Source edition
Galen. Eine Streitschrift Galen's gegen die empirischen Ärzte. Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse. Schöne, Hermann, editor. Berlin: Reimer, 1901.
Source data
A Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies · CC BY-SA 4.0
Cloned and adapted by Humanitext, with ongoing edits.
Summary
This work is a philosophical and scientific treatise dealing with the epistemological foundations of medicine, specifically focusing on the role and limits of "experience." The author begins by refuting an interlocutor who denies the existence of a phenomenon simply because its underlying mechanism cannot be explained, drawing on the words of Democritus to expose this self-contradiction. Rather than relying on Platonic theories of art (techne), the author cleverly turns the Empiricists' own assumptions against them. A central focus of the debate is the inherent contradiction in the Empiricist concept of "in most cases," as the author questions the precise number of observations required to establish such a standard. Ultimately, by examining whether such standards exist in individual cases, the work exposes the invalidity of arguments that contradict self-evident facts and reveals the fundamental flaws of dogmatic empiricism.