Movers And Shakers Flashcards
Plato
- Realm of forms or ideas = perfect
- Material realm = imperfect
Through our senses (by observing the world)
Observation equals bad our senses deceive us
Best way to gain knowledge is there a reason
Demiurge - Earth, water, air, fire (platonic solids)
Aristotle (384 - 322 BCE)
Student at Plato’s Academy in Athens
Tutored Alexander the Great
Rejected Plato’s theory of forms no perfect dog
Objects have property (color, texture, weight) and individual substrate (form and matter)
Senses are important (observation and empiricism – a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience)
For causes to understand change your production of something
- formal cause: form of a thing
- Material cause: stuff it’s made of
- Efficient Cause: the agency that causes change
- Final cause: purpose fulfilled by change
Not a materialist
Believes in no beginning, Eternal, sphere, quintessence, four elements, and two pairs of qualities (hot – cold/wet – dry)
Claudius Ptolemy
Worked in the museum of Alexandria – library
Wrote the Almagest: an astronomical and mathematical treatise that put forth a powerful model for explaining and predicting the movement of the planets and stars – geocentric
- Eccentric model
- The epicycle on deferent model
- The equant model
Uniform circular – sweeping out equal angles in equal time – but not viewed from the centre of the earth
Mathematical simplicity – uniform circular motion and the power of production
Hypatia
Neo-platonic philosopher
Taught philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics
I edited Ptolemy’s Almagest
Killed by a Christian mob
Head of the Neoplatonist School
Hippocrates
Hippocratic Corpus around 70 treatises on disease – turned medicine
Medicine equals branch of natural philosophy
Hippocratic oath
Body has four humours – refer to diagram
Four temperaments – phlegmatic, sanguine, melancholic, choleric
Disease is an in balance in the body, imbalance of humorist
The 6 non naturals
Air, food and drink, sleep and waking, movement and rest, retention and evacuation, emotions and passions of the soul
Galen of Pergamum (129-210 CE)
Studied in various Greek cities including Alexandria
“Best doctor was the philosopher”
Emphasis on both theory and practice
Classification of disease
Anatomy and dissection is important
Serve disposition to gladiators then many emperors
Lucretius (99BCE - 55 BCE)
On the nature of things (De Rerum Natura)
Very long philosophical poem – Epicureanism
Atomic materialism like Democritus
(Democritus: world made up of different kinds of moving, indivisible Adams with void in between them)
poet and philosopher
Infinite universe made of matter and void
Offers a path to happiness
Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE)
Natural history (enormous encyclopedia)
Wrote books on history and grammar – covered anthropology, cosmology, astronomy, geography, zoology, botany, etc.
Dioscorides (40-90 CE)
Roman position of Greek origin
Materia Medica - body of collected knowledge
Pharmacopeia - drug making
Nasir al-Dim al-Tusi
Under patronage of mongolian ruler
Built observatory in Maragha
New models of lunar motion
Purpose, to get rid of the equant
Tusi-couplet (see diagram)
Al-Razi (841-926)
Practised medicine in hospital in Baghdad
Critical of some aspects of Galen
Defended atomism
Differentiated smallpox from measles
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
Persian scholar
Mastered works by Aristotle, Ptolemy and Islamic literature
Wrote hundreds of treatises – box of healing (an encyclopedia: astronomy, natural philosophy, math, and logic)
Wrote the canon of medicine finished in 1025 Five books Huge synthesis of medical knowledge Heavily borrowed from Galen
John Buridan
Influential philosopher and: taught at the University of Paris
The theory of impetus: to explain projectile motion – impetus as the cause of motion
Relative motion: the celestial sphere on earth could move daily
Nicolause Copernicus (1473 to 1543)
Studied at the University of Kraków (center of humanism)
Had some medical knowledge
Worked as Canon at the Cathedral of Fraunberg
Mainly a theorist
Wrote the pamphlet Conentariolus - Little commentary: heliocentric ideas
George Rheticus came to visit and convinced him to publish
On the revolutions of the celestial sphere’s (1543)
Heliocentric model
Earth moves around its axis and around the sun
Moon moves around the earth
Explains retrograde motion and bounded elongation (the tendency of inferior planets to be close to the sun)
Did not explain: stellar parallax (observing the star in different locations during the year), moving objects on earth, the moon (if everything is meant to move around the sun then why is the moon moving around the earth?)
Vesalius (1514-1564)
On the Fabric of the Human Body 1543
- Renaissance anatomy
- Renaissance humanism
Born in Brussels
Studied medicine in Paris
Human dissections (on criminals)
Raided graves to get new bodies
Eventually became barber surgeon
Cover page of book pays homage as: classical setting, Galen, Aristotle
“Knowing your body, which is the perfect work of the ultimate craftsman and the house of the soul, – celebrating the work of the creator” – know thyself (Plato)
- Says that medicine has declined since antiquity (typical humanist argument)
- Anatomy as a branch of natural philosophy should be restored to its past glory
- Be a professor and a surgeon you have to see for yourself
- It’s true that Galen made mistakes but even he often corrects himself and Galen never dissected humans
