The Concept of Pneuma a er Aristotle Sean Coughlin David Leith Orly Lewis (eds.) BERLIN STUDIES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD the versatility of the con- cept of pneuma in philosophical and medical theories in 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, psycholog- ical, 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 vol- ume prompts a profound re-evaluation of this fluid and adaptable, but crucially important, substance, in antiquity and beyond. Sean Coughlin David Leith Orly Lewis (eds.) BERLIN STUDIES OF 61 THE ANCIENT WORLD BERLIN STUDIES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD · 61 EDITED BY TOPOI EXCELLENCE CLUSTER The Concept of Pneuma after Aristotle EDITED BY Sean Coughlin David Leith Orly Lewis Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. © 2020 Edition Topoi / Exzellenzcluster Topoi der Freien Universität Berlin und der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Design concept: Stephan Fiedler Printed and distributed by Westarp Verlagsservicegesellschaft mbH ISBN 978-3-9820670-4-9 ISSN (Print) 2366-6641 ISSN (Online) 2366-665X DOI: 10.17171/3-61 URN: urn:nbn:de:kobv:188-refubium-29034-0 First published 2020 Published under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 3.0 DE. For the terms of use of third party content, please see the reference lists. www.edition-topoi.org CONTENTS SEAN COUGHLIN, DAVID LEITH, ORLY LEWIS Introduction — 7 PAVEL GREGORIC Soul and Pneuma in De spiritu — 17 LUCIANA REPICI Strato of Lampsacus on Pneuma — 37 MICHIEL MEEUSEN Aristotle’s Second Breath: Pneumatic Processes in the Natural Problems (On Sexual Intercourse) — 63 ORLY LEWIS AND DAVID LEITH Ideas of Pneuma in Early Hellenistic Medical Writers — 93 DAVID LEITH The Pneumatic Theories of Erasistratus and Asclepiades — 131 TEUN TIELEMAN Cleanthes’ Pneumatology. Two Testimonies from Tertullian — 157 IAN HENSLEY The Physics of Pneuma in Early Stoicism — 171 SEAN COUGHLIN AND ORLY LEWIS Pneuma and the Pneumatist School of Medicine — 203 PETER N. SINGER Galen on Pneuma: Between Metaphysical Speculation and Anatomical Theory — 237 JULIUS ROCCA One Part of a Teleological Whole: Galen’s Account of the Lung as an Instrument of Pneumatic Elaboration — 283 JULIA TROMPETER How the Soul Affects the Body: Pneumatic Tension, Psychic Tension and Megalopsychia in Galen — 313 BETTINA BOHLE Proclus on the Pneumatic Ochema — 343 PETROS BOURAS-VALLIANATOS Theories on Pneuma in the Work of the Late Byzantine Physician John Zacharias Aktouarios — 365 Index of Ancient Sources — 401 Index of Names — 427 General Index — 429 Sean Coughlin, David Leith, Orly Lewis Introduction Summary This volume explores the versatility of the concept of pneuma in philosophical and med- ical theories in the wake of Aristotle’s physics. It offers thirteen separate studies of how the concept of pneuma was used in a range of physical, physiological, psychological, cos- mological 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 im- portant, substance, in antiquity and beyond. Keywords: pneuma; spirit; soul; body; history of life sciences; philosophy; medicine Dieser Band erkundet die Vielseitigkeit des Konzepts Pneuma in philosophischen und me- dizinischen Theorien in der Folge von Aristoteles’ Physik. Er bietet dreizehn Beiträge, wie das Konzept Pneuma in körperlichen, physiologischen, psychologischen, kosmologischen und ethischen Untersuchungen betrachtet wurde. Der Fokus liegt auf individuellen Den- kern oder Traditionen und deren spezifischen Fragestellungen, unter ihnen die frühen Pe- ripatetiker, die Stoiker, die großen hellenistischen medizinischen Traditionen, Galen, aber auch der spätantike Proclus und Johann Zacharias Aktouarios im frühen 14. Jh. Auf neue Forschungsansätze und Entwicklungen bezüglich des Forschungsgegenstandes griechisch- römische Philosophie und antike Medizin bauend, bietet dieser Sammelband eine profunde Neubewertung dieser fluiden, aber zentralen Substanz, in der Antike und späterer Zeit. Keywords: Pneuma; Geist; Seele; Körper; Geschichte der Lebenswissenschaften; Philoso- phie; Medizin Sean Coughlin, David Leith, Orly Lewis (eds.) | The Concept of Pneuma after Aristotle | Berlin Studies of the Ancient World 61 (ISBN 978-3-9820670-4-9; DOI: 10.17171/3-61) | www.edition-topoi.org 7 SEAN COUGHLIN, DAVID LEITH, ORLY LEWIS And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversly fram’d, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp” Air is unmistakably important. Its importance was acknowledged from early on in the Greek philosophical tradition, with Anaximenes of Miletus in the 6th century BCE, who reportedly held that the cosmos developed in some way out of the condensation and rarefaction of air as its original matter. The significance of air was elaborated further in the 5th century BCE by such thinkers as Diogenes of Apollonia, and in the medical tradition by the anonymous authors of the treatises On Breaths and On the Sacred Disease. With Aristotle, however, the airy substance ‘pneuma’ took on a new and more sophis- ticated role in explanations of animal life. His speculations seem likely to have been inspired, at least in part, by questions concerning how the soul interacts with the body. The incorporeality of the soul, as it was conceived by Plato and his disciples, posed prob- lems for explaining the soul’s interaction with the corporeal body and its environment. How, for example, might an immaterial soul affect the body so as to cause it to move, or how might sensations impinge physically on the soul so conceived? The relative in- substantiality of a pneumatic substance suggested itself as a plausible medium,1 and Aristotle himself went so far as to dissociate it from the air which inspired it, conceiving it as something ‘connate’ (σύμφυτον) and congenital, a material in us “analogous to the elements of the stars.”2 Around Aristotle’s time, then, pneuma gained a novel and crucial significance that it was to retain throughout the rest of antiquity and beyond. It came to feature promi- nently in all manner of physical, physiological, psychological, cosmological and ethical inquiries. The conceptual framework was still operative for René Descartes in the 17th century in his understanding of the working of the body by means of ‘animal spirits’ and in the context of his more radical mind-body dualism. And it continued until the 18th century, when focus shifted to entities like Luigi Galvani’s electrical force and An- toine Lavoisier’s oxygen. The longevity of pneuma as a concept makes it all the more 1 Dillon 2009. And more generally in Lloyd 2007, πνεύματι φύσις ἀνάλογον οὖσα τῷ τῶν ἄστρων 140–141, and Bartoˇs 2006. στοιχείῳ). See also Arist. Gen. an. 2.3, 736b29– 2 Arist. Gen. an. 2.3, 736b35–737a1: “the pneuma 737a1; 3.11, 762a19–b21; Arist. De motu an. 10, and the nature in the pneuma, enveloped in the 703a4–28. For key discussions see: Jaeger 1913; semen and the foam-like, being analogous to the Solmsen 1957; Nussbaum 1978; Verbeke 1978; element of the stars” (τὸ ἐμπεριλαμβανόμενον ἐν Freudenthal 1995; Bos 2003; Corcilius and Gregoric τῷ σπέρματι καὶ ἐν τῷ ἀφρώδει πνεῦμα καὶ ἡ ἐν τῷ 2013; Bos 2018; Bartoˇs and King 2020. 8 INTRODUCTION surprising, however, that there was little consensus concerning what pneuma was, what qualities it had, how many kinds there were, how it came to be present in the body, and what exactly it did there. The scholarship on these variations and elaborations of the concept of pneuma after Aristotle remains limited. While some of these issues have been addressed piecemeal in earlier scholarship, there are few studies concerned with the concept of pneuma itself.3 Moreover, recent advancements in such areas as Hellenistic medicine, Galen’s medi- cal system and its debts, Stoic physics and medieval medicine and philosophy call for a detailed re-evaluation and revised analysis. There have been important methodolog- ical developments in these fields as well. This is true particularly as regards the study of authors for which we only have fragmentary citations and reports, as is the case for most Hellenistic medical and philosophical authors. The change in method is appar- ent also in scholarship moving away from the eager attempts to identify influence and connections between different ancient authors based on (often incidental) lexical and conceptual similarities. This approach often led to circular arguments, for example, when the ideas of one ancient author were used to fill gaps in the ideas of another au- thor.4 A bottom-up approach is more fruitful, both for the study of individual authors and for the topic as a whole – an approach which examines each source in its textual and historical contexts as the basis for the reconstruction and discussion of the ideas of each author or historically-attested group of authors.5 The conference held at the Excellence Cluster Topoi in Berlin from 2 to 4 July 2015 sought to explore, and to underscore, the diversity and richness of ancient theories that made use of pneuma.