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This volume explores the versatility of the concept of pneuma in philosophical and medical theoriesin the wake of Aristotle's physics. It offers fourteen separate studies of how the concept of pneuma was used in a range of physical, physiological, psychological, cosmological and ethical inquiries. The focus is on individual thinkers or traditions and the specific questions they sought to address, including early Peripatetic sources, the Stoics, the major Hellenistic medical traditions, Galen, as well as Proclus in Late Antiquity and John Zacharias Aktouarios in the early 14th century. Building on new scholarly approaches and on recent advancements in our understanding of Graeco-Roman philosophy and medicine, the volume prompts a profound re-evaluation of this fluid and adaptable, but crucially important, substance, in antiquity and beyond.
About the author
Sean Coughlin is Research Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 980 Episteme in Bewegung
funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and at the Institute for Classical Philology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He publishes articles on Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, science and medicine, and is currently completing an edition, with translation and commentary, of the fragments of Athenaeus of Attalia.
David Leith is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Exeter. He has published variously on
the Hellenistic and Roman medical sects, especially Herophilus, Erasistratus, Asclepiades and the Methodists, and has edited medical fragments for The Oxyrhynchus Papyri series. He is currently preparing an edition, with essays and commentary, of the testimonia on Asclepiades of Bithynia.
Orly Lewis is Senior Lecturer in Classics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project ATLOMY - Anatomy in Ancient Greece and Rome: An Interactive Visual and Textual Atlas. She has published on ancient anatomy, physiology and diagnosis and the relation between theory and practice in ancient scientific method. She is currently preparing a study of the diagnostic theory and method of Archigenes of Apamea.
