Galen's Theory of Scientific Method in Medicine

• Authors: Swiderek J.
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The article presents Galen's system of scientific medicine and some problems of its top-level principles. He endeavored to build an axiomatic and deductive system of medicine. Methods of reasoning had to respect the laws of logic; they were to follow from certain premises and to discover new truths. The lower-level premises are often secured by good empirical methods. They were not questioned, but they had not enjoyed the status of axioms. The top-level principles that have to do the work of indemonstrable primary premises are self-evident axioms and definitions. The definitions generally fulfilled the required conditions though Galen himself showed that they owed their status of being self-evident and valid to empirical research. The axioms have to be non-definitional and self-evident but as some of them are either vacuous or highly problematic, Galen's top-level medical indemonstrables are inadequate for that task.

Keywords

EN

AXIOMATIC SYSTEM; DEDUCTIVE SYSTEM OF MEDICINE; GALEN'S SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE SYSTEM

Discipline

• SCIENCE_OF_SCIENCE: SCIENCE OF SCIENCE

• Publisher: Science Studies Committee, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Zagadnienia Naukoznawstwa
• Year: 2007
• Volume: 43
• Issue: 2(172)
• Pages: 239-248
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Swiderek J.

• J. Swiderek, Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej w Lublinie, Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii, pl. M. Curie-Sklodowskiej 4, 20-031 Lublin, Poland

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

07PLAAAA03196604