The Matter of ‘Sense’, the Sense of Matter. What Does the Brain-hermēneus Perform According to On the Sacred Disease?
The Matter of ‘Sense’, the Sense of Matter. What Does the Brain-hermēneus Perform According to On the Sacred Disease?

Summary/Abstract: The Hippocratic treatise On The Sacred Disease represents a milestone in ancient medical inquiry into the physiology of sense-perception and the seat of human cognition, as it fits into the debate between the encephalo-, haemato- and cardiocentric theories and offers a medical account for the centrality of the brain in the cognitive processes. The paper addresses the functional and physiological connections established, in On the Sacred Disease’s theory of cognition, between the body and the brain, which is defined as “the hermeneus of the things coming from air”. The paper is divided into three parts: in the first, i focus on the semantic field of hermeneuein and try to determine the cognitive status of the hermeneus; in the second part, i try to determine the linguistic context in which the hermeneutic performance takes place, as well as the nature of such performance; and in the third part, i argue for a biological representation of the brain hermeneutic function as it is described in On the Sacred Disease and pose the question of the rise and the limits of a ‘material semantics’.

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