ALCMAEON THE PHILOSOPHER

Science and philosophy being virtually indistinguishable among the ancients, it was unavoidable for me to write about Alcmaeon the philosopher in the previous entry, ostensibly on Alcmaeon the physician. Before I proceed with an academic summary of Alcmaeon’s philosophical achievements, let me reiterate a couple of points made earlier. Concerning Alcmaeon being a pupil of Pythagoras, this used to be the established view although Aristotle writes about certain major differences between him and the Pythagoreans, without going into the specifics of these differences. In my opinion, the latter is not an argument against the premise, as a pupil does not have to follow the course set by his teacher, and besides, their relationship may have been no more than a brief association. But then, of course, the argument for the premise is not much of an argument either. Chronology is of course a fairly compelling factor, because in those times, and even millennia later, it was a small world for prodigies seeking each other. In my view, there is also a slight whiff of connection between Pythagoras’s partiality to animals (linked to his belief in metempsychosis), and Alcmaeon’s theory regarding the animal soul.

The other point is Alcmaeon’s epistemology coming in full gear out of his medical science, like Athena out of Zeus’s head at birth. It is impossible to call him a scientist, a physician, a surgeon or whatever else while denying him the credentials of a bona fide philosopher tackling the problem of human cognition well ahead of his time.

Having thus said what I wanted to say on this subject, I shall end this entry with a short abbreviated passage on Alcmaeon from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy:

Alcmaeon has been somewhat neglected in the recent scholarship on early Greek philosophy. There may be several reasons for this neglect. First, what remains of Alcmaeon’s book has little to say on the metaphysical questions about the first principles of the cosmos, and about being, which have dominated recent scholarship on the Pre-Socratics. Secondly, doubts about his date, and about the focus of his investigations have made it difficult to place him in the development of the early Greek thought. Finally a more accurate appreciation of his use of dissection has deflated some of the hyperbolic claims in earlier studies, regarding his originality. The extent of his originality and the importance of his influence depend, to a large degree, on his dating. An extremely late dating for his activity after 450 BC makes him appear to espouse the typical views of his age, rather than to break entirely new ground. If he was active in the early fifth century, his views are much more original. That Aristotle devoted a separate treatise to respond to Alcmaeon argues in favor of his originality. He should, probably, be regarded as a pioneer in applying a political metaphor to the balance of opposites, constituting the healthy human body. The range of his work in biology is remarkable for the early fifth century, and sets the agenda for his successors. It is sometimes said that his conception of poroi (channels), which connect the sense organs to the brain, influenced the Empedoclean theory of poroi, but the theories may share no more than their name. In Empedocles, all materials have pores in them, which determine whether they mix well with other objects. Sense organs also have pores, but these function not to connect the sense organ to the seat of intelligence which for Empedocles is the heart but to determine whether the sense organ can receive the effluences that are poured forth by external objects. Alcmaeon’s influence was significant in three final ways:

1. His identification of the brain as the seat of human intelligence may have been an influence on Philolaus, on the Hippocratic Treatise On the Sacred Disease, and on Plato’s Timaeus-44d, even though a number of thinkers, including Empedocles and Aristotle, would continue to regard the heart as the seat of perception and intelligence.

2. His empiricist epistemology may be behind the important passages in Plato’s Phaedo-96b and Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics-100a.

3. He developed the first argument for the immortality of the soul, that influenced Plato’s similar argument in the Phaedrus-245c ff.

I believe that the content of my two Alcmaeonic entries has convinced the reader that this great pre-Socratic has been unfairly treated by collective historical memory of humanity, and I hope that by writing about him here, I have done him some justice, which is long past due.