Galen Pergamum (129 CE – 200 CE) was primarily a respected medical author, but his work has had a profound impact on the philosophical discourse of his time. He was a writer of logic, ethics, and philosophy, as well as a medical scientist, and wrote on a variety of philosophical topics, especially in regards to epistemology, causation in the natural world, and philosophy of mind.
His work in the medical field had a profound impact on medieval Europe and beyond, and his philosophical work was highly respected by contemporaries. Since the Scientific Revolution, he has been largely ignored by the intellectual world, but recently he has attracted considerable scholarly attention for his work on scientific knowledge, his contribution to logic, and his discussions of ethics, moral psychology, and the mind-body relationship.
Galen was born into a distinguished family of intellectuals and socialites from the culturally Greek city of Pergamon, located in present-day Turkey. He laid great stress on his own early education in mathematics and geometry, and on his passion for logic. In the philosophical debates of the post-Hellenistic schools, Galen saw these disciplines as providing a model of secure proof that was lacking from the philosophical debates of the post-Hellenistic schools, and as an antidote to the lures of Skepticism.
At the age of fourteen, he began his formal education in philosophy. This involved attendance at the closely text-based lecture courses of professors of one or more of the four established philosophical schools: Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean: Galen mentions an adherent of each as part of his early education. At the age of sixteen, he also began his medical studies, but he continued to study philosophy concurrently.
After his father’s death, he undertook an educational journey of several years, involving periods of study in Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria, to study with the foremost medical teachers of the time. This study also involved a strong textual component. Alexandria maintained its status as a center for anatomical research and teaching, but also for scholarship on classical texts. It seems likely that Galen got a lot of his training in anatomy and in the tradition and practice of commentary on texts from his predecessors, the “Hippocratic” Corpus in particular. This became a central part of his writing and his intellectual self-positioning.
In 157 he returned to his home city, taking up an official post as doctor to the gladiators, before moving to Rome in the early 160s, where—after one more brief period back in Pergamon—he settled permanently. Galen quickly became a respected figure within the socio-intellectual elite of Rome, attracting ardent followers of philosophy in particular, including Aristotelians. He quickly became well-known as a self-promoting medical practitioner; he also gave public lectures and anatomical demonstrations in a highly competitive intellectual environment. Much of his anatomical work, as well as the inception of two great works, “The Function of the Parts of the Body” and “The Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato”, took place during this early period.
In his later years, he wrote a philosophical testament in which he gives a concise but important overview of his attitudes towards a range of philosophical questions. Galen amassed a sizable fortune, including a second home in Campania; it’s likely that he had a considerable influence on medical life at Rome, although it wasn’t until a later period that his influence was documented. Some later sources suggest that he may have been alive more than ten years after his traditional death date.
