2026/01/20 by Johanna Helene Schmitt · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Classical Philosophy and Thought #History of Medicine Studies #Historical Philosophy and Science
paper · doi:10.30965/26664275-bja10139
openalex publication_date 2026/01/20 · openalex created_date 2026/01/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Abstract In antiquity, it was a lively debated question whether medicine requires logic. I argue that Sextus Empiricus, a Pyrrhonian skeptic and Empiricist, contributed to this debate with an argument to the effect that the solution of medical fallacies does not require logic. I reconstruct Sextus’ argument and suggest that a galenic argument to the effect that the solution of medical fallacies does require logic serves as a useful model for the kind of dogmatic argument Sextus wishes to oppose. Doing so gives us a version of the full skeptical opposition, and allows us to appreciate Sextus not only as a skeptic, but as a medical-philosophical thinker who argued for an empirical approach to medical fallacies in his own time. Furthermore, it brings Sextus and Galen into a hypothetical conversation which illuminates both the empirical and the dogmatic side of the debate about the use of logic in medicine.