![]() ![]() ![]() This paper assembles, up to the time of the Stoics, one part of the history of such a cause: what is called 'the synechon' (τὸ συνέχον): that which holds things together. Many earlier thinkers offer their own candidates for what actively binds parts together, with differing implications not only for why we are wholes rather than heaps, but also why our bodies inevitably become diseased and fall apart. They refer to it as the synectic cause (αἴτιον συνεκτικόν), a term variously translated as 'cohesive cause,' 'containing cause' or 'sustaining cause.' The Stoics, however, are neither the first nor the only thinkers to raise this question or to propose a single answer. This paper is about the history of a question in ancient Greek philosophy and medicine: what holds the parts of a whole together? The idea that there is a single cause responsible for cohesion is usually associated with the Stoics. Heraclitus may have mentioned ἰσονομία in his cosmological historiosophy: the change of political regimes is detrermined by the rotation of power of the 4 cosmic masses (Fire, Prester = Winter Stormwind, Sea and Earth corresponding to the Hot, the Cold, The Wet and the Dry, four cosmic forces which dominate in turn both at the tropai of the astronomical year and the tropai of Megas Eniautos) that causes cyclical alternation of the period of Want characterized by the "wetness" of souls and democratic "madness of cowds" and the period of Abundance of fire when the souls become dry and the "insane" rule of hoi polloi is replaced by the rule of "one the best". Acmaeon, Herodotus, Heraclitus and the authors of the Attic scolium to Harmodius and Aristogeiton use it independently of each other. Refutation of J.Mansfeld's attempt to doubt the authenticity of isonomia: this is an early Ionian term for moderate democracy replaced only in the second half of the 5th century by the Attic δημοκρατία, it constitues a verbatim quotation from Alcmaeon, and not a "Herodotism" in Placita, contra Mansfeld. 6) Alcmaeon B 4, Herodotus, Heraclitus and the early history of isonomia. The mention of the diaphonia of Pythagoras and Alcmaeon (aprioristic ten abstract pairs of opposites versus indefinite number of opposites perceived by the senses) thus is not accidental: it is intrinsically connected with the programmatic empiricist epistemology from which the book Alpha starts. ![]() The theoretical conflict of Alcmaeon's empiricism with the aprioristic mathematical essentialism of the Pythagoreans is viewed by Aristotle as a historical antecedent to his own debate with the Old Academy. Aristotle's "wondering" about who borrowed his theory of opposites from whom (rationalists from empiricists or vice versa) may by polemical in purpose and directed against contemporary Pythagorizing Platonists: the leitmotif of Metaphysics Alpha is that most philosophers in their theories of the first principles did not propose something different from one or few of the 4 principles established by Aristotle in his Physics. Alcmaeon' theory of opposites is directly linked to his theory of sensation and was conceived as empirical alternative to the Pythagorean Table of opposites which is based on rationalist epistemology and consists of mathematical and ethical concepts. 986a29-31) which supports the ealier date (c.500 B.C.) against Mansfeld's attempt to redate Alcmaeon to the second half of the 5th century B.C. A defence of the longer version of Aristotle's evidence on Alcmaeon (Metaph. 5) The date of Alcmaeon and his relation to the Pythagoreans. 4) The "seasons of life" analogy: an additional fragment of Alcmaeon from Aristotle's GA and HA. Plato in "Timaeus" remakes Alcmaeon's original biological analogy (relation of brain and senses) and adapts it to his moral psycholohy (relation of reason and emotions). 3) Alcmaeon and the origin of the akropolis/kephale analogy in Greek philosophy and medicine. 2) A new fragment of Alcmaeon from the Turba philosophorum: Locustor/Locuton in Sermo 7 is Alcmaeon (cf. Table of contents: 1) The epistemological proem of Alcmaeon's book: a new reading of fr.
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