Plato’s Medicalisation of Ethics

Abstract

I argue for the view that the scientific model which Plato consistently had in mind when sharpening his main ethical theory was medicine. Moreover, I ascribe to Plato a “medical model of ethics”. A careful examination of this model reveals how Plato appropriates several medical concepts and ideas by employing two central methodological devices in his thought: dialectical transposition and analogical characterisation. In discussing them, I identify different kinds of medical references in the dialogues –not all medical references in Plato have the same methodological status– and draw greater attention to the most recurrent medical analogies in them. More generally, the paper is also meant to provide a case study of the complex relationship between medicine and philosophy in Antiquity by examining in a new light the various ways in which the former served as an epistemological and ethical model for the latter.

The nature of justice in the perspective of the philosophy of science

“…Plato divides virtue into the following classifications a) wisdom or wisdom; b) courage or determination; c) discipline; as well as justice. [3] Referring to the nature of Plato's concept of justice, Ulpianus emphasized the notion of justice as an acknowledgment of what is a person's rights based on rights that must be received in accordance with what should be received. This is a concept of justice based on rights that must be received to those who really really deserve it.…”

“…Central to Plato's philosophy was his doctrine of the world of ideas, which bears deep characteristics. [3]Plato distinguishes between the real, visible world that can be captured through the senses called reality. The reality of life can be sensed by every creature created by God, but on the other hand Plato states that there is a world that cannot be sensed by humans, namely the world of ideas or is a mirage of the indigent nature that is and cannot be sensed by humans.…”

Soul as Principle in Plato’s Charmides: A Reading of Plato’s Anthropological Ontology Based on Hermias Alexandrinus on Plato’s Phaedrus

“…Then, in turn, he converts this tendency for the medicalization of philosophy into a zeal for the philosophicalization of medicine and human treatment, as well as the establishment of a moral anthropology 8 , cf. [13], see also [16]. In involving himself in a dialectic with the doctors and Zalmoxian holistic medicine, Socrates does not merely appear as a physician of the soul but rather introduces an authoritative philosophical medicine which gives rise to a new anthropological ontology.…”

“…In his view, instead of a direct or explicit interest for-and epistemological speculation about-the cognitive functions of soul, in the course of the development of an implied analogy between body and soul which was activated by the interaction between medicine and philosophy, and within the frame of naturalistic approaches to the ψυχή, rationalistic ideas about the body and its nature were transferred to the soul. From this perspective, interest in the significance of the soul for the psychosomatic man did not emerge from a growing tendency for its separation from the body, but from a purpose dictated by both scientific or philosophizing medicine and medicalized philosophy or iatrophilosophy: therapy aimed emphatically at the whole man and could be effective only as part of a holistic conception of health (see [16]). Claus stresses that the reason for which the soul acquires moral and personal connotations within this frame of thought is precisely the fact that it is regarded as the psychosomatic φύσις of man, which is amenable to therapy.…”

“…[17,19,33,34]. If the body is a part of the soul considered as a whole and their relationship is that of a biological interrelation, then the soul becomes a substance which differs from the body only from the perspective of its wholeness, namely, only quantitatively and not ontologically; hence, it is not incorporeal 16 [34]. Nonetheless, a considerable number of scholars also believe that conceiving of the soul as the whole in Chrm.…”