Aileen Das

Aileen Das is currently an Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. As an intellectual historian with training in Classics, she is interested in how Greco-Roman and medieval Islamicate authors articulate categories of knowledge such as ‘medicine’, ‘philosophy’, and ‘science’. Her first book, Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge University Press, under contract) examines the concept of disciplinarity, especially the ways in which boundaries are drawn between disciplines in contests for epistemic authority. In particular, it considers 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. She argues 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. Finally, this study shows that Galen’s engagement with the <em>Timaeus</em> became a touchstone for Islamicate thinkers’ own disciplinary agendas. Her second project (The Art in Brief: Time and Exegesis in Greco-Roman and Islamicate Medicine), to which she will turn her attention during her stay at the CHS, looks at 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.