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Pain is one of the most crucial phenomena of human and animal life. There is also a problem of rational interpretation and evaluation of pain. What is pain? How we experience it? How it influences our life? These questions can be asked in different contexts, e.g. medicine, social sciences, philosophy, religion, etc. The aim of this seminar is to focus on how the problem of pain was treated in two traditions of thinking in Antiquity: in classical philosophy and in Hippocratic medicine.
Plato, Aristotle, and Hippocrates represent three eminent authorities in the ancient intellectual world, Plato and Aristotle in philosophy, Hippocrates in medicine. Their influence is still present in our contemporary thinking. Thus, we will address philosophical approaches to pain in Plato and Aristotle and medical ones in Hippocrates. All three of them addressed the problem of pain and proposed answers to it. The aim of our seminar is to explore these answers, to see their roots in the philosophical and scientific systems of the given authors, and, finally, to see differences and similarities between them. Thus, the main goal of the seminar is to see how the understanding of the problem of pain differed from the point of view of philosophy and of medicine, and how these different perspectives influenced the particular answers on questions connected to pain. Last update: Linka Vojtěch, Mgr., Ph.D. (21.01.2021)
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Oral presentation of a primary or secondary text and an essay (5 pages) Last update: Linka Vojtěch, Mgr., Ph.D. (21.01.2021)
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Questions and problems connected to pain will be explored in the following manner. In preparation for every session, students will read a short primary and/or secondary text connected to the actual topic. Once a semester, every student will have to prepare a short summary of one text and present it in the session. For the final evaluation, students will write a short essay connected to a topic discussed during the semester. The sessions throughout the semester will be divided into five groups: 1) The problem of pain in antiquity – introduction (two sessions), 2) Hippocrates on pain (three sessions), 3) Plato on pain (two sessions), 4) Aristotle on pain (three sessions), 5) Pain between philosophy and medicine (two sessions).
1. Session: Seminar introduction, a general discussion about pain Reference text: Definition of pain (International Association for the study of pain, https://www.iasp-pain.org/PublicationsNews/NewsDetail.aspx?ItemNumber=10475). 2. Session: Pain in antiquity Reference texts: Rey (1995), The history of pain (pp. 10-23); Harris (2018), Pain and Medicine in the Classical World (pp. 55-66), Sophocles, Philoctetes (parts) 3. Session: Hippocrates on Pain I: theoretical writings Reference texts: Hippocrates, The Nature of men (parts), Ancient medicine (parts), On Regimen (parts) 4. Session: Hippocrates on Pain II: practical writings Reference texts: Hippocrates, Places in man 42, On fractures (parts), Epidemics (parts), Coan praenotions (1-100, 150-200, Loeb pp. 109-127 139-151), Nature of women (1-7, Loeb pp. 193-207) 5. Session: Hippocrates on Pain III: Contemporary discussion Reference texts: Horden (1999), Pain in Hippocratic Medicine; King (1999), Chronic Pain and the Creation of Narrative; King (2001), What does medicine mean? The pain of being human 6. Session: Plato on Pain I. The birth of the ethical problem of pain Reference texts: Plato, Gorgias 491e-499e; Philebus 31a-33c, 44a-45e, 51a-53c, 60a-e 7. Session: Plato on Pain II. Place of pain in Plato’s ethical theory Reference text: Republic 583b-584d; Phaedo 65a-c, 68e–69e, 83c-84b 8. Session: Aristotle on Pain I. Aristotle’s ethics and pain Reference texts: Nicomachean ethics I. Politics I.1-2, 1253a7-18; Cheng (2018), Aristotle’s vocabulary of pain 9. Session: Aristotle on Pain II. Place of pain in Aristotle’s ethical theory: pain and pleasure Reference texts: Nicomachean ethics VII. 11-14; Taylor (2008), Pleasure: Aristotle’s Response to Plato. 10. Session: Aristotle on Pain III. Pain, activity, and Eudaimonia Reference text: Nicomachean ethics X. 1-5. Frede (2016), Pleasure and Pain in Aristotle’s Ethics. 11. Session: Ethical and/versus physiological approach to pain. Formulating the philosophical and medical positions of the discussed texts. Critical evaluation of these positions. Discussion. 12. Session: Broader context of pain in antiquity. Reference texts: The history of pain (pp. 24-43), Harris (2018), Pain and Medicine in the Classical World (pp. 66-82)
Bibliography Primary: Plato, Complete Works. John M. Cooper, D. S. Hutchinson (eds.), 1997. Barnes, J., The Complete Works of Aristotle: The revised Oxford translation. Princeton, 1984 Jones, W.H.S., Potter, P., and Smith, W. Hippocrates. Loeb edition, 10 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1923-2012.
Secondary: Aydede M. Pain. 2005. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = Budelmann F. “The Reception of Sophocles’ Representation of Physical Pain”, AJPh 128, 2007, 443–467. Craik, The ‘Hippocratic’ corpus. Content and Context. Routledge 2015 Cheng, W., “Aristotle’s vocabulary of pain”. Philologus. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/phil-2018-0008 Frede D., Pleasure and Pain in Aristotle’s Ethics, in R. Kraut (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Blackwell Publishing, 2016. Harris W., Pain and Medicine in the Classical World. In W. Harris, (ed.) Pleasure and Pain in Classical times, 2018. Konstan (2018), On grief and pain. Harris (2018), Pain and Medicine in the Classical World. Millot (2018), Must We Suffer in Order to Stay Healthy Pleasure and Pain in Ancient Medical Literature. Mann (2018), Pleasure, Pain, and the Unity of the Soul in Plato’s Protagoras. Horden, P. “Pain in Hippocratic Medicine”, in J. R. Hinnells/R. Porter (eds.), Religion, Health and Suffering, London 1999, 295–315. King, D., Experiencing Pain in Imperial Greek Culture. Oxford University Press, 2018. King, H., “Chronic Pain and the Creation of Narrative,” in Porter, J., ed., Constructions of the Classical Body. Ann Arbor, 1999, 269-286. Rey, R., The History of Pain. Harvard University Press, 1995. Scullin, Sarah E., Hippocratic Pain. Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2012. Taylor C.C.W., Pleasure: Aristotle’s Response to Plato, in Taylor, C.C.W., Pleasure, Mind, and Soul. Selected Papers in Ancient Philosophy, 2008. Wilson, N. “The Semantics of Pain in Greco-Roman Antiquity”, in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2013.
Last update: Linka Vojtěch, Mgr., Ph.D. (10.04.2021)
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