Hankinson R J
Department of Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA.
Can Bull Med Hist. 2009;26(1):129-54. doi: 10.3138/cbmh.26.1.129.
Central to Don Bates's thesis about the role of medicine in the Scientific Revolution is the Greek concept of psyche. This article explores this connection in relation to Galen. Paradoxically, Galen declined to commit himself to any particular view of the soul's real nature, and held aloof from both materialist and Platonic positions. His medical approach, however, offered a way through these difficulties: we may not know what the soul is, but we know it exists, because we can see what it does. Medicine can also reveal other truths about the soul, such as the location of its various parts in the brain, heart and liver, or its transmission through the nerves. Different souls exhibit different "powers," i.e., causal postulates conceived in relation to their specific effects. Thus the soul can be a proper object of scientific inquiry if one concentrates on its evident manifestations, and seeks to make causal and categorical sense of them within a general theory of functioning. Galen's stance can be compared to some positions of Galileo, and even to La Mettrie, who claimed Galen's support for his contention that the powers of the soul are affected by bodily conditions. Both of them concentrate on the evident facts of animal and human life; both put their considerable medical learning to work to make sense of these facts; and they shared a common aversion to dogmatism. Though Galen, unlike Galileo, would make some place for talk about substances and essences in science, he is in some respects more modern than many thinkers of the Scientific Revolution in his willingness to accommodate a wide range of modes of physical causation.
唐·贝茨关于医学在科学革命中作用的论点的核心是希腊语中的“psyche”概念。本文探讨了这一与盖伦相关的联系。矛盾的是，盖伦拒绝将自己局限于对灵魂真实本质的任何特定观点，并且远离唯物主义和柏拉图主义的立场。然而，他的医学方法提供了一条解决这些难题的途径：我们可能不知道灵魂是什么，但我们知道它存在，因为我们能看到它的作用。医学还能揭示关于灵魂的其他真相，比如其各个部分在大脑、心脏和肝脏中的位置，或者它通过神经的传导。不同的灵魂展现出不同的“力量”，即根据其特定效果所构想的因果假设。因此，如果一个人专注于灵魂的明显表现，并试图在一个关于功能的一般理论中对其进行因果和分类上的理解，那么灵魂就可以成为科学探究的恰当对象。盖伦的立场可以与伽利略的一些观点相比较，甚至与拉美特利的观点相比较，拉美特利声称盖伦支持他的论点，即灵魂的力量会受到身体状况的影响。他们两人都专注于动物和人类生活的明显事实；都运用他们丰富的医学知识来理解这些事实；并且他们都同样厌恶教条主义。尽管与伽利略不同，盖伦会在科学中为关于实体和本质的讨论留出一些空间，但在愿意接纳广泛的物理因果模式方面，他在某些方面比科学革命中的许多思想家更具现代性。
