Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Note on Transliterations and Translations -- INTRODUCTION -- Symptoms and Subjects -- Seeing through Symptoms -- The Physical Imagination -- Rethinking Sma and Psukh -- Telling Stories -- CHAPTER ONE: Before the Physical Body -- Daemonic Violence -- The Seen and the Felt -- The Boundaries of the Felt -- Fear and the Visual Field of the Self -- How Gods Act -- The Seen Body and Social Agency -- Interpreting Disease and Practices of Healing -- CHAPTER TWO: The Inquiry into Nature and the Physical Imagination -- Depersonalizing Causes -- Natural Justice -- Melissus and the Denial of Bod -- A Community of Objects -- Bodies, Persons, Knowledge -- CHAPTER THREE: Incorporating the Daemonic -- Symptoms at the Threshold of Seen and Unseen -- The Interval -- Explaining Disease -- The Dynamics of the Cavity -- The Automatic Body -- CHAPTER FOUR: Signs of Life and Techniques of Taking Care -- The Prognostic Symptom: Forces of Life and Death -- Fragile Life -- On Ancient Medicine and the Discovery of Human Nature -- Embodiment, Knowledge, and Technical Agency -- Taking Care -- Shoring up the Self -- CHAPTER FIVE: Beyond the Sma -- Bodily Needs -- Psychic Desires -- Gorgias's Encomium to Helen and Human Diseases -- Psychic Disorder in Democritus -- CHAPTER SIX: Forces of Nature, Acts of Gods -- The Polysemy of the Symptom -- Tragedy and the Interval -- Euripides' Causes: The Madness of Heracles -- Euripides' Causes: The Madness of Orestes -- Realizing Disease in the Hippolytus -- Daemonic Phusis -- The Semantics of Suffering -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index Locorum -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- G -- H -- I -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- S -- T -- V -- X -- General Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- X -- Z.
The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (sôma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature. By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances hidden inside the person. Imagining a daemonic space inside the person but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of the self. The Symptom and the Subject highlights with fresh importance how classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential ways of thinking about the human subject
