Department of English

This graduate seminar will explore the rich and varied intellectual debates of the Classical period, using early Hippocratic texts to introduce some of the major questions that occupied contemporary thinkers. Such topics include, among others, the nature of matter and the body, the interaction of humans and environment, ‘anthropology’, empiricism, inference from signs, health and disease. We will focus on selections from the Greek texts of the Hippocratic 'Airs Waters Places', 'Nature of Man', 'Sacred Disease', 'On Ancient Medicine', and ‘Epidemics’ in their relation to other contemporary authors, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, assorted Presocratics and Sophists, and Plato.