Book contents
- Galen’s Epistemology
- Galen’s Epistemology
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Do I Wake or Sleep?’
- Chapter 2 Galen’s Empiricist Background
- Chapter 3 Discovery, Method, and Justification
- Chapter 4 From Problems to Demonstrations
- Chapter 5 Galen’s Notion of Dialectic
- Chapter 6 The Relationship between Perceptual Experience and Logos
- Chapter 7 Galen against Archigenes on the Pulse and What It Teaches Us about Galen’s Method of Diairesis
- Chapter 8 On Sense-Perception
- Chapter 9 Reason and Experience in Galen’s Moral Epistemology
- Chapter 10 The Arabic Alexandrians’ Summary of Galen’s On the Therapeutic Method
- Chapter 11 What Level of Certainty Can Medical Sign-Inference Reach?
- Bibliography
- Index of Passages
- General Subject Index
Chapter 2 - Galen’s Empiricist Background
A Study of the Argument in On Medical Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2022
- Galen’s Epistemology
- Galen’s Epistemology
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Do I Wake or Sleep?’
- Chapter 2 Galen’s Empiricist Background
- Chapter 3 Discovery, Method, and Justification
- Chapter 4 From Problems to Demonstrations
- Chapter 5 Galen’s Notion of Dialectic
- Chapter 6 The Relationship between Perceptual Experience and Logos
- Chapter 7 Galen against Archigenes on the Pulse and What It Teaches Us about Galen’s Method of Diairesis
- Chapter 8 On Sense-Perception
- Chapter 9 Reason and Experience in Galen’s Moral Epistemology
- Chapter 10 The Arabic Alexandrians’ Summary of Galen’s On the Therapeutic Method
- Chapter 11 What Level of Certainty Can Medical Sign-Inference Reach?
- Bibliography
- Index of Passages
- General Subject Index
Summary
The chapter focuses on the methodological debate between Empiricist and Rationalist schools of medicine, as portrayed in Galen’s early treatise On Medical Experience (Med.Exp.). This dense and philosophically-sophisticated text, preserved for the most part only in an Arabic translation, supposedly presents the substance of a dispute, witnessed by the young Galen, between his Rationalist teacher Pelops and an Empiricist opponent, about the respective roles of experience and reason in medicine. Analysing the arguments on both sides, in particular as they concern the question of inductive generalisation and the nature and validity of the empirical procedure known as epilogimos, the chapter shows how Galen’s presentation of a sequence of responses and counter-responses between the two protagonists serves to prefigure his own complex and hugely influential synthesis of the empirical and rationalist procedures in his own mature methodology.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Galen's EpistemologyExperience, Reason, and Method in Ancient Medicine, pp. 32 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
- 1
- Cited by