This chapter develops a theory of Homeric creativity that is informed by both contemporary cognitive studies and by ancient ideas about poetic craft and divine inspiration, as seen through the lenses of archaic poetry and Plato’s Ion. Sections 1-2 survey the conceptions of the poet as a craftsman vs. divinely inspired in Homer, Hesiod, Archilochus, Pindar, Democritus, and Plato. Section 3 introduces the modern study of creativity in the field of cognitive psychology, the study of jazz improvisation, and the concept of flow. Section 4 introduces the neuroscience of improvisation, including recent fMRI studies on jazz and lyric improvisation. The results of these studies (pointing to a state of hypofrontality when carrying out complex improvisational tasks) are compatible with some ancient ideas on creativity and inspiration (such as the idea that an external source - like the Muses- might be involved in these creative acts).

This chapter proposes that the myths of Hephaistos, the ancient Greek god of metalwork and the only physically impaired member of the Olympic pantheon, can provide insights into ancient inspirations for and understandings of assistive technology. It explores the range of different types of assistive technology that impaired and disabled individuals used in classical antiquity to facilitate their physical mobility, covering staffs, sticks, crutches, corrective footwear, extremity prostheses, conveyances, equids, bearers, and caregivers. It notes the frequent association of impairment and technology in classical antiquity. It argues for a reassessment of the suitability of the Medical Model for use in relation to impairment and disability in classical antiquity under certain circumstances.

Chapter 4 presents the epoch of technē, which is marked by the play of the fickleness of nature, luck (tuchē) and the fragility of early human stratagems. Technē is both a means of controlling the world, as well as one of violence. Indicated by humble and pre-scientific inventions such as the almanack, they allow little gains to be wrest from an otherwise unforgiving surround by knowing when to sow or harvest in accordance with the almanack’s alignment of experiential, mythical and cosmological clues. The epoch of technē is characterized by an intimacy between humans and their surroundings, the term planning itself finding its roots in the way in which seedlings are pushed into the ground by a farmer’s foot. But there is also violence; both imposed on the human body, whose shape is bent and twisted, ground down and severed by the acts of labour and the growing numbers of devices that extend human reach; as well upon nature, which becomes a place in need of taming and cultivating; cutting, slicing, ploughing, killing and using.

This chapter uses three secondhand reports (the testimonies on Petron and Philistion in the Anonymus Londiniensis, the speech of Eryximachus in Plato’s Symposium, and the treatise On Ancient Medicine) to point out that an interest in cosmological principles does not preclude more traditional explanations of health and disease. Petron, Philistion, and Eryximachus all combine their first principles with lower-level discussions of the humors, pneuma, and the “powers” of food and drink. Instead of replacing humors with cosmic principles, these doctors constructed multitiered narratives of pathogenesis, placing humors and cosmic principles at different points in the causal chain. After making this point, this chapter then demonstrates that the polemical On Ancient Medicine is an unreliable witness to what the cosmological doctors were doing. Whereas the author of this text claims that the prioritizing of such principles as the hot and the cold is incompatible with the attribution of diseases to the humors, the cosmological doctors were in fact more than comfortable with combining first principles with more traditional beliefs about the body.

This chapter argues that the cosmological doctors arose as the result of a much wider realignment in Classical Greek medicine. As some doctors grew increasingly concerned about the many variables that can change from one case to the next, they rejected older forms of diagnostic handbooks in favor of new methods for organizing medical knowledge. We see this anxiety over individual differences not only in the works of the cosmological doctors but also in texts such as On Regimen in Acute Diseases, Prognostic, Airs Waters Places, and the seven books of Epidemics. In all of these texts, medical inquiry is defined, quite generally, as a search for commonalities. Doctors in this period were gathering together multiple accounts, noting the similarities and differences between those accounts, and isolating high-level generalizations that can unite and govern them all. Although the cosmological doctors took their search for commonalities farther than some of their contemporaries might have been willing to follow, they nevertheless responded to the same pressures that transformed nearly all the medical literature that survives from this period.

I describes four kinds of knowledge and associate each with distinctive projects. What we generally refer to as positivist IR aspires to what Aristotle calls episteme: scientific knowledge that can be expressed mathematically. Interpretivist approaches aspire to phroēesis, which is best understood as practical knowledge that helps us cope with the world. This distinction cuts across paradigms and is a far more fundamental division.

Gadamer saw hermeneutics as heir to the tradition of Aristotelian practical philosophy. The exercise of phronesis, good practical judgment, helps sustain the solidarities upon which democracy depends. Phronesis is distinguished from techne, technical knowledge. Gadamer is critical of technocratic thinking. Phronesis is closely related to ethos. It has communal dimensions such that it invigorates the ethos of the society and makes possible solidarity. The basis for this is friendship. Friendship involves a life together of reciprocal co-perception.

Cormac McCarthy’s interest in science and association with the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute is well remarked. Scholars less regularly explore how scientific theories inform his work, with critics more often noting his generally negative figuration of advanced technologies. On April 20, 2107, after decades of publishing only fiction, plays, and screenplays, McCarthy contributed an essay on linguistics, dream, and the unconscious to the online science journal Nautilus. “The Kekule Problem” occasioned notable critical reactions online, with McCarthy responding in a second essay. This chapter considers these essays while providing an overview of the influence of science and technology on his creative work. McCarthy’s interest in scientific theories promises rich territory for future scholarship, particularly to complement attention to dreams and to figurations of technology. Ultimately, McCarthy’s speculation on lingusitics proves less valuable to that field, of course, than as insights into his own writing process. Open scientific inquiry and speculation run alongside the power of dreams and tecnological skepticism throughout his creative work.

Here, the authors present two justifications usually cited as sufficient to warrant patients‘ trust in physicians: professional status and individual merit. Whereas in ‘status trust’ professionalism is taken as a guarantor of trustworthiness, in ‘merit trust’ a physician’s trustworthiness is assessed individually. On either account, trust is justified by the physician’s professionalism. ‘Professionalism’ may be defined as ‘acting trustworthily’ in exchange for autonomy of decision-making, whereas trustworthiness refers to ‘competence’ in terms of episteme (theoretical knowledge), techne (craft or skill), and phronesis (practical knowledge or experience), and ‘commitment’ as ‘to act in a way that the truster approves’. The authors argue that although in principle trust in physicians is justified, since both professionalism and individually assessed trustworthiness grant derivative authority, the reality is different. because an increasing number of patients reject the concept of professionalism and, accordingly, find it difficult (or even impossible) to assess physicians’ trustworthiness. Hence, they no longer believe that their trust in physicians is justified.