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.
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