relational axiom;

S3 Presumably the 'primary axioms' are the same as the 'logical axioms' (logikai archai) of MM X 37 (see my Galen on the Therapeutic Method ad loc.); see also Thrasybulus V 846-7; at Inst. Log. 17, Galen remarks that virtually every sound argument derives its soundness from an axiom, which he defines as 'ex hautou pistos logos' - on the force of this see my 'Galen on the logic of relations', forthcoming in L. Schrenk (ed.) Aristotle in Later Antiquity. Galen's objection to premiss (vii), the reconstructed premiss (ii) of Zeno's original argument, is that it is unsupported by the requisite general considerations, which is why the argument requires the addition of the 'axiom' (xi) - but of course the 'axiom' fails to meet the appropriate epistemological criteria. For similar moves (in a quite different argumentative context), see Inst.Log. 16, where Galen objects to both Stoic and Peripatetic formulations of the argument that if Socrates is Lamprocles' father, then the latter is his son, on the grounds that neither invokes the requisite axiom of father-son relations at a sufficiently general level. I discuss this case and its meta-logical implications in my art.cit. above. 4 For a formalisation of these arguments, see Appendix.

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and it is that relation which is supposed to support (ii) (or (A2) ).55 But (xi) is ambiguous - and it is on the detection of that ambiguity that Galen bases his refutation. The damage is done by the apparently innocent preposition 'out of (apo).

Galen himself does not adopt the strategy of attacking (xi) in its full generality; rather he fastens on (ii), Zeno's unsupported derivative of it, reformulating it as

(2a) if voice were sent out from (apo) the brain, it would not be sent out through the windpipe. (PHP V 244-5) (= [B] vii)

in order to 'replace the word "passes" with a more perspicuous term'. (2a), Galen claims, is not merely unscientific;

this premiss not only falls outside the first class [i.e. that of the scientific and demonstrative premisses: see above] . . . but even outside the second and third . . .; it belongs to the fourth class, the sophistical premisses, since it hides behind a verbal form that has been given a fraudulent and sophistical ambiguity in the hope of thus avoiding refutation. For the statement . .. 1(2a)] is unsound because it contains the preposition 'from' (apo); in all such propositions, the prepositions 'by' (hupo) and 'out of (ek) are umambiguous;. ... For voice sent out through the windpipe is also sent out of something and by something; out of something, namely the vessel which contains it, and by something, namely the power which causes the container to move. (PHP V 244-5)

Thus (2a) might be glossed either as

(2ai) if voice were sent out by the brain, it would not be sent through the windpipe

or as

(2aii) if voice were sent out of the brain, it would not be sent through the windpipe. (PHP V 245-6)

" (C9) of the formal version is also an important axiom, but I supply it on Galen's behalf in order to get rid of the identity-sign: note that the sense of 'in' which 'I' stands for needs to be relatively strictly and tightly interpreted, otherwise the axiom turns out to be obviously false. 5 One might be disposed to doubt Galen's claim here about 'ek', at least construed as a claim about ordinary Greek - for 'ek' seems to have exactly the same indeterminacy as Iapo', perhaps more so. Aristotle wrote a chapter of his philosophical lexicon (Met. 5 22) on its vagaries, and much of his metaphysics of generation and change can be seen as an attempt to purge Greek philosophy of the logical and metaphysical shambles it had got itself into as a result of too little appreciation of the logically Protean nature of 'ek' (it is entailed by the logic of generation that everything that comes to be does so from its opposite; but it cannot be the case that opposites cause opposites; hence generation is impossible - that is, I think, Parmenides' argument: and it falls foul of the same confusion). But for all that, Galen is surely substantially right about the danger of confusion here; see n. 52 above.

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(2ai) is false; (2aii) is true but irrelevant (it's not that sense of 'out of that is at issue here). In general, (xi) is susceptible of equivalent formulations, one of them analogous to (2ai) and false, while the other, analogous to (2aii), is true but logically impotent. Consequently the argument fails.

Galen reinforces the truth of this by asking the reader to consider analogues to (2ai) involving urine and excrement. If reason were located, as the Stoics have it, in the heart, and if it were the case that for A to control B, B would have to be sent out of A, then the excretory faculties could not be under rational control (since the heart is not adjacent to either the urethra or the rectum). But such an argument simply involves the same confusion: we are not, a priori at least, incontinent."7 By paying insufficient attention to the proper use of language the Stoics seek to draw absurd causal conclusions regarding the limits of agency on the basis of a perfectly true but quite irrelevant proposition about transfer and adjacency. Indeed, 'the answer to our original question remains open - nothing in the evidence [sc. of how the body is controlled] inclines us to either view (PHP V 249)'.

3. Empirical Investigation, the Location of Functions, and the Transmission of Causal Power

So much for destructive argument, Galen has, effectively, shown that the Stoics have failed to make out a case for their contention that

(1) the heart is the locus of choice and control (LC);

the excretory arguments suggest further that they have to support their claim that it is impossible that

(2) LC lies in the brain.

It remains, however, for Galen to disprove (1) and to support his own view (2).

He has established that positional location has nothing directly to do with whether or not an organ can control the functions of some other; you cannot simply infer what moves what by seeing what is next to what. But then, as

S7 'I need not provide a proof that this statement is not true: I need only ask that they

comment on the following piece of reasoning: Urine passes through the genitals; if it were sent out by the heart it would not go out

through the genitals; but it is in fact sent out through our choice; choice therefore is

not in the heart. Once can construct an argument about excrement in the same way.' (PHP V 246). On

such parabolai, see M. Schofield, 'The syllogisms of Zeno of Citium', Phronesis xxviii 1,

pp. 34ff.

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Galen notes, Chrysippus has a rejoinder to the advocates of (2) - if they are right, and it is possible for voice to be carried from the windpipe, but at the initiation of the head,58 then equally it must be possible on their account for (1) to be true. Galen represents this concession on Chrysippus' part as a blunder, an admission that his own argument was not demonstratively probative:59 this may or may not be a philosophical mistake on Galen's part. However, even if Galen's criticism of Chrysippus is justified ad hominem, he still needs, since he himself rejects (xi), to be able to blunt the objection, even if it turns out (as I think ultimately it does not) that Chrysippus is logically barred from framing it.

What he needs, then, is to show just what is required in the way of connections between one part of the body and another for control to be exercised. Such connection will be physical;' hence we must discover what is as a matter of fact the right type of physical connection. The appropriate route to such a discovery is via anatomy; and anatomical experimentation favours the nerves as being the appropriate connectors.

The special organ of voice is the larynx, and the nerves that control its muscles originate in the brain; by ligating these nerves, you can deprive the animal of vocal power (PHP V 235).61 Galen reinforces this by pointing out

S8 apo tes kephalhs poias tinos katarche's gignomenes (255): Galen purports to quote Chrysippus's own words here. 59PHP V 255-6; cf. 261:

He conceded that it is possible that voice be sent out of the chest and through the windpipe, while the head supplies the origin of movement (arche tes kineseos) to the parts in that region; the argument must therefore not be considered demonstrative as most Stoics supposed.

It could be objected that Galen's criticism is logically misguided: one may entertain a position per impossibile for the purposes of making an ad hominem point, without committing yourself in any real sense to its possibility (or alternatively one may concede that it is logically possible, yet deny that it is causally possible; and one may even allow its causal possibility, while simply denying its causal actuality). One might attempt to defend Galen here; the Stoics rely implicitly, he thinks, on an assertion of the impossibility of there being causal arrangements of the kind that Galen wants to defend - on the a priori truth of the axiom (xi) (interpreted on the lines of (2ai): p. 217 above); but if it were true a priori, then such counterfactuals would be even conceptually impossible. That does not settle the matter - and more can be said in defence of the coherence of the Chrysippean position even if (xi) is construed as an a priori axiom with immediate causal consequences. 60 Here Galen simply adopts the virtually universal Greek view that causing is a matter of transmission by bodily contact (see n. 21 above): I examine this 'General Causal Axiom' (GCA) further below. 61 Galen's famous experiments on the recurrent laryngeal nerve are described in AA II 576-8: much of AA is devoted to various experiments involving ligation and severing of nerves.

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that if the heart were responsible for muscular movements, such ligations would not affect the voice, and further that as a matter of fact you can damage an animal's heart without immediately impairing its voice (PHP V 237).62 Thus experiment shows us that it is the nerves that carry the causal power responsible for voice; and as a matter of type (I) evident observation we can see that the nerves in question have nothing to do with the heart. Hence, by an application of a general principle of causal mediation (GCA: see further below, p. 222), the heart can have nothing (at least directly) to do with voice-production; and so (1) is false. The argument also provides support for (2); but that support needs to be toughened into proof.

In order to do this, Galen needs to tease out the results of his ligation experiments, and to reinforce them with causal axioms. We have already adverted to a general axiom of causal mediation (GCA); that will show, in conjunction with the anatomical experimental evidence, that the nerves are the media of transference for vocal power, and of conscious control;63 and further that whatever is as a matter of fact the LC will be located at one end or the other of the transferring medium. But it won't as yet tell us which end (cf. PHP V 563-40); hence we cannot yet determine where the LC is. In order to do that, Galen thinks, he must determine the origin (arche) of the structures in question; and it is to that issue that he turns his attention next.

Galen wraps up his attack on the Stoic argument with the following ringing paragraph:

I would perhaps say more about the fallacy of the argument if Chrysippus had not also recognised its absurdity . . . where he said that it is possible for discourse to be sent out from the parts in the chest while the head provides the origin of movement (arche tMs kinese6s), just as it is possible that the nerves all have their growth out of the head but receive the origin of their power from the heart. Chrysippus was correct in saying this . . .; but what he said about arguments from position, and about those among them that rest for the most part on the evidence of poets, or of the majority of mankind, or etymology, or anything of that kind was not correct. He would have done better to stick to the sort of premiss supplied by the scientific method, and to examine them and judge them by means of perception (PHP V 261-2; cf. 766, quoted above, p. 201)

The important thing here is that Galen allows that, for all that has been said and demonstrated so far, it is possible that

I Indeed you can remove it completely and the animal will continue to protest vocally, at least for a while: 238-9. '3 Galen's extraordinarily comprehensive sequence of experiments on the nervous system and the spinal column are detailed in AA II 651-706; and see also the later books, preserved only in Arabic (M. Simon, Sieben Bucher, Anatomie des Galen (Leipzig, 1906), pp. 13-31, 92-114, 261-73).

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(3) the nerves might be the vehicles for the motor functions; (4) the nerves have their origin in the brain;

and that

(5) the heart may in turn supply the brain with the power of perception and choice (dunamis aisthetike te kai proairetike: PHP V 262).

(3), (4) and (5) are not incompatible - hence, even if (3) and (4) have been demonstrated it remains to show that (5) is false, in order to favour (2) over (1). In the succeeding sentences, Galen spells out how one is to go about doing that:

one must determine by dissection . . . the number and nature of the structures that connect the heart with the brain, and next one must cut or crush or ligate each of them at the neck, and then observe what the effects are on the animal. The heart and brain are connected by three kinds of vessels . . ; veins, arteries, and nerves. (PHP V 263)

Then you must proceed carefully to isolate each vessel in turn and see what effect ligature has on each of them. This is difficult to do accurately, as the vessels are very close together, and hence it is easy to trap more than one of them at once (this fact, Galen thinks, is responsible for much faulty theo- rising about these matters: 264; see p. 225 below). When you ligate the nerves, the animal loses its vocal power (although the involuntary activities remain unaffected, as do some of the voluntary ones): but no such effect happens when the arteries are ligated;

hence one may readily infer that the heart needs no help from the brain to move the pulse, and the brain needs none from the heart for the animal to have sensation and the power of voluntary action. (PHP V 264)4

What of those who think that ligation of the arteries produces 'aphasia and stupefaction'? Well, Galen says, they make a mistake about the phainomena (ligation of the arteries doesn't cause voicelessness),65 but they are right about the conclusions they should draw were their account of the phenomena correct:

'6 Galen wavers in quite what he asserts is lost when the nerves are ligated - sometimes it appears only to be the voice, at other times it is the power of voluntary movement and sensation as well; and this vacillation blurs the outline of his argument. But it is not radically damaging to it; and he was well aware of the distinction between the sensory and the motor nerve (see the passages of AA cited in nn. 56, 57 above; and in particular Simon (1906), pp. 262-9, in which Galen describes in detail a sequence of neural ligatures to produce a variety of different results: in no case, however, is it ligature of the arteries that produces the sensory and motor effects). '5 For this reason Galen thinks that the carotid arteries are wrongly named: PHP V 195.

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for if the animal really became stupefied (karodes)' . ., it would necessarily follow that the heart sent out the primary origin of sensation and movement to the brain, while the latter distributed it through the whole body via the nerves . .. For as it was demonstrated earlier [Book One, V 187-210] that the heart is the source of the arteries and the brain of the nerves, the conclusion would follow if their statement were true, that the heart supplies the brain with psychic power via the arteries (PHP V 265-6).

All of these arguments make use of the following general causal axiom:

GCA: If A transmits some causal power P to B, then either (a) A is adjacent to B, or (b) if A is remote from B, then there is some vessel V such that V links A and B and P is transmitted through V.

The Stoic error in the windpipe argument can now be construed as a failure to see that (b) is a legitimate option, and a corresponding assumption that GCA amounted to its first disjunct (a).

But GCA on its own won't deliver Galen's conclusion; he requires another causal axiom, presupposed as common ground between him and his opponents in the argument here, namely an axiom of causal priority (ACP). This could be formulated in a variety of ways, but intuitively (and semi-formally) it states that

ACP: Some organ 0 is only causally primary in regard to some power P if it is not the case that there is some further organ O' which is prior to 0 and responsible for P.

ACP as it stands is both unclear and formally deficient. The notion of responsibility needs giving formal flesh, as does the concept of priority.6" I shall not venture further into that particular minefield, and trust optimisti- cally that the general lines of the claim being made by ACP are clear enough, even if its details are controverted and obscure. But it must be the case that 'necessary' and 'responsible' are to be construed in a sense stronger than that of simply being causal prerequisites - for, in that weak sense, the heart will satisfy ACP (animals can't feel or undertake voluntary movements unless they are alive; and the heart is necessary for life).!8 Indeed, failure explicitly to treat of these issues seems to me to be perhaps the most serious flaw in Galen's causal analysis. He is of course wrong that the carotid arteries do not affect consciousness; but he could allow that they

i Galen glosses karodes thus: hoper autois onoma bouletai sOmainein to anaistheton te kai akineton (266).

67 Again informally A is prior to B just in case A is necessary for B: but the difficulty merely resurfaces in a new guise - 'necessary' in what sense? I For a discussion of the difficulties involved in determining the precise sense of 'causal' and 'responsible' in related contexts, see my art.cit., n. 1 above.

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did, and still preserve both (1) and ACP, if he allows that 0 can be primary for P even though some O' is (in some sense) responsible for the continued functioning of 0; O' of course cannot be responsible for P (by ACP) - but it does not seem that such a state of affairs could not obtain. However, Galen appears committed to rejecting this possibility.69

But however that may be, we still need some way of supporting (or at the very least of understanding) Galen's claim to have demonstrated that the heart is the origin of the arteries and the brain of the nerves, as he claims already to have done. For surely all he has shown so far (at best) by his experiments is that there is causal communication via the nerves and the arteries - how can he claim to have shown its direction (cf. PHP V 563-4)? Let us turn to a passage in Book Six of PHP, after the lengthy refutation of the Stoic account of the passions which has occupied most of the intervening section of the treatise.70

In Book Six, after establishing (at least to his satisfaction) the truth of Plato's doctrine that the rational power is located in the brain, while the spirited part resides in the heart,7" he turns to the case of the liver, and the appetitive part:

this proof will not be from such clear evidence . ., nor are its premisses taken from the very nature of the thing under investigation, (cf. 219, 227: and see above) but from properties peculiar to it (ek ton tou6i subebekot6n idiai).72 For when the nerves were stopped with ligatures or were cut, we could see that the parts continuous with the brain retained their original powers, but those beyond the ligature immediately lost both sensation and motion. And similarly with the arteries: we saw the natural pulse still remained in the arteries continuous with the heart but disappeared completely in those that were separated off by ligature." Again it

See PHP V 532-4, a passage discussed below. lhis treatment forms the subject-matter of my art.cit., n. 1.

v' At 333-4, Galen recapitulates his argument concerning the brain and the heart: one must begin from [their] attributes and properties . . . as they pertain to the essence of the matter . . . [t]he main ones were that the brain is the source of . . . nerves which transmit sensation and voluntary motion . . . as the heart is the source of the arteries . . . and when the . . . brain is pressed or wounded the whole animal becomes stupefied, but neither the arterial motion nor that in the heart is des- troyed . . . We also showed that neither supplies these powers to the other . . . but each of them is as it were the fountain of its own power.

n The phrase is Aristotelian: see De An. I 1, 402a5; for some examples of 'properties', see n. 71. 73 On Galen's experiments with arterial ligature, and the (false) conclusions he drew thereby concerning the transmission of the power of the pulse, see Whether Blood is Naturally Contained in theArteries (Art.Sang.) IV 702-36; Art.Sang. is edited with useful notes and introductory essays by D.J. Furley and J.S. Wilkie in Galen on Respiration and the Arteries, (Princeton, 1984); see also M.P. Amacher, 'Galen's experiment on the

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was clearly evident that the disturbances of the soul that occur in anger and fear cause the heart to depart from its natural action. We also mentioned in how many ways the whole body is harmed by pressure on the brain or damage to its ventricles, and that this too clearly indicates that it is the source of motion and sensation. But in the case of the liver we are unable to make any such demonstration, whether by exposing it and applying pressure, or by ligating the veins. For it is not the source of obvious motion as the heart is of pulsation and the brain of sensation and volition; nor is it the cause of rapid injury, as the others are, but it takes time for the weakness of the liver to harm the animal's nutrition and colouring. (PHP V 519-21)

There are two important features of this passage - one is the eminently plausible idea that it is easier to see that some intervention has had an effect if the effect in question follows immediately or rapidly upon the intervention.74 The second is that, given that causal influence is directional, flowing one way only, if you intervene at some point in the vessel which transfers the influence such as to interrupt it, then all points downstream of the interruption will be affected, while those upstream of it will not be affected.

That aqueous metaphor is not accidental - Galen himself makes consid- erable use of it, and it is arguable that the metaphor colours and conditions his account of the fluxion of blood in the body:75 at PHP V 572, he describes the veins as ochetoi, conduits;76 and in his defence of the role of the liver as the source (arche) of the veins at 545-7, he writes:

if you wished to describe the distribution of water brought into a city, you would not pass over its first entrance and find some other point from which to begin the account; there is every necessity first to speak of that place in the city where the water first arrives from outside and from that beginning to proceed to describe the rest. Therefore you should not look for one starting-point (arche') of the nature of the thing, and another for instruction (didaskalia) about it. (PHP V 546)

Galen is making the ad hominem point that even those who deny that the liver is the arche of the veins none the less begin their account of the veins from the liver, which suggests its primacy.

Nevertheless, the water analogy is not, as we shall see, entirely a happy one; and indeed the most prominent metaphor that Galen employs is that of the branches of a tree - the veins split off from their basic trunk (555-7; cf.

arterial pulse, and the experiment repeated', Sudhoffs Archiv fur Geschichte der Medi- zin, 48 (1964). 7 Cf. in a different context In Hippocratis de Natura Hominum (HNH) XV 161-2 (ad ch. 13). 7 Cf. in this regard I.M. Lonie, 'Erasistratus, the Erasistratians, and Aristotle', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 38, (1964), pp. 426-43. 76 Cf. Tim. 77c-e, where Plato employs the same language and a similar metaphor (cf. ib. 78c-79a).

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530); this image is developed most fully at 522-7, where it is interwoven with that of the water-supply; one short quotation from this passage should suffice to give its flavour:

it is evident to anyone who is versed in the ways of nature that larger things are the sources (archai) of smaller, just as the spring is greater than the channels (ochetai) into which it is divided. And yet some have attained the peak of unreason by supposing that what follows the arche is greater than the arche.7 They are misled by rivers, which are very small at their sources, but increase as they advance . . . Some rivers grow larger . . . when tributaries flow into them, while some decrease in size as channels branch off. No river that comes from a single spring is smaller at its head than it is thereafter, but if it is collected from many springs it is reasonable that the whole should become larger than any one of them. (PHP V 525-6)

So only certain types of watercourse will serve as suitable analogues and no doubt Galen is thinking of irrigation systems, or other sorts of artificial water-supply. But what entitles him to do this, in his view, is the absurdity of supposing that in animals the sources of the nutritive power could be various and at the extremities, flowing together to some confluence: the point is made partly by appealing to analogy, partly by appeal to reason:

[you will be] compelled to admit that the source of the . .. arteries, nerves, and veins is in every part of the body, so that the heel perhaps, or the finger is the source of the largest artery . . . So perhaps the person who introduces this argument is not ashamed to say that the branches of trees or the ends of roots are the archai of the plant . . . simply to say that the ends of the veins are archai is absurd . . . every part will be a source. If they reply that some of the ends are archai and others not they will be putting forward an undemonstrated assumption. (PHP V 526-7)

The model, in fact, is clearly that of irrigation systems - the blood, like water in irrigation ditches, flows out from a central source, and is dispersed to and absorbed by the extremities.78 However, the assumption that it is logically entailed by the concept of a source, an arche', that such a thing must be unitary and undivided (hence the remarks about the impossibility of the root-ends being archai for the tree) is clearly a very strong one, and on the face of it unjustifiably so. It is worth remarking in this context that Galen does hold that the root-ends are analogous to mouths (527: see n. 96 below), hence he cannot simply hold that it is impossible for a variety of

7 This sort of claim bears comparison with Descartes' famous idea that there is always at least as much 'reality' in the cause as in the effect': Meditations III; although Galen's employment of an analogous principle here is I think less philosophically suspect than Descartes'. 78 For the pervasiveness of this model, and its possible effect of suppressing the emergen- ce of the hypothesis of the circulation of the blood, see Lonie, 1964 and see Timaeus 77c-e, 78c-79a.

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separate parts to contribute to the same overall function. Rather, I think the crucial notion is that of control: if control over some function is to be exercised, then it must be done centrally - causal power ramifies out from the original source.79 That is a powerful intuition, and I shall not pursue the matter further. I am not convinced that it is in all cases justified, however.'

Galen's account is also guided by analogy with the case of the heart - for in the case of that organ, he thinks you can just see directly that it is the source of arterial activity, since

the heart alone of all the parts in the animal is seen to preserve its natural activity8' for a very long time even after removal. (PHP V 531; cf. 185-7, 238-9; 561-3)

But of course it is impossible directly to see this in the case of the liver - and hence its role in connection with the veins must be inferred by analogy, an analogy that involves appeals to the similarity of the branching structure of the veins to that of the arteries, and to various structures to be found in plants. Galen's treatment is much more complex and detailed than I can do justice to here; but I shall briefly consider one subsidiary set of arguments involving analogy before turning to the actual account of the functioning of the soul.

At PHP V 532ff., Galen considers a possible objection to the claim that the liver is responsible for the nutritive power supplied by the veins. Could not the liver simply supply the material, while the heart injected the power? This is rejected partly on conceptual grounds; if an organ supplies the matter, then it must be the source of the nutritive power: for

it is reasonable that what provides the whole body with matter suitable for nourishment is the source of the power of nutrition and growth. (PHP V 533)

But that is not the whole story - if the heart possesses the nutritive power, then either the liver is superfluous (but nature, for Galen even more than for Aristotle, does nothing in vain),82 or the liver functions 'like a servant',

7 Indeed, ramification of this sort is sometimes taken to be the defining characteristic of causal direction: see e.g. K. Popper, 'The arrow of time', Nature clxxvii (1956), 538; see also J.L. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe (Oxford, 1974), ch. 7. ' Recent work on the nature of the immune system, and the proper way to describe it, provides an example in point: see in this regard the paper by E. Levy 'Networks', in Matthen and Linsky, 1988 (n. 82). 81 i.e. that of causing pulsation in the arteries: it is not quite clear what he has in mind here; nor does it seem, on any interpretation, actually to be true. I See my articles (1) 'Galen explains the elephant', in Matthen and Linsky (eds.) Philosophy and Biology (Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supp. Vol. 14, 1988), pp. 135- 57, and (2) 'Galen and the best of all possible worlds', in Classical Quarterly xxxix 1 (1989), pp. 206-277.

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as Alexander of Aphrodisias believed.83 Galen rejects this on the basis of an axiom:

(A): every organ that prepares material for another keeps it untouched for that organ; (PHP V 534)

and (A) is taken to entail (in conjunction with a further unstated axiom, which is nevertheless Galenic, that Nature will arrange things econom- ically)'" that there will be only one distributing channel in the case of such organs, leading directly to the organ it supplies (Galen instances the route from the lungs to the heart, from the stomach to the liver, and from the rete mirabile to the brain); but the routes of distribution from the liver are multiple, and hence do not match that model.85

But a crucial question remains to be addressed: Galen has admitted (PHP V 519) that in the case of the role of the liver his 'proof' has not been 'from such clear evidence' as in the case of the heart and the brain; is he thereby committed to thinking that he has not genuinely offered a demonstration, at least not one which meets the strict and rigorous methodological requirements laid down at the beginning of Book Two (PHP V 219-24; see above, pp. 211-14)? Is he, willy-nilly, introducing premisses that are at best dialectical (or even worse) into the heart of what ought to be a scientific inquiry? The answer to that question depends, I think, on the nature of the analogies that Galen uses, and the role that they are supposed to play in his demonstrations. He admits that he cannot offer an absolutely certain, watertight demonstration 'from the nature [i.e. the essence] of the thing under investigation'; but that does not commit him necessarily to mere dialectic or rhetoric. The dialectical part of his exposition, the confutation of his opponents on the basis of their premisses, is already over - and he is certainly not' aiming at mere conviction, or worse still intellectual fraud.

I DeAn.3, pp. 95-7 Bruns (Suppl. Arist. 11.1). 84 For a discussion of the axiom (or axioms) involved here, their Galenic provenance and justification, see my artt.cit., n. 82 above (esp. (1), pp. 151-5). Briefly, the two principles I ascribe to Galen are what I call the Principle of Creative Economy (roughly that Nature is not prodigal, and that the skill of the demiurge manifests itself in the economy with which he makes use of the materials available to him), and the No Redundancy Assumption, namely the view that Nature will not put more work into its creations than is demanded by the exigencies of structure and function. 8' It is not clear what precisely is the status of (A), whether it is supposed to be an empirical generalization, or an a priori truth of some kind: presumably if it is the latter, then it will have to be underpinned by considerations of the sort outlined in n. 84. 1 At least ostensibly - others, holding a lower opinion of Galen's intellectual honesty might none the less suspect him of fraudulence here. But it is surely more interesting philosophically, as well as more charitable, to succumb to such suspicions only as a last resort.

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Of course he might still be guilty of it - Galen frequently remarks that there are two reasons why people become 'entrapped' by sophisms.87 They can be so either as a result of ignorance, inexperience, and lack of training in the logical methods, or as a result of a deliberate desire to cheat and mislead. Perhaps, then, Galen is the sad, unwitting victim of the very methodological failings he discerns in others?

I think he can, methodologically at least, be acquitted of this charge. To rely on the 'properties peculiar' to something (see above, p. 223) is not to resort to ad hominem argument, or mere rhetoric. Rather, in this case at least, the properties peculiar to the liver are its structural features (that it is the origin and source of the veins, given the constraints on what can count as a source which have already been discussed); one cannot directly assess its functional role, for reasons that PHP V 519-21 (above, pp. 223-4) spelled out. Now, for Galen the link between structure and function, while close and perspicuous, is not a matter of immediate evidence, nor is it in general a simple logical relation; it may have to be inferred on the basis of a variety of complex considerations.88 Those considerations are, in this case, precisely those of n. 83 above.

Galen is wrong about most of this: but he goes wrong not because of a simple failure to follow his own strictures on method. Rather the root of his error lies in a too sanguine (but I have argued elsewhere well motivated) acceptance of a particularly powerfully interpreted teleology on the metaphysical side, and an over optimistic epistemological belief that the empirical sciences can be reduced to indubitable Aristotelian axioms. The upshot of this is that the analogies he employs are not meant in themselves to constitute the whole of the argument; that is, he does not feebly conclude from that fact that the liver looks like the heart (in some respect) that it acts like it too. Rather, the analogous structure is a guide to the right answer, because it serves to remind the investigator of a basic teleological truth about the arrangement of the world.

Of course, that in itself will not do all the work that Galen needs to do here - nothing will. But it is relatively easy to see how the rest of the argument for the primacy of the liver in relation to the veins, and of its key role in the distribution of nutrients via the blood, might be plausibly filled

I Cf. Pecc. Dig. V 72-5 for Galen's clearest account of his notion of a sophism; see also Nat.Fac. II 44ff., 51-3. N See my artt.cit., n. 82 above for details. 9 artt.cit., n. 82.

9 For a discussion of the latter features of Galen's philosophy of science, see my 'Galen's account of scientific knowledge', in J.A. Lopez Ferez (ed.).

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in, on the basis of the (admittedly questionable) causal axioms earlier discerned.

4. Desire and the Liver

Let us, then, allow that Galen has indeed established that the liver is the source of the veins and of the elaboration of the blood. But why imagine that that has got anything to do with the desires? Is he not committing an ignoratio elenchi on a grand scale by simply assimilating the source of the veins and the appetitive soul? Hippocrates is Galen's model on the nutritive front,9 Plato on the philosophical (Tim. 70d-e); and Galen asserts that

it makes no difference whether the liver is called the source of the veins, or of the appetitive soul, but it is more appropriate for a physician to present his teaching in terms of bodily organs, a philosopher in terms of powers of the soul; in either case; the one follows from a proof of the other. (PHP V 577)

Galen then quotes from the Timaeus (70d-71b), on the construction and location of the appetitive soul; it is that part which is 'desirous of food and drink, and all that it requires because of the nature of the body'; i.e., matters connected with nutrition. The argument appears to be that, because the liver is the elaborator of products necessary for the nutrition of the body, it must also be the locus of attraction for the raw materials that go to make up those products, and hence must be the source of the desires that go along with that attraction. Galen, it must be remembered, is operating with a broad concept of 'soul' and the psychic; and he takes it from Plato that even plants have a certain form of perception and hence of desire (contra the general thesis of Aristotle in de Anima 3 10-11, and of the Stoics: PHP V 521), namely a desire for and attractive faculty of whatever is suitable for their nutrition, and a corresponding repulsion for whatever is alien to their systems.92

But why imagine the locus of desire for some set of substances need be

91 He quotes many times from de Alimento on the subject of the rhizosis [literally, where the rootgrowth of a plant becomes the trunk] of the veins: de Alim. 31 = CMG I 1, 82.13ff.; see PHP V 199-200, 531-2, 543, 577, 578. 'I Subst.Nat.Fac. IV 764-5; cf. PHP V 518, 521ff; and see Nat.Fac. II 159-60: 'thus it is confirmed by all the phenomena . . . that there must obtain in almost every part of an animal a certain inclination (ephesis) and, as it were, a desire (orexis) for their particular quality, and an aversion, or as it were a hatred, for the alien quality.' Nat. Fac. consists in large part of an attack on the physiology of Erasistratus who denied the existence of 'natural powers' in the bodily of organs of attraction, repulsion, excretion and so on, and who sought to explain the body's mechanics solely in terms of such purely physical principles as horror vacui.

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the same as the organ which makes use of them? Why could not one organ desire on behalf of another? Well, perhaps to have a need for something (at least in a suitably strong sense), and to take steps to get it, just is to desire that thing, other things being equal; Galen would be sympathetic to El- izabeth Anscombe's remark that 'the primitive sign of wanting is trying to get' (Intention [19571 Section 36). The liver clearly tries to get things - hence it wants them.

But even if we admit such an extensional notion of wants and desires, it will not, surely, suffice to ensure that 'it makes no difference whether the liver is called the source of the veins or the appetitive soul', at least if by 'appetitive soul' we mean a locus of conscious (or at least potentially conscious) desires for such things as food, drink and sex. It seems as though there is simply a gross fallacy of equivocation going on here: my liver tries to get food; I try to get food; hence I (qua desire for nutrition) am my liver.

I think there are broadly two lines of defence open to Galen here. The first relies on his Platonic inheritance. Thirst properly construed, for Plato, is not the desire for a particular kind of drink, or for a good drink, but simply to drink (Rep. 437bff.); and the same goes for the other desires. The level of articulation - the degree of propositional or cognitive content if you like - is low, perhaps absent altogether. If this sort of nisus does carry along with it some sort of propositional articulation, then that is secondary and subsidiary, a consequence (perhaps even an epiphenomenon), and certainly not a cause or component, of the desire itself: it is, in the language of John Searle, simply 'the froth on the wave'. When Galen remarks in his short treatise That the Best Doctor Be also a Philosopher93 that one can never develop the habits of hard work necessary to scientific achievement if one is 'a slave to the belly or the genitals' (Opt.Med. I 59), he employs that metaphor of slavery in a more than usually literal sense.' At this elemental level, it makes more sense to ascribe the source of the craving to the part which 'desires' (in a broad, non-intentional sense) the sustenance, which attracts the raw-materials towards it, and elaborates them into something else.95 Here again, Galen makes use of an analogy (it is not clear how innocently): the rhizosis of plants is like the liver - for the liver sends shoots downwards to the stomach to draw up nourishment, and upwards (the

93 Opt.Med. I 53-63, - MS 2 1-8, Maller (1891). 9 For Galen's use of the metaphor in moral contexts, see my art.cit., n. 1, forthcoming. s These various processes of elaboration, in the heart, the stomach, the liver, and the

seminal vesicles, are central to Galen's metabolic system: see PHP V 565-74.

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veins) to distribute the elaborated product.' The second defence appeals to teleological considerations (but is also, at

least in inspiration, Platonist). Suppose it really is the case that one organ (the brain, let us say) desires something on behalf of another. What could be the point of such a duplication of functions? A properly economical creator simply would not tolerate such a waste of resources.' Of course that is not say that there is no role for the brain to play in regard to desire: its function precisely is to weigh the raw data coming from the desiderative part and to determine whether desires should or should not be acted upon; in order to do this the desires clearly must be given propositional form - and that perhaps is sufficient to explain the need for conscious desires, at least in rational animals.98

5. Conclusions

Let us briefly, then, take stock of what Galen thinks he has demonstrated. Firstly, he thinks he has established tripartition, along Platonic lines; but he has done more than that - in demonstrating (at least to his own satisfaction) the general agreement of Plato and Hippocrates on these issues, he has shown how the physiological account of the functioning of the parts of the body, of their mutual interdependence, and of the structures that join them together, complements the philosophical account of the separation of parts of the soul. And he has elaborated and applied a method of scientific investigation and argument that purports to distinguish between certainty, mere plausibility, and outright sophistry, and to assign authority its due weight. It must be admitted, I think, even by the most fervent admirer of Galen's work, that his application of the method falls short of the high ideals he sets himself. But it is the fact that he sees the ideals so clearly, that he recognizes so acutely the need to marry conceptual rigour with skill and dedication in empirical investigation, that is impressive. However, just where that leaves his attack on Chrysippean moral psychology, and how the philosophical and scientific results obtained can be integrated with a plausible account of the phenomenology of affection, and the theory of human

' PHP V 522-7, esp. 527: 'the ends of the roots can be called sources of the tree's nutriment, just like the veins that descend into the stomach and the arteries into the lungs [i.e. for the heart]'; and 556ff. See pp. 225-6 above. 7 For a detailed account of Galen's creatonism, see my artt.cit., n. 82 above. I I examine in more detail Galen's picture of the role and function of the intellect in the properly managed rational life in my art.cit., n. 1.

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responsibility, is a question I leave for another occasion.99

University of Texas at Austin

Appendix: A Formalisation of the Stoic Arguments

It is perhaps worth setting out these arguments in a formal manner, using the techniques of modem symbolic logic. [A] translates as follows:

[A] 1 (1) Tvw A (i) 2 (2) (x)(Sxb -- TxW) A (ii) 2 (3) (x)(Txw - Sxb) 2:contr. 2 (4)Tvw--Svb 3:UE 1,2 (5) - Svb 1,4: MPP 6 (6) (x)(Svx * Sdx) A (iii) 6 (7) Svb ++ Sdb 6: UE 1,2,6 (8)-Sdb 5,7: MPP 9 (9) Sdm A (iv) 10 (10)m = b A 9,10 (11) Sdb 9,10: = subst 1,2,6,9,10 (12) Sdb &-Sdb 8,11 &1 1,2,6,9 (13) - m = b 10,12: RAA (v)

(v = voice; w = windpipe; b = brain; d = discourse; m = mind; Txy = x passes through y; Sxy = x passes from y)

[C] makes use of two further abbreviations: 'Cxy' = x is continuous with y; 'Ixy' = x is in y (the latter allows us to drop the use of the identity-sign from the argument):

[Ci] 1 (1) Tvw A (vi) 2 (2) (x)(y)(Txy -. (z)(Sxz -+ Czy) ) A (xi) 2 (3) Tvw -- (z)(Svz -- Czw) 2: UE (two steps) 1,2 (4) (z)(Svz -- Czw) 1,3: MPP 1,2 (5) Svb - Cbw 4: UE 6 (6)- Cbw A (xii) 1,2,6 (7) - Svb 5,6: MT- (xiii)

9 The other occasion being my art.cit., n. 1 above; I should like to thank Malcolm Schofield for his extensive and acute editorial remarks.

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But, given that discourse = df* meaningful voice (xv), and given that whatever goes for voice goes afortiori for meaningful voice (which entails (xiv) ), then we can substitute 'd' for 'v' throughout [Ci], and hence obtain

(7*) - Sdb (xvii)

Now we can formalize [Cii] as follows:

[Cii] 8 (8) Sdm A (xvi) 9 (9) (x)(y)(Ixy -- (z)(Szx -- Szy)) A 9 (10) Imb - (z)(Szm -+ Szb) 9: UE (two steps) 9 (11)Imb -(Sdm --Sdb) 10: UE 8,9 (12) Imb Sdb 8,11: MPP 1,2,6,8,9 (13)-Imb 7*, 12: MTT (xviii)

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