Scientific Realism and the Objects of Medicine in the Hippocratic Treatise On the Art

Abstract

On the Art is a polemical treatise in the Hippocratic Corpus that has been dated to 450 – 400 BCE. As a polemical work, the author defends the existence of medicine against detractors. I argue that the author employs two arguments for scientific realism in defense of medicine that are among the earliest known. First, I situate the work in the context of the sophistic movement and the nomos vs. physis debate. Second, I analyze the two arguments in On the Art II, and I argue by contraposing spatiotemporalist, constructivist, and realist interpretations of the passage that the author grapples with the semantic stretch of the word εἶδος. Thereafter, I propose the arguments are best understood as indispensability arguments in which medical realism is defended in order to explain clinical practice.

Keywords

• scientific realism
• medicine
• ancient greek philosophy
• sophism
• abstract objects
• ontology