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SUMMARY:The Rejection of Magic in Early Greek and Chinese Medicine - Arthu
 r Harris\, History and Philosophy of Science
DTSTART:20240305T183000Z
DTEND:20240305T193000Z
UID:TALK208144@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Stefanie Ullmann
DESCRIPTION:Explicit\, general criticism of magic is one of the distinctiv
 e features of early Greek thought. The Hippocratic text On the Sacred Dise
 ase launches an attack against all purifiers and any attribution of the so
 -called sacred disease to divine intervention. The author goes on to insis
 t that every disease has a nature (phusis) and a natural cause. Early Chin
 ese physicians did not write polemics against magic or codify standards of
  causal explanation. Nevertheless\, by the second century BCE\, a group of
  elite physicians\, basing their practice on vessel theory\, developed a p
 oint of view from which they regarded traditional attributions of illness 
 to spirits and demons as false. Demons and incantations are consistently e
 xcluded from their writings and several texts make this general rejection 
 explicit: ‘the Way is without demons and spirits’ (Suwen 25 / Taisu 19
 ). How was this possible without direct criticism? Drawing on comparative 
 evidence from ancient Greece\, China\, Egypt and Mesopotamia\, I will expl
 ore the question of how a community of investigators comes to reject magic
 .
LOCATION:Richard King room\, Darwin College
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