About

Aileen Das is an Associate Professor in Classical Studies and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Warwick, obtained in 2013. Her research focuses on the reception of Greco-Roman medicine and philosophy in the medieval Islamicate world. She investigates how medieval Arabic writers engaged in medico-philosophical controversies rooted in Greco-Roman antiquity, such as debates about the sources of sensation, and how they used their ancient predecessors’ rhetoric to position themselves within the medico-philosophical tradition. Das is currently finishing a monograph titled 'Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus,' which argues that Galen of Pergamum was the first to utilize Plato’s cosmological dialogue to reimagine medicine and challenge philosophy’s exclusive epistemic authority. Her work demonstrates how medieval Arabic writings on Galen’s explanations of the Timaeus fostered new perspectives on knowledge categories like medicine and philosophy, as well as professional identities. Her ongoing projects include a second monograph, 'The Art in Brief: Time and Exegesis in Greco-Roman and Islamicate Medicine,' which explores the role of brevity in medical literature, focusing on aphorisms and summaries that construct authority through 'discourses of compression' and justify their conciseness by the authors’ need to work against deadlines. Her teaching interests encompass medieval medicine, particularly Galenism, and philosophy, including Platonic and Aristotelian receptions. She also specializes in the 'Greco-Arabic' translation movement, writing science in the medieval Islamicate world, gender and health, and pharmacology.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social Science
• Classics
• History
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Art
• Theology
• Literature
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Galen beyond Baghdad

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-06-20

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  Abstract This chapter argues that Galen gave medieval Islamicate authors an autobiographical discourse on which to draw to position themselves as more uniquely qualified than their peers and predecessors, including Galen himself, to improve their respective sciences. Focusing on individuals born outside of Baghdad, the chapter first investigates how the mathematician Ibn al-Haytham (d. 1039) and the theologian al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) appropriated Galen’s narrative about his youthful search for knowledge to distinguish Aristotelian philosophy and Sufism, rather than geometry, as the surest path to truth. The second half highlights how the doctors Ibn Riḍwān (988–1061) and al-Rāzī (d. 925) utilized Galen’s tactics of self-presentation—specifically, the link that he establishes between himself and Hippocrates and his claims of doctrinal independence—to supplant his medical authority.

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• Galen's Humanistic Medicine

  Mohr Siebeck eBooks · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

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• Een kostenverhaal zonder narratief: Het onbestemde rechtskarakter van een nieuwe strafrechtelijke maatregel

  Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) · 2021-04-12

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  In het wetsvoorstel ‘Versterking strafrechtelijke aanpak ondermijnende criminaliteit’ is een ‘maatregel kostenverhaal’ opgenomen die beoogt de kosten van de vernietiging van bepaalde gevaarlijke voorwerpen te verhalen op de veroordeelde voor het strafbare feit waarmee de inbeslagname van dat voorwerp of die voorwerpen samenhangt. Het kan best gerechtvaardigd zijn de strafrechtelijk veroordeelde te laten opdraaien voor de kosten die moeten worden gemaakt om de gevolgen van zijn handelen ongedaan te maken. Maar de juridische onderbouwing van de voorgestelde maatregel laat te wensen over: de primaire rechtsgrondslag voor de maatregel, rechtsherstel, wordt noch op coherente wijze uitgewerkt noch betrokken op het overige sanctierecht. Dat is niet alleen een theoretisch bezwaar.

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• PAUL KRAUS, RICHARD WALZER, AND GALEN'S <i>COM. TIM.</i>

  Arabic Sciences and Philosophy · 2021 · 2 citations

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  • Classics
  • Philosophy
  • Literature

  Abstract A key work for the study of pre-modern Platonism, Galen's (d. ca. 217 CE) “Synopsis of Plato's Timaeus ” ( Com. Tim. ) is served solely by an “imperfect” 1951 edition that presents for the first time the surviving Arabic text and translates it into Latin. The editors of the “Plato Arabus” series of the Corpus Platonicum , to which the edition belongs, blamed its flaws on the untimely death of Paul Kraus (1904-1944), who prepared the edition with another Jewish refugee Richard Walzer (1900-1975) around WWII. My analysis of archival sources will demonstrate that the labor on the volume was disproportionately Kraus’, whom Walzer and the Corpus Platonicum editor Raymond Klibansky (1905-2005) marginalized from the project in their attempts to secure employment in British academia as displaced Jews. I will also consider how Walzer and Klibansky re-envisioned Kraus’ plans for a Semitic corpus of Platonism to a narrower “Plato Arabus” that would align with a study of Latin Platonism (“Plato Latinus”) in which they presumed their British patrons would be more interested.

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• Galen: A Thinking Doctor in Imperial Rome by Vivian Nutton

  Aestimatio Sources and Studies in the History of Science · 2021-08-31

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  The popularity that ancient medicine and Galenic studies in particular now enjoy in anglophone scholarship is owing in no small part to the author of the monograph under review. Through his textual critical and analytic work over the past 50 years, Nutton has made the life, writings, and thought of the secondcentury ad Greek doctor Galen of Pergamum (d. ca 216) more accessible to generations of students and scholars. As Nutton admits in the introduction, the present book has the apologetic aim of defending his careerlong interest in Galen against critics who might view Galen’s obsolete medical theories and practices as evidence of a lack of intellectual worth. Reviewed by: Aileen R. Das, Published Online (2021-08-31)Copyright © 2021 by Aileen R. DasThis open access publication is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND) Article PDF Link: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/aestimatio/article/view/37740/28739 Corresponding Author: Aileen R. Das,University of MichiganE-Mail: ardas@umich.edu

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• Al-Rāzī: The ‘Arab Galen’ and his Plato, New Disciplinary Ideals

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-10-30 · 1 citations

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  The third chapter focuses on the Iranian doctor Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (sometimes called the 'Arab Galen'), who was attacked by later Islamicate thinkers for his disciplinary overreach, and his bid to replace Galenism with his more theologically informed system of medicine and philosophy. In particular, it argues that al-Rāzī seeks to weaken the epistemic authority of Galenism through his critiques of Galen’s explanations of certain ideas from Plato’s Timaeus. I first consider the Middle Platonic and Neoplatonic sources on which al-Rāzī may have drawn to elaborate his 'anti-Platonism' – his Platonism in response to Galen's Platonism. Turning finally to the Doubts about Galen, I demonstrate that al-Rāzī attacks Galen on the subjects of creation, pleasure, and the soul for neglecting God's role in the cosmos in his interpretations of the Timaeus. In reformulating the boundaries of medicine to include theological knowledge, which belonged in ancient epistemological schemes to metaphysics, al-Rāzī, I conclude, promotes the doctor-metaphysician in opposition to Galen’s more limited philosopher-doctor as the most reliable investigator of the cosmos.

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• Conclusion: Medicine Disciplined

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-10-30

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  Reflecting on the subjects from Plato's Timaeus at the centre of the disciplinary rivalry explored in the preceding chapters, I conclude that mind-body problems -- questions treating the extent to which psychic and 'mental' processes are separable from the corporeal realm -- provoked the most debate. My contention is that Galen's interpretation of a close link between the body and soul in the dialogue allowed himself and his sympathizers to give doctors a stake in psychological knowledge and trouble the distribution of value based on the corporeal-incorporeal dichotomy, which privileged philosophers. Therefore, the restrictive disciplinary laws imposed on doctors by Avicenna and Maimonides are a strategy to reclaim philosophy's hegemony on the soul and superior epistemic standing. While my study had divided Galen's successors into supporters and opponents of his project, I maintain that each Arabic actor tries to overwrite Galen's expertise with their own. Finally, I consider how my examination of the discursive reimagining of medicine can provide a longue durée perspective on modern reconceptualizations of the field, such as disputes about the relevance of the Medical Humanities.

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• STUDIES IN THE RECEPTION OF GALEN - (P.) Bouras-Vallianatos, (B.) Zipser (edd.) Brill's Companion to the Reception of Galen. (Brill's Companions to Classical Reception 17.) Pp. xxvi + 684, b/w &amp; colour ills. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. Cased, €180, US$217. ISBN: 978-90-04-30221-1.

  The Classical Review · 2020-01-13

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  STUDIES IN THE RECEPTION OF GALEN - (P.) Bouras-Vallianatos, (B.) Zipser (edd.) Brill's Companion to the Reception of Galen. (Brill's Companions to Classical Reception 17.) Pp. xxvi + 684, b/w &amp; colour ills. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. Cased, €180, US$217. ISBN: 978-90-04-30221-1. - Volume 70 Issue 1

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• Uprooting the <i>Timaeus</i>: Maimonides and the Re-medicalization of Galenism

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-10-30

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  Chapter five concentrates on the Rabbi Moses Maimonides' reformist project to rid Galenism of its Timaean elements. As I establish, while Maimonides' affiliation with Aristotelianism put him in conflict with Galen, the Platonic lines in Galen's thought also generated problems for his own conception of Jewish belief. I show that Maimonides rejected Galen's reading of the Timaeus' cosmogony as heterodox in the Guide for the Perplexed and Medical Aphorisms because of its denial of creation ex nihilo and the omnipotence of God. Therefore, Maimonides had theological reasons for wishing to curtail Galen's philosophical reach. Giving special attention to the Medical Aphorisms, I uncover the various polemical tactics that Maimonides employs, which include giving more limited meanings to Galen's philosophically loaded terminology and mobilizing his own anatomical experience to dispute Galen's brain-centred theory of sensation, to dephilosophize Galenism and recentre it on the body.

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• From the Heavens to the Body: Ḥunayn’s Ophthalmology

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-10-30

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  The second chapter studies the efforts of the Christian Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, whose workshop in ʿAbbāsid Baghdad translated the Galenic sources considered in this book, to enhance the respectability of the specialism of ophthalmology in his Ten Treatises on the Eye. I show that, even more so than medicine, ophthalmology was at a disadvantage in its pursuit for epistemic authority because Galen himself had attacked the sub-field as an exemplar of the worrying tendency among doctors in Rome and other cities towards specialization, which threatened the unity of the discipline and the health of patients. Concerned with his own intellectual status at court, Ḥunayn, I argue, subversively uses Galen's explanation of the Timaeus' description of the eyes' service to the rational soul to give ophthalmologists a stake in medico-philosophical controversies relating to sensation. I also expose how Ḥunayn modifies Galen’s interpretation of Plato’s teleological ocular anatomy and visual theory in order to privilege the eye over all other organs as a window to cosmic knowledge.

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Frequent coauthors

• Kamran Karimullah

  University of Religions and Denominations

  69 shared

• Taro Mimura

  Hiroshima University

  69 shared

• Emily Selove

  69 shared

• Peter E. Pormann

  University of Manchester

  68 shared

• Nicola Carpentieri

  University of Padua

  68 shared

• Hammood Obaid

  67 shared

• Pauline Koetschet

  Institut français du Proche-Orient

  2 shared

• Hamood Obaid

  2 shared