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The Empirical Element in the Methods of Early Greek Medical Writers and Herodotus: a Shared Epistemological Response

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2015

Donald Lateiner
Donald Lateiner*
Affiliation:
Ohio Wesleyan University
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Extract

Today one expects a truth or the truth to be characterized by objectivity, communicability, and unity. It should be testable, precisely expressed, consistent, and logical. To be all this, the truth must conform to the world of observation, and it must be based on data that can verify or falsify it. A truth may be general or particular, and research in different disciplines, of course, will pursue information and truths by different methods.

Some thinkers express dissatisfaction with the narrowness of this concept of truth, which is largely based on the specific needs of the inductive model of the natural sciences. It makes us uncomfortable, however, to say that the poet has one kind of truth, the philosopher another, the doctor, the physicist, and the geographer still others, and the historian another, yet autonomous truth. History is among the fields of study most subject to misapprehension, for it lies between human sciences and human arts, also between cases and laws.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antichthon , Volume 20 , 1986 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 1986

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