| Sumario: | What, for Galen, are powers, and how are they to be properly individuated? The notion of a power or capacity (dunamis) does a great deal of work in Galen. As in Aristotle, the concept of adunamisis tightly linked with that of anenergeia, but these are not simply logical abstractions. Rather the naturalenergeiaiare the basic functional activities of the animal body and its parts, and just as health consists in proper functioning, so disease is defined as ‘damage to one of the naturalenergeiaiof the body’, and these activities are damaged when something interferes with its relateddunamis. Here I try to make sense of the apparently very different things Galen says regardingdunameis. For example, he says that they do not inhabit our bodies as we do our houses; that is, presumably, they are not substantial or hypostasized; rather they are properties of us. Equally, he is perfectly clear that they are relational items: a power is a power for affecting something determinate in some determinate way. They are also said to be efficient causes. But it is not clear how these different strands fit together.
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