Galen's Institutio Logica

Abstract

just cited that in his book De Optima Secta he undertook to show not that the sect bearing the name of this or that philosophy or physician was best, but that only he who had an understanding of scientific demonstration and was without prejudice for or against any sect would, if willing to pursue truth and criticize the opinions of the other sects, be able to discover the best sect.This leads to the consequence that there is just one science responsible to the discovery of truth and not confined by philosophical dogma .There is not, as the disputes of the sects implied, a Stoic science or a Peripatetic science or any other special sect.Thus science, because it is a single thing, transcending the sects, is autonomous as well.This does not mean that science is divorced from philosophy.Galen's essay, "That the Best Physician is also a Philosopher" (Kuehn, I, 53-63), emphatically asserts the converse.The autonomy of science means that it is free from having to support a given philosophical position.Lastly, in this same essay Galen asserts the co-operative nature of science and its tendency to progress from generation to generation.He says:The fact that we are born later than the ancients and receive from them the arts in an advanced state, is no small advantage.At any rate, things that took Hippocrates a long time to discover, one can now learn in a few years and one can employ the rest of his life in the discovery of things that remain to be learned.A unified, autonomous, co-operative, and progressive enterprise, proceeding by rational methods to demonstrate the truth about things observed in this world, owes much to Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Chrysippus, but most of all it owes them the duty of correcting any errors they may have made and rescuing them from the discord into which the prejudice and even stupidity of their followers had led the schools that bore their names.Galen's understanding of scientific method is fundamentally derived from Aristotle and Theophrastus, but he has created a fundamentally different science from theirs through his reaction against the diaphonia of the schools.The hints of bad blood between Galen and Alexander have perhaps some reason.*The Institutio, then, may be a work that is absolutely unique, written not from the standpoint of any sect, but from the standpoint of an introduction to the method of science viewed in this new way.It is, moreover, not a mere schoolbook.Brief as it is, it contains indications of a man whose life's work has been the transformation of the traditional logic into the method appropriate to a new stage in the history of science.t * For these hints see I.

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