Science in Context

This paper examines Galen’s engagement with the Empiricist school of medicine in his protreptic treatise, commonly known as Exhortation to Study the Arts. I argue that Galen composed this work in order to express his vision of how one comes to obtain medical knowledge, thereby attacking the Empiricists’ reliance on experience (empeiria).

The biography of Anaxagoras (500–428), the greatest scientist of antiquity, has long been hotly contested, without any consensus being reached. There is doubt over (1) his link to Themistocles, (2) which thirty years he spent in Athens, and (3) the date of his trial for impiety after the decree of Diopeithes had outlawed astronomy. His biography is of extraordinary importance for the history of science, for Greek religion and for 5th-century Athenian politics in equal measure.

Ancient Greek mathematics has been associated for centuries with the systematic, deductive style of Euclid’s Elements. The strength of this association has tended to obscure the variety of ancient methodological and stylistic practices. In this paper I shall argue that this variety is not a happenstance result of individual authorial preferences, but that there were two distinct intellectual traditions within ancient Greek theoretical mathematics, each with its own stylistic conventions, problem-solving methods, epistemological priorities, and even preferred vocabulary.

This paper explores how Hippocratic authors described gender differentiation in the brain and its malleability.

The Letter of Aristeas is a Hellenistic work narrating the translation of the Torah into Greek at the behest of Ptolemy Philadelphus. It is important for the study of Hellenistic Judaism (it describes the Septuagint’s production) and for Hellenistic Greek literary culture (it describes the Alexandrian Library). Despite its importance as a historical source, it is under-appreciated as literature.

What is passion, yours, mine, anyone's, when others start to care about it? Polemon's Physiognomy, a book treating the body as a window into the soul, prompts that question. For Polemon has much to tell us not just about passion itself, but also about the "how" and "why" of observing it in others. Yet his book has had little impact on research into a topic of abiding interest over the past several decades: the passions — desire, envy, etc. — in the Greco-Roman world.