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view, common among Stoics, that each individual had some unique property,
or essence, that remained unchanged throughout the life of the individual, and
by which, despite other radical changes, the individual could be identified.
26
Such ideas, which might have led to what we think of as a modern, relational
view of personal identity, were overshadowed in the Roman period by the
ascendancy of Neoplatonism, which through the influence primarily of
Augustine provided the framework for Christian theology from the fourth to
the thirteenth centuries.
Related to these earlier Greek materialistic atomistic philosophies, but with a
more practical focus, were the medical materialists. The earliest Greek physi-
cians, whose medical works were collectively attributed to Hippocrates, worked
under the assumption that both mental (
psyche ) and physical (
soma ) illnesses had
their basis in the physical constitution of humans ( physis ). For instance,
Hippocrates’
On the Sacred Disease
begins: “It [epilepsy] appears to me to be nowise
more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from
which it originates like other affections.” He goes on to describe the similarity of
this “sacred” disease with other maladies involving insanity, after which he
explains why some forms of mental illness are said to be sacred: “They who first
referred this malady to the gods appear to me to have been just such persons as
the conjurors, purificators, mountebanks, and charlatans now are, who give
themselves out for being excessively religious, and as knowing more than other
people.” These people, he continued, use “divinity as a pretext and screen” for
their own ignorance. Hippocrates’ own view was that “the brain,” which is “the
primary seat of sense and of the spirits” and “perceives whatever occurs in
the body,” is “the cause of [these] afflictions.” Some of these disturbances affect
the brain itself and lead to mental illness. Thus, in his view, the way to treat this
illness is to treat the brain.
27
Subsequently anatomical investigations by Herophilus and Erasistratus
(c. 330-250 b.c.e.) established the role that nerves play in connecting the brain to
the rest of the body. This discovery, apparently, had a great impact on Epicurean
and Stoic philosophers of the time, including physicians, since it provided a clear
means of explaining in a physical way how mind and body might interact. If the
brain were the seat of the mind and could communicate through the nerves to
the rest of the body, the activities of the body could be known. The body, then,
would not require an immaterial mind that operates, in some unknowable
fashion, on all parts of the body. Instead, the mind itself could be some kind of
“spiritual matter” (pneuma) of a thin and rapidly moving sort. It could have the
brain as its center but through the nerves grow tendrils to the rest of the body
and in this way both feel and control distant parts of the body.
28