Like their forerunners, post-Hellenistic doctors also grappled with the unclear boundaries between healthy versus pathologic sleep, and consciousness-unconsciousness. Furthermore, they incorporated new diseases and redefined others - like lethargy - that were specifically associated with this process. Celsus considered sleep as all-or-nothing phenomenon, without recognising different depths. Regarding mental capacities, he subsumed most of them in his idea of mens/animus. Aretaeus, on the other hand did conceive different depths of sleep, and his eclectic method enabled him to find alternative pathophysiological explanations to characterise several of its main features. Similarly, although his organization of mental capacities varied according to what he was explaining, the opposition gnômê-aisthêsis was important in his idea of mind.

In this chapter I apply the theoretical framework developed in the previous chapters to the case of the Cyprus conflict. First, I offer a short narration of the Cyprus conflict as background knowledge to the analysis that will follow that concerns the ontogenesis of social representations of the Cyprus conflict in the context of evolving educational policies of collective memory and history teaching since 1974. In particular, I propose that students, depending on their developmental level, reconstruct a collective memory promulgated for years as a certain hegemonic historical narrative of collective struggle to undo the injustices caused by a collective trauma. I also present research findings from our lab spanning the years 2003-2023 regarding the evolution and crystallisation of significant structures of representation in this period touching upon issues of change, resistance and continuity.

Charis Psaltis (this volume) states that the direct predecessors of the theoretical framework of genetic psychology he is developing in his comprehensive chapter can be found in Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology, Lucien Goldmann’s Genetic Structuralism, and Serge Moscovici’s Genetic Model of Social Influence. The ideas of these scholars were further elaborated in Gerard Duveen’s contributions directed towards the advancement of genetic social psychology. Charis Psaltis states that common threads binding these approaches together were the concepts of the dialectics of genesis and structure, part-whole relations, and temporality. Psaltis emphasises that these common threads were linked with the fundamental epistemological questions that had already preoccupied philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg W. F. Hegel, and Karl Marx. In this commentary I shall suggest that while the questions about the nature of knowledge bind these philosophers together, their proposed answers surpass their common links because, depending on their epistemological presuppositions, their answers are based on diverse concepts concerning the nature of knowledge. Consequently, these answers were reflected in different ways in the contributions of Piaget, Goldmann, Moscovici and Duveen in their studies of the dialectics of genesis and structure.

This chapter develops a theory of singular compositional explanation. The core idea is that a singular compositional explanation is a representation of an ontological dependence relation between entities mentioned in a representation of an explanans and entities mentioned in a representation of an explanandum. The account is realist in the sense that it postulates a real relation among entities in the world that would have been rejected by logical empiricists. Explanations are singular in the sense that the explanandum entity is a single spatiotemporal particular and the explanans entities are individual spatiotemporal particulars. The explanations are compositional in the sense that the explanandum entity is an individual, an individual property instance, or an individual activity instance that is explained by sets of lower level individuals, lower level property instances, or lower level activity instances.

4 Post-Hellenistic authors present a more compartmentalised idea of diseases in general and of impaired consciousness in particular. Unlike the Hippocratics, who barely discussed mental illness, these authors did distinguish impaired consciousness from mental illness through a classificatory system of dichotomic oppositions, additionally they discussed new conditions which are not mentioned in the HC. In most theorisations, perceptions play an increasingly relevant role to understand these conditions.

In the Introduction I set out to explore accounts of impaired consciousness in ancient medical texts through two axes. In the longitudinal thematic one, I aimed to contrast the different approaches to the topic against their respective medical contexts, and to establish relationships between texts, authors and periods. The transversal axis, on the other hand, focused on how the development of ideas and debates around impaired consciousness illuminates our understanding of other concepts about ancient medicine in general, and about the alluded to authors in particular. In summarising the main findings of this research I will first focus on the transversal axis, and then I shall add my final remarks about impaired consciousness itself.

This chapter draws some broad contrasts between the theory of singular compositional abduction and various Peircean accounts of abduction. In brief, Peirce and the Neo-Peirceans believe that scientists use abduction to introduce hypotheses, whereas I maintain that scientists sometimes use singular compositional abduction to confirm hypotheses. Peirce and the Neo-Peirceans have proposed that scientists hypothetico-deductively confirm hypotheses. Further, neither Peirce nor the Neo-Peirceans develop a theory of compositional explanation suitable for the case studies reviewed in Chapters 5 and 6. Moreover, their project is not focused on providing an account of scientific experimental work.

Hippocratic doctors discussed two forms of total loss of consciousness. The most common one, where they equated fainting with a separation of the soul, and another form - independent from the psuchê - where they saw the concurrence of numerous independent bodily symptoms that ended up in a swoon. The momentary disruption of cognitive functions that occurred during fainting, and their definite cessation with death made them conceive the soul as both a broad notion that subsumed numerous mental capacities (which transiently separated from the body during swoons) and as a life force that abandoned the body for good with death.

This brief concluding chapter provides a broad brush summary of the book. If historians and philosophers of science are interested in how scientists confirm compositional hypotheses, then an important resource is the scientific literature wherein scientists appeal to experimental results. This is where the theory of singular compositional abduction provides a novel account. The book ends on a note about the incompleteness of the theory. For one thing, the theory does not provide an account of how functional magnetic resonance imaging might be used to confirm compositional hypotheses.