Substance, Element, Quality, Mixture: Galen’s Physics and His Hippocratic Inheritance

Abstract

Galen insists that Hippocrates, in Nature of Man, adopts and argues for a physics in which not only the four fundamental qualities, hot, cold, dry and wet, but also the four basic elements, are taken to be fundamental to the constitution of all material things. He does so because he thinks that such a physics is in fact the right one. The main purpose of this paper is to examine why Galen thinks that not only the fundamental qualities, and a material stuff for them to be instantiated in, is conceptually required for any adequate physics, but also why a commitment to actual elements, conceived of as those material bodies which most fully instantiated the causally basic qualities, is also required. I examine the sources of Galen’s views on material interaction as they derive from their Aristotelian (and to a lesser extent Stoic) forebears, and conclude, ultimately, that Galen’s claim that precise conceptual analysis demands the postulation of actual elements, conceived as the bodies which maximally instantiate the four fundamental qualities, even though no such pure element is ever actually distilled, is in fact unwarranted.

Keywords

• substance
• element
• quality
• mixture
• matter
• form