Aileen Das

As an intellectual historian with training in Classics, I am interested in how Greco-Roman and medieval Islamicate authors articulate categories of knowledge such as ‘medicine’, ‘philosophy’, and ‘science’. My current research examines the concept of disciplinarity, especially the ways in which boundaries are drawn between disciplines in contests for epistemic authority. My first monograph, Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge University Press, 2020; winner of the SCS 2021 Goodwin Award of Merit), looks at the polemical use of Plato’s cosmological dialogue by the Greek doctor Galen of Pergamum (d. c. 217) to contest philosophy’s exclusive right to define, describe, and explain the different domains of reality. I argue that, in so doing, Galen sets out to establish medicine as a reliable authority on not only the body but also the soul and the wider cosmos. Moreover, this study shows that Galen’s engagement with the Timaeus became a touchstone for Islamicate thinkers’ own disciplinary agendas. Two new monograph projects look at (1) 19th and early 20th-century Muslim and Jewish orientalists' invocation of a continuous link between Greece and Islam in response to their exclusion from European life and (2) the role of brevity in scientific discourse, particularly how Greek and Arabic epitomatory writings claim to compress all of the art of medicine into a few set truths.

Having published a number of articles on Greco-Roman medicine and philosophy and their reception in the pre-modern Middle East, I would be delighted to supervise graduate students interested in working on any facet of the history of medicine, science, and technology from the classical to medieval period.