Introduction

This volume sets out to chart a path at the intersection between the histories of medicine and philosophy concerning a topic that is prominent in contemporary debates, i.e. the translation of physiology, and accordingly pathology, into numerical terms. In particular, the book discusses and contextualizes issues that are simultaneous of medical and philosophical import, such as the quantification of temperaments and complexions, the quantification of life processes and physiology, the quantification of embryology, the impact of quantified reasoning on the notions of virtue, vice, health, illness, personhood, certainty, as well as the various ways in which philosophers have rejected the reduction of life to a quantitative and numerical approach. This introduction offers an overview on the epistemological challenge of quantification in classical philosophy. It also provides a historical account of the practices and conceptualizations of quantification as applied to the domains of biology, physiology, and pathology.