On the Natural Faculties
Peri Physikon Dynameon
Living organs perform their functions through inherent natural faculties, attraction, retention, alteration, and expulsion, that arise from a purposeful, teleological design of the body, refuting mechanistic accounts, especially the atomists', that reduce physiology to blind matter in motion.
- natural faculties of organs (attraction, retention, alteration, expulsion)
- teleological physiology: nature does nothing in vain
- refutation of atomist, mechanistic accounts
- grounding in Hippocratic authority
- medicine's dominant framework for fifteen centuries
On the Natural Faculties argues that the body's organs, above all the liver, kidneys, and stomach, perform their functions through inherent natural faculties, faculties of attraction, retention, alteration, and expulsion, that cannot be explained by the purely mechanical accounts of the atomist and Epicurean traditions Galen sets out to refute. Galen grounds this teleological physiology in his admiration for Hippocratic medicine and in an argument, borrowed from and extending Aristotle, that nature does nothing in vain. Combining careful anatomical observation, much from animal dissection, with polemical argument, Galen established a physiological framework that dominated Western and Islamic medicine for nearly fifteen hundred years.
Commentary
Readers' notes on this work. No account needed - be scholarly, or at least civil.
Loading commentary…