Among Medicine, Physics and Psychology. Krasis and Mixis in Galens’s Thought

This research project to conducts on Galen’s corpus an investigation of the occurrences of terms pertaining to families of κεράννυμι and μείγνυμι and to read and analyse them in order to find out the relations between Galen and his philosophical background, with reference to Aristotle’s remarks on the topic and the Peripatetic tradition, to the doctrines of the Stoics and to the reflections of Alexander of Aphrodisias, whose Demixtione seems to be fundamental to understand the debate on this theme flourished by Galen’s time. This research allows to recognize the semantic evolutions in Galen’s thought of the terms κρᾶσις and μίξις, and in these terms it can be regarded as a contribution to the study of the philosophical lexicon concerning ancient physical theories of the matter and the philosophical and medical aspects connected to them. Through this investigation it is also possible to understand Galen’s theories of mixtures in context, in order to shed some light on the relations between Galen and the contemporary philosophical debate on the topic.