Elisaveta Shcherbakova, "The Paths of the Soul in the Pseudo-Hippocratic De victu", in: Chiara Ferella and Cilliers Breytenbach (Eds.), Paths of Knowledge. Interconnection(s) between Knowledge and Journey in the Greco-Roman World, Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2018, 75–91

Abstract

In my paper I propose a new interpretation of a notoriously difficult passage from the Pseudo-Hippocratic treatise De victu, which deals with the activities of the soul during sleep. The passage in question has been interpreted by many scholars as a kind of Orphico-Pythagorean journey of the soul, and thus as key evidence for body-soul dualism in De victu. However, as I attempt to demonstrate, the soul does indeed take a journey, but not a Pythagorean one: in my reading of the text, it travels from the periphery deeper inside the body, to a place the author calls the “oikos of the soul”. I argue that this oikos best correspondsto a kind of ‘cognitive center’, located in the chest and/or heart-region. This type of soul-journey points not to a dualist but to a materialist interpretation of De victu’s psychology. Further, I argue that overall the treatise is closer to the materialist psychophysiology of such fifth century Presocratics as Diogenes of Apollonia.

Published In

Chiara Ferella and Cilliers Breytenbach (Eds.), Paths of Knowledge. Interconnection(s) between Knowledge and Journey in the Greco-Roman World, Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2018