Free and open to the public; please register at https://myumi.ch/51r2p

IISS is pleased to announce our first book workshop of the semester with Prof. Aileen Das on her most recent book, Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus. This fascinating monograph is the first full-length study of the Arabic reception of Plato’s Timaeus. It considers the role of Galen of Pergamum (129–c. 216 CE) in shaping medieval perceptions of the text as transgressing disciplinary norms. It argues that Galen appealed to the entangled cosmological scheme of the dialogue, where different relations connect the body, soul, and cosmos, to expand the boundaries of medicine in his pursuit of epistemic authority – the right to define and explain natural reality. Prof. Aileen Das situates Galen’s work on disciplinary boundaries in the context of medicine’s ancient rivalry with philosophy, whose professionals were long seen as possessing superior knowledge of the cosmos vis-à-vis that of doctors. Her case studies show how Galen and four of the most important Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers in the Arabic Middle Ages creatively interpreted key doctrines from the Timaeus to reimagine medicine and philosophy as well as their own intellectual identities.