This chapter outlines Plato’s metaphysics of artefacts on the basis of his explicit references to Ideas of artefacts in the Cratylus and Republic X, his discussion of the eidetic cosmos presented in the Parmenides and the description of the material world as a product of the divine artisan in the Timaeus. The second section presents the shortcomings of Plato’s account detected by Aristotle and addressed through artefacts: these are Plato’s failure to recognise final causes and the concept of imitation. The third section outlines the metaphysical intuitions upon which Aristotle builds by taking artefacts into account. The roots of certain metaphysical problems are not explicitly identified as Platonic, but they are arguably to be found in the Platonic corpus. These problems concern the range of things that have a form, the separation between axiology and metaphysics, the concept of real kinds and the relation between parts and whole.

The metaphysics of artefacts is increasingly gaining the attention of contemporary metaphysicians, particularly among supporters of hylomorphism, who all refer to or draw on Aristotle. However, there is no consensus about the place of artefacts in Aristotle’s ontology. Not only that, but there is no consensus as to whether Aristotle even has a single coherent account of artefacts in the first place. This book has shown that Aristotle does present a coherent and detailed account of artefacts. I shall now summarise the conclusions that have been reached in a manner that is sensitive to currently discussed issues, so as to provide a guide for the contemporary (Neo)-Aristotelian debate.

Chapter 5 argues that the identification of the form in the mind of the artisan with art amounts to ascribing it the role of efficient cause. As the chapter explains, the form in the mind of the artisan is responsible for both qualified and unqualified coming-to-be. Art is the only form that is an efficient cause, in contrast to the form inherent in the artefact. By resorting to Aristotle’s biological works, the chapter clarifies how artefacts come to lack an inner principle of their behaviour and how this is connected with their lack of an inner principle of unqualified coming-to-be. Two theses in particular are challenged. The first is that the form is transmitted from the mind to the object and, as a result, the form of an artefact is potential, because this is the status of the form in the mind in the artisan. The second thesis is that artefacts are not substances because their forms are not principles of changes. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the relation between eternity and substantiality.

Chapter 2 addresses Aristotle’s use of artefacts as counterexamples or central elements in counter-arguments against Plato and the Academy. The common opinion, within the Academy, that there cannot exist Ideas of artefacts is used by Aristotle to highlight the internal incoherence of the Platonic theory (Met. A 9, 990b8–15; Met. B 4, 999b15–20; Met. K 2, 1060b23–8). Moreover, the case of artefacts offers evidence that Ideas are either inert thus superflous (Met. A 9, 991b1–7; GC 2.9, 335b18–24), or even in contradiction with the coming-to-be of individual substances (Met. Z 8, 1033b19–24). The chapter shows that in these passages Aristotle is using artefacts dialectically against Plato’s separation of Ideas and concludes with a reflection on the notions of separation and substantiality.

This final chapter shows how further enquiry into artefacts’ metaphysics forces us to return to artefacts’ physics. At the same time, this further enquiry is in turn shown to fall outside the interests of a metaphysician and to be the task of a natural philosopher. For this reason, the chapter looks at artefacts as objects of inquiry and distinguishes between perspective of the natural scientist, the maker, and the user on the one hand, and the perspective of the metaphysician on the other. This discussion allows us to wrap up the results, to reassess the relationship between the Physics and the Metaphysics, and to evaluate the respective contributions of these works to Aristotle’s ontology of artefacts.

This chapter picks up on Chapter 6, and looks further into the history of the moralization of mental illness from the late antique period to the end of the Middle Ages, with the discourses focusing on the topics of debauchery, wine-consumption, sexual excess and general depravity in the case of phrenitis. The lines are those traced by the patristic material, among which Augustine stands out as the most prolific source; the moral allegory is then further elaborated in adaptation to the themes and concerns of medieval theology and the various developments in medical physiological concepts and pathological ideas. The chapter concludes with the figure of Falstaff, the Shakespearian character who best represents this early-modern outcome of 'ethical phrenitis' as a disease of squander, drunkenness and sexual licentiousness.

In the first chapter I introduce some methodological issues pertaining to the history of mental health: on the one hand, the issue of anachronism, the problem of retrospective diagnosis, on the other, the importance of maintaining intelligibility across cultures. When it comes to the ancient world, there are specific problems related to the nature of medical sources in Greek and Latin, and our limited access to the medical practices underlying them; in addition, the genre 'biography of disease' has its own pitfalls, namely those of attributing ‘essence’ to what appears, prima facie, to be most of all a construct: a disease concept or label such as phrenitis. Finally, in this chapter I consider the label phrenitis, its etymological meanings and the implications of the name vis-à-vis localization (chest? lungs? diaphragm? heart?) and mental life (mind? character? soul? mental capacities?). I also discuss the ‘Homeric’ appeal of the phrēn/phrenes, the name of the body part from which the label originates. The poetic archaism of phrēn/phrenes combined with its medical use made it both understandable as a generic term for mental life and specifically a ‘medical’ term to indicate the diaphragm, and contributed to making phrenitis a long-lasting disease concept.

Localization is a key move in the history of medicine across cultures, arguably; but a parallel, if not alternative, narrative can be noticed in the Graeco-Roman tradition (and elsewhere), which I have called one of ‘delocalization’, discussed in Chapter 3:namely, the approach to disease, and especially mental disease, in terms of ‘holistic’ impact on the patient. This surfaces most prominently in some authors, but can also be noticed as a matter of discussion of the locus affectus in great thinkers like Galen. In this particular strand of the history of phrenitis the key authors who have reached us are the Roman author of De medicina, Celsus; the Atomist philosopher and doctor Asclepiades; and the thinkers of the Methodist tradition, represented most extensively by Caelius Aurelianus as far as phrenitis is concerned. This chapter surveys the relevant texts by Celsus and Caelius and the fragmentary evidence on Asclepiades, where an important cluster of shared principles emerges: an interest in psychology and in the health of the individual ‘as a whole’, a disregard for the localization of the disease in a specific body part, and of fever as a key pathological indicator, and a strong inclination towards psychotherapeutical and ‘soothing’ measures.

Chapter 2 begins with classical medicine, exploring the sources of so-called Hippocratic medicine, nosological and clinical, as well as other lesser-known authors from the fourth century BCE such as Diocles and Praxagoras. The limited material preserved on our topic from Hellenistic medicine (Herophilus and Erasistratus) is also surveyed. The richest information is preserved by the writings of the Hippocratic Corpus, where phrenitis first appears, and where it is richly described, both in nosological profiles and with reference to specific patients. Its core traits are by this point established: fever, localization in the chest , and an association with winter also showed by the co-morbidity with, and analogy to, pleuritis and pneumonia. Interestingly, the phren/phrenes are seldom mentioned in discussions of phrenitis, and when they are, not in their traditional, ‘Homeric’ psychological function, or directly as locus affectus, thus signalling a desire to distance the pathological narrative from traditional poetic models.