Das

Topic: NES Seminar Series #9 "Mapping Medicine with the Platonic Cosmos in the Medieval Islamicate World"

Speaker: Aileen Das, Universisty of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Respondent: Brooke Holmes, Princeton University

Aileen Das is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the Departments of Classical Studies and Middle East Studies. Trained as a classicist, Aileen is an intellectual historian who is interested in how medicine is constructed and inscribed in Greco-Roman antiquity and the medieval Islamicate world. Her first book, Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato's Timaeus (Cambridge University Press, October 2020), 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. Aileen's next monograph project considers the role of brevity in the construction of scientific authority across time.

Monday, November 2, 2020