Comparing Aristotle And Galen's Analysis

Perhaps the greatest strand of continuity between Aristotle and Galen (and between the ancient Greco-Roman tradition and the early Christian tradition) is their one-sex model/discourse surrounding gender; both of these thinkers believe that the female is an inverted and imperfect version of the male. In other words, the female is a deficient male and/or a male gone wrong. This is largely evident in Galen’s writing as he states “all the parts that men have have women have too..in women the parts are within, whereas in men they outside” (Galen, 628). Similarly, Aristotle argues that the female is an imperfect male that “is colder in nature” (Aristotle, 1133). These quotes, therefore, both illustrate a one-sex model with a masculine basis and
In Plato’s Symposium, for example, we witness a dialogue in which Socrates claims that reproduction (whether of children or of ideas) is the only means by which mortality is overcome. Similarly, In Galen’s text we see an emphasis on how reproduction is nature’s way of escaping mortality. While it is true that the details/founding principles of the ideas of each respective thinker may be different, there seems to be a thematic/discursive continuity: “Galen’s analyses concerning aphrodisia are situated within the ancient thematic of the relations between death, immortality, and reproduction” (Foucault,
Firstly -unlike Aristotle, Plato, and Galen- we do not view sex as this process that is a rational result of the larger schema of bodily mechanisms. Sex for us is about desire: a desire that has come to shape our understanding of ourselves as it has become the birth place of sexual identity categories. Desire for us (and the sexual identity categories that result from the discourse on desire) is a place where we seek a truth about our innermost selves based on who we sleep with and what we do in bed. The discursive explosion on the topics of sex/desire , as shown by Foucault, has become the place in modern western discourse for the production of a corpus of knowledge that regulate/produce certain regimes around sexuality and the body. The body, in modern discourses therefore, has become a place for producing knowledge about the self based on the soul and the nature of its desires: desires that has be confessed, cured, regulated, disciplined, and monitored. It is not a surprise, therefore, that in modern discourses the soul (what is understood as the impetus of desire) takes center stage to the body; whereas in previous discourses the body is what should subdue the