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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:02.867)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Colin Webster, Associate Professor of Classics at UC Davis and the President of Society for Ancient Medicine. And we're here to talk about his book, Tools and the Organism, Technology and the Body in Greek and Roman Medicine. Dr. Webster, wonderful to have you on today.
Colin Webster (00:22.606)
Thanks for having me on, PJ.
PJ (00:25.396)
So, first question I always love to start with is, why this book? What do we need to know about tools and the organism?
Colin Webster (00:33.394)
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean there's two ways into it why this book for me I sort of started out as a an ancient philosopher and I took this funny degree I went to this liberal arts college with a great books program and ended up in this undergraduate major called contemporary studies Which is a vacuously titled degree, but it meant that I studied a little bit of history of science some poetry continental philosophy literature kind of large
PJ (00:55.199)
Thanks for watching!
Colin Webster (01:02.53)
broad swaths of great book style things, but in the contemporary world. And then I got into classics. I did ancient philosophy. I entered my PhD with the expectation I was going to continue to do ancient philosophy. And then at a certain point, I just fell back in love with ancient science. And so for me, this was a way to revisit some of the stuff that I loved in my undergraduate degree. It hooked me in my doctoral research. And then I've always loved...
epistemological questions, why we think we believe the things that we believe, and I am maybe encyclopedic in outlook. I like to answer that question historically, I like to answer that question with as little abstraction and as much of the nitty-gritty as possible. So why this book for me is that it's two neuroses pulled into one sort of big questions, but also let's try to absorb as much information as possible.
So that's one way of looking at why this book for me to satisfy my own personal neuroses, which I guess is why every book is written ever. And the second is we're kind of in this moment where we are surrounded by technologies. I have my Apple Watch on. I just did a Peloton ride where a machine told me whether I was in my optimal zone, whether I was good enough.
today, whether I was better than yesterday, I go to my doctor, they have machines that interact with me, tell me my blood pressure. We're sort of surrounded by machines that mediate our relationship with our bodies and also help scientists conceptualize what's going on, how our body parts work. And so since our view of the human body is so mediated through technology, I got interested in this project because I wanted to see what it was like in antiquity.
where they didn't have x-rays, they didn't have, they didn't have MRI machines, they certainly didn't have little watches that told them how fast they were going on bikes. But how did their tools, nevertheless, their technologies, shape the way that they thought about the human body, how it worked, what it meant to explain the body, what its behaviors were? And what I found is that the...
Colin Webster (03:24.47)
Technologies, as simple as they seem to us sometimes, were still extraordinarily influential, and a large part of the history of ancient medicine can be read as an engagement between medical theorists and the technologies that are surrounding them.
PJ (03:43.207)
One, thank you. That's a great answer. And I'm just going to apologize up front. I took Greek about 15 years ago. So my pronunciation, I struggled with pronunciation anyways. But so I feel like, please correct me as we go through the different kind of etymologies some of these words. I know this is a difficult question to start with.
Colin Webster (03:50.462)
So the apology is a yes.
PJ (04:10.867)
But this is a word that I have often found to be, it becomes more nebulous the more you study it, but it becomes more valuable even as it becomes more ambiguous. And that is, when you say technology and you use it a lot in your book, what is technology? And I know that's not, the definite side of that is difficult, but there's definitely, there are ways to make that useful.
Colin Webster (04:28.116)
Yeah.
Colin Webster (04:36.346)
Yeah, again, this is a tough and a great question, because I like to answer these questions in sort of nitty-gritty way, how the term is actually used. Of course, the answer is technology can mean whatever it is that we use it to refer to. But by technology, there's sort of two... Originally, it comes from this Greek word, technē, as if you've taken Greek 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you know.
And techne originally means a type of teachable expertise or something along those lines that in and around the fifth century BCE, there's a sort of discourse that develops around these little manuals that teach you how to do things. And those are generally called techne. So medicine would be a techne, but also, I don't know, like farming could be one if you have principles that you're teaching.
And from that, you can sort of see how the ending of the word technology or logia would tend to identify technology as a study of techne, just like biology or anthropology or the study of life or the study of humans. But technology, that's what it meant, especially in German circles, until and around...
I think it's the mid 19th century when it starts to be used to be referred to the actual material devices around us. So I tend to use it to refer to any of the human made devices that are used for some purposes. That can be stone, you know, stones that have been chipped to turn into blades. That can be computers. That can be...
You know, that can be glasses, that can be paper, that can be any of the stuff that we manufacture and use for some purpose. I think, you know, in modern parlances, it tends to be a little bit more flashy. Like people wouldn't think of a spoon as a technology. They would think of AI as a technology. Whereas I like to use a way more capacious, yeah, way more capacious view of the term to think of even.
Colin Webster (06:48.706)
The most simple things we use, if they are human made and they're made for some purpose, I'm gonna classify them as a technology.
PJ (06:56.039)
Yeah, when you look at innate philosophical differences, it is strange to distinguish between something like a watch made with clockwork and a watch made with electricity. But that's kind of where a lot of people, because things were so basic, and that's where we've advanced so far, you know, it's like, oh, it needs to be like, it needs to at least have electricity be considered technology. And then you're like, why? And there's no answer. It's just, it's more historical.
Colin Webster (07:09.768)
Mm-hmm.
Colin Webster (07:22.782)
Yeah, certainly. Yeah. That if you have, if, um, it's not impressive enough, it becomes infrastructure rather than technology or something along those lines, you take it for granted. But no, I think all of these things that we use on a daily, like you take a tree and that is a natural object, you strip it of a bark and you stand it up to be a tent pole and you've, you've made a tool. You've made a technology. It's a basic one, but I would classify that as a technology.
PJ (07:54.859)
You've talked a little bit about the nitty-gritty. I just want to make sure I'm on the same track. I noticed this in your book, is that you're talking about you love to do really close readings of authors. I've noticed you've collected quite a few authors. Is that kind of when you're talking about getting the nitty-gritty, you're talking about this kind of close reading?
Colin Webster (08:11.666)
Yeah, I mean, for me, the personal neuroses are like trying to accumulate all the information we can from both material and textual sources. So the nitty gritty is absolutely I'm a trained philologist, which means that I have spent my time studying texts, looking at not only how different texts relate to one another, but also metaphors.
metaphors shape the way people conceptualize the world and if people from ancient Greece use a different set of metaphors to refer to something that could be meaningful rather than just incidental. So when I say the nitty gritty sometimes I mean really trying to get into ancient worldviews by incredibly attentive
Yeah, incredible attention paid to the particular formulations that they are using and not presuming that we can translate it straightway into our mode of speaking. And then the other nitty gritty is actually looking at how pipes worked. What are the pipes? If they're going to talk about irrigation pipes, let's look at the actual pipes that they had around them. If they're going to talk about the body as an irrigation system, where are they in Greece? What are the pipes that are around them? And sometimes it's boring.
turns out pipes are just pipes and other times it turns out that it's actually quite consequential whether, you know, this is not what I talk about in my book but Roman lead pipes versus terracotta pipes, pressurized versus non-pressurized plumbing I do talk about in my book but those very material details that it's easy to gloss over I also try to pay as much attention to it as I can. And I apologize if you can hear this but there is a tree that is being eaten by
side of my window. So if you can hear a sort of monstrous roar, it is that they're mulching a tree across the street, or at least some branches. All right.
PJ (09:59.241)
Ha ha ha!
PJ (10:08.367)
I think of that as an appropriate backdrop for what we're talking about.
Colin Webster (10:12.658)
Yeah, and I guess it's a Leviathan in the background or something.
PJ (10:16.755)
Yeah, the roar in the background. So I mean, you know, I have these other things I want to talk about, but please, I would love to find out how the metaphor, the model of pressurized versus non-pressurized pipes became a valuable piece of data for you.
Colin Webster (10:18.619)
It's coming to get me.
Colin Webster (10:37.218)
Great. Yeah, so that's one of the, maybe the splashier examples that I try to talk about in this book. So, just to sort of frame it a little bit more.
I, in asking these questions, how do tools and technology shape ancient understandings of the human body, I look at a couple different ways that's the case, sort of on a conceptual level which I can talk about a little bit later, and then one of the more important ways is the actual material level, that if we in the modern world invent computers that radically changes the way we talk about human brains, conceptualize how they operate, and then we start using metaphors.
like the brain processing information, storing memory in particular ways, processing, I guess I've already said that, that you start to use terminology for the brain that's actually taken from computers and it gets naturalized pretty quickly. And that's the way we start to think, even without necessarily recognizing it, how we're conceptualizing and explaining cognition. So I'm trying to look at similar things in antiquity
as material tools are developed, how that changes the metaphors and the characterizations, and essentially the available types of explanation that can be made about the human body. So that's the sort of goal, and one of the ways I do that is I look at...
5th century medical explanations and this is the era of the Hippocrates. So this the Hippocrates you've heard your audiences presumably heard of the Hippocrates and the Hippocratic oath. So Hippocrates is a real living physician who was born on Kos sometime in the 5th century BCE.
Colin Webster (12:27.734)
There are about 60 some-odd texts that are attributed to Hippocrates, but unfortunately we don't know if any of them are actually written by him. There's a few that might have been written by him, but the texts that are in this so-called Hippocratic corpus disagree with one another. Some of them are notes, some of them are...
sort of speeches that are given, so there's wildly different views within this body of texts. So they can't all be written by the same person unless the person is changing their viewpoints like every two months. And there's just too much there to be written by one person.
But what most of these authors share is that they think the important things in the human bodies are fluids. We call them humors from Greek term koumoi, which means fluid, but also maybe taste. And so you have the idea of what is fluid.
Eventually what comes out of this is the standard four humor theory that is promoted by Galen, which is yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm, but in the Hippocrates it's way more open. Some authors talk about water, phlegm, black bile, and phlegm sort of become the two paradigmatic pathological substances. But what you hear again and again and again as these authors talk about fluids moving through the vessels in the body is that they also talk about air.
And they talk about air as responsible for things like sensation. There's one particular text called On the Sacred Disease that tries to explain what we would call epilepsy or maybe grand mal seizures and how they happen in the body. And his explanation is that you have air traveling through our blood vessels and that's why we feel the air gets into our fingers. And if you.
Colin Webster (14:20.27)
pinch those vessels, eventually you're going to lose sensation. And what happens is that phlegm blocks the vessels that are leading up to our brain, and that ends up producing a loss of consciousness. So this idea that air flows through the same vessels as phlegm flows through the same vessels as blood, and there's only really one system in the body, is pretty prevalent in Hippocratic texts.
You get the same basic idea in Plato, although he provides, this is in his text, the Timaeus, where he builds the entire world from scratch, so to speak, a cosmological text. And as part of that, the world, it's a very complicated text, but the world is itself a type of body. So the body mimics, there's like these.
imitations of the world imitating the divine maker, and the human body imitating the world imitating the divine maker, et cetera, et cetera. So you sort of get these emanations going down. And the human body at one point, as he's describing how it's made, he talks about the blood flowing down the spine like irrigation. And then later he'll talk about respiration and the air going directly into our veins throughout our body. So there's this really common idea that air flows in the same vessels
as our blood.
If you look at fifth century pipes, they are all about this big and they're made of terracotta and they are fit one pipe into the next in sort of male and female ends and they're laid out in a long row like that. And they have to be made in short sections because they're made on a potter's wheel. So you can only get so tall before the scene from Ghosts happens and the place starts flying around all over the place over Patrick Swayze and Whippy Goldberg.
PJ (16:06.495)
you
Colin Webster (16:13.13)
So they have to be made relatively short. And then to connect them, there's a hole in the top. And you slip them from one into the next, and then presumably reach down into the hole to seal them from the inside. And what this hole means is that none of these pipes could run at pressure. All of the irrigation pipes in fifth century Greece, especially Athens, are going to be made of these terracotta pipes, none of which truly run at pressure.
a very small section potentially in the agora that filled up to its brim, but in general it is not how the pipes are designed. And so I argue that when people think about blood flowing through these systems and air moving through these systems, it's completely natural to think about air and blood in the same, in the same pipes moving in different directions, which for us seems incredibly bizarre because air would get stuck.
you know, bubbles would form, the air would all rise to the top, like how is it that air and blood can flow simultaneously without constant problems, let alone phlegm occasionally blocking the air? So that's in the fifth century. Pipes that don't run at pressure, blood that flows with air. Fast forward about 50 years and you enter the Hellenistic period. And this is the era after Alexander the Great.
conquers his father Philip conquers Greece and then he extends that project into first Anatolia and then the Levant and Egypt and then back through the Middle East, Cedar Babylonia and onward all the way to modern-day Pakistan and then back. And so this upends the classical order in the in the Mediterranean and beyond and in these Hellenistic kingdoms that
Colin Webster (18:08.35)
It's been called court science by the scholar Marcus Berry, where especially in Alexandria, the Ptolemies, who are the Ptolemaic dynasty, who Cleopatra is the last of these rulers, started inviting scientists. So like they invite librarians, they invite poets, they invite philosophers, they invite physicians, they invite people who make stuff, and they all try to set them, they set them all up in this place called the museum, the museo.
And there's a library there, which is the famous Library of Alexandria. So there's this sort of vibrant intellectual culture that develops with a bunch of different folks in Alexandria, but potentially all around the Mediterranean in these Hellenistic cities. And this is the moment when pneumatics gets developed, that part of this new court science is a couple people. One, there's a guy coming out of Athens named Stratto.
Then there are some other inventors, including a guy named Philo, and they invent things like the water pump. They invent organs that work through pressurized devices. They invent these trick vessels where you can plug a hole and pour water and then unplug the hole and pour wine. There's devices that use water pressure to make alarms go off, to make birds sing. So these incredibly intricate
sometimes automata, but often sort of trick vessels that use water pressure and air in separated chambers that are carefully controlled so as to produce these incredible marvelous effects. So this is only about 80 years after Plato, a hundred years after the Hippocrates or so. And it's at the same moment, in the same place, there is a physician named Eris Istridis of Chios.
who comes to Alexandria, he may be in the museum, he may not, and he starts thinking about the human body in totally different terms as the Hippocrates. That is, he thinks that the blood and the air are in two completely separate systems. At this point in time, the heart for him becomes a mechanism of propulsion. This is work that Heinrich von Staden at Princeton.
Colin Webster (20:34.974)
has talked about for a number of years, that the heart is a mechanism of propulsion much like the newly invented force pump, and one side pushes air through the newly discovered arteries, the other side pushes blood through the newly dis- well the newly classified veins, and these two systems are completely separate. And what happens when air gets into the bloodstream or vice versa
through what he thinks of as, he calls them the mouth, we think it's capillaries, but where these two systems touch each other in the body, if air sneaks into the blood you get inflammation and fever. So he totally thinks about, totally changes the way he thinks about how the human body functions, how it works, and how pathology works.
And you can see he doesn't make an explicit comparison to pneumatic technologies, but I think it's very clear that these technologies didn't really exist in the same way even 50 years prior. And the same moment they explode in Alexandria is the moment that suddenly the body becomes fully pressurized for this medical theorist. So that's the answer, but that's the moment. Is that me? That's gotta be me who's continually getting emails.
PJ (21:50.749)
Yeah.
Colin Webster (21:57.246)
If I can turn my notifications on. We might be able to hear it. Oh yeah, you can't hear it? Okay.
PJ (21:57.703)
I'm not hearing it, so we might be okay. So one, I see what you mean by nitty gritty, and I love it. And I think, I mean, that argument makes sense to me in my absolutely no knowledge of the field, yeah, but it makes sense, yeah. A lot to take in there.
Colin Webster (22:04.322)
So.
Colin Webster (22:07.639)
Mm-hmm.
Colin Webster (22:15.047)
Yeah, you're good.
PJ (22:26.671)
I do feel like I have to, you know, as you're, I was immediately caught by you saying that your work on pressurized versus non-pressurized pipes was one of your splashier examples. No, that did come to mind. But, and maybe for our audience to appreciate what's going on here too, and to see this in real time, I had Dr. Megan Sullivan on.
Colin Webster (22:42.275)
Yeah.
PJ (22:55.167)
And I remember myself listening to John Searle talk about different models of consciousness. And Dr. Sullivan has been teaching for several years through the models of consciousness. And when she first started teaching, she was like, she would give all the different, you know, the controversial, you know, people have different models. And one of them was the computer model that we have our hardware and our software. And when she first started teaching it...
Colin Webster (23:22.251)
off where exactly.
PJ (23:24.723)
how many people, she's like, how many of you think that makes sense or how many, and maybe one person would raise their hand? Well, within 10 years, or maybe it was eight years, it had literally flip-flopped. The majority of the class was like, that's the one that makes sense to me. And so, I mean, that's just a modern day example of what you're talking about, but like what we see around us is how we organize things in our brains. That makes total sense to me.
Colin Webster (23:47.674)
Yeah. And you can see it with AI and predictive, you know, stochastic predictive networks. That's the moment we're using them to mimic consciousness. And the moment that they are successful, we think of them as, oh, that's how consciousness works. And, you know, my stance is like, these can actually be very good models. I'm taking no stance on whether or not they're successful explanations.
just pointing out the historical fact that as our technologies change, especially technologies that we make to mimic natural phenomena, how swiftly those change from technologies used to augment or mimic into actual explanations or cognitive models. The movement sometimes is just like instantaneous.
PJ (24:36.987)
Yeah, and I kind of want to talk about this because sometimes it seems really helpful and other times, you know, it can blind us, right? Like for instance with non-pressurized pipes, it's like, well, they must run together. But I think to help the audience understand, it'd be useful for them to understand the connection between tools and the etymology of organ or organism. But you also talk about...
these other terms that would have been more prominent, things like topoi, schemata, viscera, places, spaces, and structures. And is there value in maybe recovering these at a basic level, would that help us be more creative in finding other models that not necessarily are more accurate, but may supplement our current models?
Colin Webster (25:18.487)
Yeah.
Colin Webster (25:35.21)
Yeah, absolutely. So maybe I'll sort of explain the shift from spaces, places, to organs, and then talk about newer models of the body that are coming out beyond sort of the organism. So the second, if the one of the ways I look at the impacts of technology on the body is as new tools are invented, new theories emerge that are based on those tools. The other.
PJ (25:49.)
Hmm.
Colin Webster (26:04.614)
The other thing I try to track is how people or what the people think the body actually is. What type of object is it and how the parts in it relate to one another. And this is where we talk about the organism that we have. Now we think of these things in our bodies, the heart, the lungs, the liver, they are our organs. We talk about organic food that is stuff that is like...
has to do with life. We talk about organisms. Those are life forms that probably have these parts in them that perform certain functions. So we have this whole set of terminology that seems to be about life, about biotic things, but all of those terms come from the Greek word organon, which means tool. So what I track in this book is, along with material technologies, is this shift. How did the word tool become so associated with
words for body parts and actual becomes used to refer to living things, tool-like things, organisms, as literally saying something is tool-like. How do we come to a situation where we talk about living things as tool-like? And to start that story, I go back to the Hippocrates, these people in the fifth century, the sixth through fourth century BCE, who are writing in Greece and they're writing these this set of texts that disagree with one another,
talk about the humors, talk about fire and water and all kinds of constituent elements of the body. And what you find is that as they're thinking about blood and phlegm and black bile moving through the body, none of them use the term organon to refer to any of the body parts. They never use the metaphor of the heart as a tool, the liver as a tool, the lungs as a tool, nowhere. It's easy to overlook that.
I think it's relatively easy to just, you can see it in translations. When they talk about body parts, they often translators just swap the word organ in there as though that were not a metaphor, that's just a basic descriptive word, rather than a word that implies a full conception of what the body is and how its parts interact. Instead, rather than.
Colin Webster (28:26.138)
or organon, the Hippocrates use these other words that you've just talked about. So places, spaces, sometimes they talk about the things in the body, they don't, they talk about the liver and the gallbladder and they will even say that humors collect in these spaces, but they never assign a function to any of these spaces. That they do not think of the body, first and foremost, as a functionally
arranged thing. That when you explain how, like what the body is, or you come to a satisfactory explanation of disease, you do not need to tell people what the liver does, or you know, what function it plays in the body. You can just say the liver is the place where black bile collects. Now that's a
On the one hand, that seems relatively close, it's very easy to miss this in these texts because we're so used to thinking about function as the way you explain how things work and how they relate to one another. And the Hippogratics do occasionally talk about function, they talk about things, vessels moving fluid from one place to another. So it's not like function is completely absent from their worldview, but that's not.
how they conceptualize how the body relates to itself, how the parts relate to one another. It's not a functional object. You can think of it more like, for some of these authors, like in ecology, that the armpit hairs grow in the armpit because there's more moisture there. And if more moisture runs there, the glands absorb more moisture because they want the moisture for themselves. So it's not that the parts are serving some
function in this hierarchically arranged whole like a machine, and instead you have individual body parts that sometimes that are looking out for their own interests. In the same way that a you know a salt marsh, you can say that reeds or oyster beds have the function of preventing floods, but the oysters are not trying to prevent floods, they're just trying to grow where they are, and that has these you know the secondary impact of preventing certain
Colin Webster (30:45.986)
things. So that sort of ecological model, or that's the metaphor that we might use today to think about it, that's one of the ways that they start to think about the interior parts. But function, a hierarchically arranged functional machine, is not how the Hippocratics are thinking about it. Fast forward another couple of decades, you get to the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and this is where the tool terminology
starts to come in that in this text that I mentioned, Plato's Timaeus, this is where the tool metaphor really starts to pop up, that it starts, there's another Platonic text where it appears first, but it starts as a metaphor to say like the tools see, sorry, the eyes see as though, we see through the eyes as though through tools, and then within I think four or five sentences, he just starts to talk about the eyes as tools, straight up.
PJ (31:42.345)
Hmm.
Colin Webster (31:42.53)
So the naturalization of this metaphor that our body parts are tools that serve certain function happens very quickly in these philosophical authors. And Aristotle is very explicit about this, that living things are organicon, are tool-like. A soul, which is for him the thing that is the activity of life, occurs only in a tool-like thing.
That's very explicit about this. And after Aristotle is when this idea takes off in some of these physicians that I like, Eris Istrides, whom I spoke about, who does the pressurized body, that a huge number of physicians start to take up the idea that the body has tool-like parts and they each perform functions, and that when the...
malfunction, that's what causes illness rather than a type of imbalance. Imbalance can be part of it, but imbalance produces malfunction, and malfunction is the thing that physicians need to deal with. And so we are left with the, we're still left with this philosophical shift about 2,300 years later. We still talk about organisms, we still talk about disease as
Colin Webster (33:07.602)
The last, I'll say 10 years, but we could go back a little bit further than that, has really, I mean, I live in California, I live in Oakland, it's all over the place here, but we talk about our microbiome, our gut flora, our gut health, the idea that our body has far, like, far more bacterial cells that do not contain our DNA than contain our so-called our DNA.
We have viruses in our body that are part of what it means to be human and without those viruses, our body would not operate in the same way. But to say that they have functions or they're part of the human machine seems a little bit odd. So instead we talk about gut flora. We talk about things having, we have to grow, provide the correct environment in our guts for the right type of bacteria to grow and then that affects our cognition, et cetera.
that model of the body as an environment in which different cells, that different types can grow, is way closer to an earlier Hippocratic model that sees the body as a, you could say a type of ecology. So that's the long answer, philosophical takeaway that we are now getting back to a place where, if we don't think of the body just as a machine that has
parts that can be replaced by other parts that provide the same function, but a site where cells are trying to thrive because of their own cell self-interest, and that creates a type of harmonization within the body. That is a way different model. You start to interact with what the human body is in a different way in terms of medical interventions. You might be a little bit less cautious.
or a little bit more cautious to start cutting parts out. Maybe it's like, oh, gallbladder, yeah, we can just get rid of that, or appendix, yeah, we can just get rid of that, and we'll, or your uterus, we can just take your uterus out and we'll replace what it did with estrogen or with a few hormones. So we can just take the organ out and fulfill the function with another technology.
PJ (35:01.647)
I was like, wait, okay.
Colin Webster (35:25.598)
That I think is a lot harder to support if you're thinking about the body as in ecology. So I think, yeah, I'll stop talking there, but that's the sort of shift now towards alternative ways of thinking about bodies that are not just organisms.
PJ (35:35.08)
Yeah.
PJ (35:44.487)
You know, I should have looked it up as you were talking, but I believe his name is Dr. Michael Ruse. I had him on to talk about Darwin. And another one, you even mentioned this in the introduction, another model that shows up is like the mechanism model too, right? That even as you talk about tools, tools are in terms of function, in terms of purpose. And then you have one of the things, one of the shifts with Darwin is we don't have to explain in terms of purpose. We just explain.
purely in terms of just what it does. Is that... Go ahead.
Colin Webster (36:17.71)
Uh, except yeah, that's, that's true, except Darwin does this, um, have your cake and eat it too thing. The entirety of, um, Darwinian evolution claims that there is no divine hand that is, you know, this is the term teleological, that there, there's no divine hand that is organizing the world to some purpose. There's no divine hand that is.
making the tools that are in animal bodies for certain purposes. So there's no teleology. The world is not oriented towards some goal. And the trick that makes Darwinian evolution so successful, to have its cake and eat it too, is that the entire heuristic frame, the entire way that evolution works, is teleological at its very core. That we only have to talk about mechanisms, there's no divine hand, but nature is purposeful.
PJ (37:11.229)
Yeah.
Colin Webster (37:16.382)
Evolution selects for function. That I was just in the botanical garden today and people were talking about how each plant had different strategies for pollination. That if you, I've been in biology classes this year where I've heard biology professors say there is no structure in any plant anywhere that does not serve some purpose. And that's to say that pushed down way to its very core
Yes, it's a mechanic mechanical explanation of the world insofar as it's not a divinely created one But every mechanism through serving the purpose of replicating DNA is in fact functional in some regard. So like yeah, it's wonderful. I have taught a class on Aristotelian biology and showing them
Aristotle's teleology versus Darwinian teleology and showing just how, yeah, just how thoroughly we are still- Voice is not recognized. Oh my goodness. What happened there? TV. TV springing to life. Hopefully it calms down. It heard me talking about its friends. Sorry, sorry TV.
PJ (38:27.263)
Speaking of technology, yeah. No. Good.
PJ (38:35.751)
Yeah, one thing I did want to ask you about, and you mentioned you move from Hippocrates and the different humours, and there's lots of different humours, right? You even talk about like air, which is kind of not really a fluid, right? But it counts as one of these humours. And then you talk about with Galen, it goes down to four, and this becomes the classic model.
Colin Webster (38:53.418)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ (39:01.979)
Perhaps I was reading too much into it, but I did know maybe a slight tone of frustration that you had to compress Greek through the Roman lens. You're talking about the compression of Greek classics through Roman, even as you talk about the names. And we see this too with Galen. Can you talk about how that compression has affected us culturally?
Colin Webster (39:30.638)
Sure.
PJ (39:30.923)
that we have received the Greeks largely through the Romans.
Colin Webster (39:34.562)
A great question. This is sort of one of my, yeah, one of my larger thoughts about the field of classics in general, I teach in the classics department. And we have this terminology that we use all the time in our field talking about Greco-Roman science, Greco-Roman religion, as though Greeks and Romans are just naturally and inextricably wed together.
And there is, in my mind, absolutely no doubt that Greeks and the Roman Empire are deeply interacting with one another. That is not my problem. That half the Roman Empire spoke Greek in upper, you know, Roman literature is responding to Greek models. The two cultures are sort of deeply interwoven. My frustration is when that becomes blinding.
to how the ancient world actually operated. That prior to the rise of the Roman Empire, and we'll say even something like the early second century CE, it's just not really on the Greek cultural map. And so Hippocrates has nothing to do with Rome, or it has just as much to do with Rome as it does with Egypt or Sierra Babylonia or the Black Sea or the Scythians up there on the...
Asian steps. And so to just think it's unproblematic to use a Roman example from two, three centuries later to understand Hippocrates, but do all kinds of work to try to show why that's taken as natural, but somehow using Egypt or Egyptian models to understand Hippocrates feels like a foreign thing, that's where I think it's blinding. And so my next project is
for me trying to push past these boundaries. And they're hard to push past because of the linguistic and philological tradition that we've had all of these Greek texts which are taken up by Latin authors, translated into Latin, Greek and Latin when they are reintroduced into medieval Europe. Hebrew is another one of these languages that pops back up at the same time along with Arabic.
Colin Webster (41:58.49)
Arabic and Hebrew stop getting translated, and Greek and Latin become the two languages that people read, and suddenly they become the canonical languages of the ancient world. And so it's hard when you're trying to find out how did Egyptian medicine influence Greek medicine because there's no textual tradition to rely on. Those texts are gone, or they are papyri in dumps.
in the desert and you have to have a whole other set of skills to learn where those papyrus fragments are to reconstruct medicine in a completely different way that we're generally not trained in that isn't just sitting down and reading someone's theories. And if you want to go beyond Egypt to some place like a Sierra Babylonia, you have to learn cuneiform, look at cuneiform tablets, learn another set of history, another set of skills. And so this is what I'm trying to
this new project I have on intercultural medical exchange, but it is required, I'm on leave this year with a new directions, Mellon New Directions fellowship, and I am training in paleoethnobotany to look at seed samples. I'm trying to learn organic residue analysis. I'm trying to learn Akkadian, so I can look at Acetobabalone sources from the Middle East. I'm trying to learn Arabic. I would love to learn Sanskrit as the next part of this project. I'm trying to learn.
Arya Vedic medicine. So trying, it is very easy to keep Greece and Rome together because the texts are right there and they're in a department like mine where we teach those and only those two languages. And I would love to see a model for studying the ancient world that doesn't just take those two languages and those two cultures as the only two that are truly meaningful from antiquity and the only two that are actually wedded.
together in some sort of essential way. And actually, I see my department at Davis, we're doing that, we're trying to push beyond the Greece and Rome, not get rid of Greece and Rome, not get rid of Greek and Latin, but try to make the ancient world a little bit more capacious and bring it into dialogue with other traditions so that they can be studied as they should be all together as one part of, one ancient network rather than the sort of columns or silos that we've developed.
Colin Webster (44:23.631)
as a result of our disciplinary techniques.
PJ (44:27.195)
Um, with a fair way to make sure I'm tracking with you, uh, to talk about this would be the way that we sometimes say like the Western world in a contemporary sense. And then you look at and you say like, it's very clear that Europe and America, um, are very different, like the different languages, different government structures, different, um, even like, uh, you know, as we talk about models, like
Colin Webster (44:36.684)
Yeah.
PJ (44:55.379)
the way that walking and driving are different from like, you know, France, Germany, and England to somewhere like America. I think I've seen so many Reddit posts about Europeans coming over and saying, oh, we'll just go to New York and then go to Florida the next day, you know, or Los Angeles the next day. Like we'll drive there, right? And it's just because the scale of America is different. But to your point with like Greece and...
PJ (45:28.348)
Egypt, there's the obvious influence of Europe on America, but there's also a lot of influence from Mexico on America, and on America to Mexico, but those are seen as foreign and not as natural linkage in the way that we do with Europe and America. Is that a similar process there?
Colin Webster (45:50.026)
Yeah, yeah, something like that. That's, to use ancient examples, that with, you know, Alexander the Great taking over a huge portion of the Eastern Mediterranean, there are Greek speakers in Egypt for several hundred years who are in charge before the Romans take over. And so then Greek is still the administrative language. And it's not like Greek wasn't there before Alexander the Great came. There were Greek settlements in Egypt.
There's just a lot more interaction between ancient cultures than I think we're used to. And sure it fluctuates, there are moments when you get a full Macedonian Greek government in Egypt, that is a moment where more interaction is going to occur between these cultures. But I think there's never a moment when they're not engaging. And so when we say the West, that tends to be code for something like Christendom.
except now we're in a more atheistic age and so we can't really say that anymore. It's also coded for whiteness in a very particular way and so it's not like Europe doesn't have a whole set of intellectual traditions that can be thought of as unified. It's these are that that's totally a you know a valuable way to think about certain traditions that develop and I think
ignoring the historical split between Christendom and Islam would be to sort of misunderstand how historical boundaries were set up. But to think of those boundaries as immutable, as not historically contingent, as not moving back and forth, is also a major historical error. And to think that just because there are, you know, different religions that have met ended up in different places.
that there aren't other intellectual traditions that have moved back and forth. And we should think of those wedded together or are productive to think about as a unified tradition that isn't the West, that isn't just mapping on to another set of political or religious boundaries is sort of, yeah, is what I mean. Like Greece and Rome do influence one another.
Colin Webster (48:08.77)
Greece is ruled by the Romans. It becomes the core of the Roman Empire, which then shifts even further east. And Roman Empire is largely in Asia. The vast majority of the Roman Empire is not in Europe. And so to think of that as part of a European tradition or a Western tradition at the exclusion of looking at North Africa, the Middle East, the Black Sea.
Turkey is just, I think, to misunderstand how history works.
PJ (48:42.643)
This is a thread that's been running through here. Your focus on language and your appreciation for the nitty-gritty and your desire not to get rid of models but to make them more capacious and so it's not to eliminate the Greco-Roman tradition. Okay, we have that. Now let's look apart from that. What does that guard against? What is the value of making these models more capacious?
Colin Webster (48:51.074)
versus.
Colin Webster (49:12.278)
Yeah, that's a good question. One, I just think truth, being to be the old capital T historical truth, it's just if we're going to get, like what happens as a discipline, and this is sort of a frustration that I have had, is that I am trained in reading texts, in reading Greek and Latin.
and I have databases that I know how to use where I can look up any word that has ever appeared in Greek and I know how to do that. And I'm rewarded by working with Greek and Latin and looking up where those words are and coming up with intricate models. And so that has more to say about the technologies that we have developed to engage with this, the ancient world, which have made the phenomena have certain boundaries because of the tools that we use to access it.
And I think it is more truthful to the ancient world to not let our tools, which are our language programs and our databases and our scholarly editions and our translations and our manuscript tradition, dictate what we think the ancient world actually was. And so the benefits, I think, are just on a basic level, a better sense of history.
a better sense of how the ancient world actually worked. And I think, you know, politically, for me, we get a way better sense that these, the world as we see it is in fact, a very recent configuration that the nation states that we have, the modern ethnostates that sort of emerged in the 19th century are, they didn't come out of nothing. It's not like they don't have something to touch on in the ancient world, but it's also
only part of the story, that boundaries and people moved around, that the ancient world was way more fluid than we assume, if we only stick with our modern maps, our modern tools, and we don't try to break down some of the boundaries that have, that have, keep us from looking at other ways of thinking about the ancient world. So truth, big old, big, you know, the girl, the old one, the old one, that guy.
PJ (51:26.492)
Yep, bigger.
PJ (51:30.107)
Yeah, and I mean, you definitely touched on it there. Can you elaborate further on this idea of, if I can, better understanding history to better understand the contemporary world or it's better understand ourselves? How would you, how does that movement happen? What is that movement?
Colin Webster (51:51.674)
Yeah, that's a good question. I think better understand ourselves is a little harder. I grapple with this quite frequently. I run as part of the Society for Ancient Medicine, of which I'm no longer the president. I just ended my term. But only just, only like this past month. But now I'm staying on as the editor of this blog that I run there called The Rootcutter, which is about ancient.
PJ (52:09.772)
Oh, sorry.
Colin Webster (52:20.678)
using ancient medical texts from various traditions to help us understand ourselves. And that's always a really hard, hard one. How, is there a sort of technique that we can use to use ancient wisdom to better ourselves or how studying, it's sort of easy to look at something like Epictetus, a stoic philosopher who was a slave who writes this.
manual the and charidion that is a guide to life and it's easy to see how that can directly impact your activities how you think about yourself that you can suddenly think oh you know my reaction is the only thing that is in my control here is it says it right here you know I can take that line and change how I think about my own space in the world how other people who come up with ideas that we don't believe in any longer
how political boundaries that have shifted over time, how networks and communities that we didn't think were in contact with one another were in contact with one another, how they use plant substances to heal certain things, like how that whole historical mess changes how we view ourself. I don't think there's like a really, a neat direct line. What it's done for me,
is just show the incredible complexity and variety of human experience. So when you see what's going on in the world and people giving pat explanations of them, you can think actually this is a very old, you know, these are very old ideas or these, what you're saying now about this topic isn't true.
it's not where these people have lived, et cetera. You can sort of think about these, whether it's conflicts or ideas in their long jure. It makes you very frustrated, I think, with most, it's made me very frustrated with most public discourses around ideas because I wanna push back into the past and that's not necessarily rewarded in a news story that needs to communicate something without spending 48 hours on it. But anyway, I do think recognizing
Colin Webster (54:42.07)
just how complex the world is and how old human history is and that human history is actually not that far away that we're still living with the decisions, the consequences of a huge number of things that happened in the past that are not really, like they're still lingering with us. We're still, they're still there, the after effects.
PJ (55:09.528)
I think in many ways that feels like a great summary of today. Dr. Colin Webster, the editor formerly known as President, sorry I couldn't resist, it's been a real joy to have you on today. Thank you so much.
Colin Webster (55:17.243)
Yeah.
Colin Webster (55:23.03)
Thank you so much. Take care.