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Article ID: CBB001214344

Aristotle on the Debate about the Central Organ of the Human Body in the 5th and 4th Centuries BC (2012)

Historia Scientiarum: International Journal of the History of Science Society of Japan
Volume: 22, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 1-21
Publication date: 2012
Language: English

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Aristotle's cardiocentric model of animals, including human beings, which he introduced in his physiological and biological treatises, seems to reflect a history of debate about the central organ of the human body. This paper will make it clear that his arguments for cardiocentrism include a specific criticism of the encephalocentric model of the human being, proposed by the author of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease. The Hippocratic author holds that the brain is responsible for our psychic states and activities, which will be affected by some unusual changes that it undergoes in its physical condition. Aristotle, on the other hand, insists that some bodily abnormalities, such as the palpitation of the heart, and all psychic disturbances including mental derangements, which the Hippocratic author ascribes to the abnormal condition of the brain as the central organ of the human body, may be explained within the framework of his cardiocentric model. These facts will indicate that Aristotle targeted the Hippocratic author as one of the proponents of the encephalocentric view in his critical comments on it. It will shed a new light on the relationship of thought between Hippocratic medicine and Aristotelian psychophysiology in view of the historical debate about the central organ of the human body.

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