124 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystus
throughout classical antiquity (and remained so until the nineteenth cen-
tury), and to which no definitive answer was found. In so far as antiquity
is concerned, there were at least three causes for this: the reasons for asking
the question (and the desire to answer it) differed depending on whether
one’s purposes were medical, philosophical or purely rhetorical; the status
of the arguments for or against a certain answer (such as the evidential value
of medical experiments) was subject to fluctuation; and the question itself
posed numerous other problems related to the (to this day) disputed area of
philosophical psychology or ‘philosophy of the mind’, such as the question
of the relationship between body and soul, or of the difference between the
various ‘psychic’ faculties, and so on. When following the debate from its in-
ception until late antiquity, one gets the impression that the differences
manifest themselves precisely in these three areas. Whereas the doctors
of the Hippocratic Corpus were mainly interested in the question of the
location of the mind in so far as they felt a need for a treatment of psycho-
logical disorders based on a theory of nature, later the situation changed
and medical-physiological data were no more than one of the possible (but
by no means decisive) factors to build arguments for one of the positions
taken on.
In the section below I will pay particular attention to the early phase of the
debate (fifth and fourth centuriesbce), concentrating on the main authors
of the Hippocratic Corpus, Aristotle and Diocles, with brief references to
Plato.
2 greek doctors and philosophers of the
fifth and fourth centuries bce
It can be inferred from remarks made by Plato, Aristotle and in the
Hippocratic Corpus^12 that as early as the fifth centurybcedoctors and nat-
ural philosophers disagreed on the question which bodily factors (organs,
tissues or substances) played the most important part in performing facul-
ties we would call ‘psychic’ or ‘mental’. These include thinking, perception,
feeling, remembering, and so on. Secondary literature on this issue usually
distinguishes between the encephalocentric, cardiocentric and haematocen-
tric view on the seat of the mind.^13 The encephalocentric view was allegedly
(^12) Plato,Phaedo 96 b; Aristotle,Metaph. 1013 a 4 ff. and 1035 b 25 ff.; [Hippocrates],On the Sacred
Disease 17 ( 6. 392 L.).
(^13) See, among others, Manuli and Vegetti ( 1977 ). A selection from the extensive range of literature
on this subject: Bidez and Leboucq ( 1944 ); Byl ( 1968 ); Di Benedetto ( 1986 ) 35 – 69 ; Duminil ( 1983 );
Gundert ( 2000 ); Hankinson ( 1991 b); Harris ( 1973 ); Manuli ( 1977 ); Pigeaud ( 1981 b) 72 ; Pigeaud
( 1980 ); Pigeaud ( 1987 ); Revesz ( 1917 ); Rusche ( ̈ 1930 ); B. Simon ( 1978 ); P. N. Singer ( 1992 ).