HISTNEUR-L: The History of Neuroscience Internet Forum

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Re: Ventricular Doctrine 

On Sun, 22 Feb 1998, Solidarity Foundation wrote:

> I don't think it requires hubris to challenege Clarke and Dewhurst's
> statement. The dynamic causal analysis of cognition given by Nememsius
> had been known since Aristotle, if not earlier, but was discussed
> either independtly of any particular organic embodiment, or in a
> general way with reference to EITHER the heart (Aristotle, earlier
> Stoics) or the brain (Platonists, Hippocratics, Galenists).

Sun, 22 Feb 1998 12:01:23 -0500, Christopher D. Green wrote:

This claim puzzles me. Where, precisely, does Aristotle advance a
*psychological* ventricular theory with respect to the heart? He
occasionally wrote that anger is a heating of blood aroud the heart, but I
don't recall the claim that different chambers of the heart are
responsible for different functions, and exchange their results among each
other (which is what I suppose a dynamic cardiac-ventricular theory would
have to claim.
_________________

I'm afraid we are talking at cross-purposes. Robinson had asked, "Was
Nemesius' dynamic element ignored for 500 years?" My point was that the
"dynamic element" in the theory of cognition had already been worked
out a long time earlier, irrespective of whatever organic theory was or
was not associated with it. 

I never meant to imply that Aristotle specifically advanced a *psychological*
ventricular theory with respect to the heart. But he did have a dynamic
theory of cognition, and he did believe the cognitive faculties were
seated in the heart.

Incidentally, in your list of passages from Aristotle, you did not cite the
work which I think is among the most rleevant to the question, namely
Aristotle's De Generatione Animalium v.2 (781a21-30; cf. 776b12-19,
786b7-23, 787b6-788a16), which has to do with the generation of speech
from the heart, a theory that was followed by the earlier Stoics through
Chrysuppus (sorry, Chrysippus), and still held by most Stoics in Galen's
time.

I don't think Aristotle's theory of cognition, with the faculties seated
in the heart, has anything to do with the ventricles of the heart.

In your message of Wed, 18 Feb 1998 09:51:46 -0500,you wrote, "Higher cognitive
functions were often thought to have some immaterial basis...
Thus, "anatomical justifications" would have seemed
beside the point.

I agree, and I think that's why Aristotle didn't work this out. For
him, the "lower" aspects of internal sense functions were part of the
external senses themselves, and the higher aspects were immaterial but
"seated" in the heart.

[My server has warned of an imminent shutoff, so I may not be able to
finish this.]

Jeffrey Wollock
<HISTNEUR-L@library.ucla.edu>