ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the conflict between reason and experience in Greek thought, from the Presocratics, through the Greek rationalists (Plato, Aristotle and his Peripatetic successors, the Stoics), to Galen and his reception in the Arabic tradition. Special attention is paid to the Empirist tradition of Greco-Roman medicine, as an example of “memorism” (Frede) or “epistemic modesty.” In response to the Aristotelian doctrine of definition and demonstration, which denied that individual things, persons, and events are susceptible of true “knowledge,” some doctors, craftsman, and “mystic” schools such as the Islamic Sufis, and even Avicenna in some of his works, had recourse to alternative traditions that stressed the importance of experience, emphasizing the value of first-person “witnessing” over rationalist theorizing. In this sense, it is argued that empiricism may be compatible with some forms of “mysticism.” Thus, problems of translation, the limits of language and the ineffability of individuals, and the complementary tension between different types of “knowing,” are closely linked throughout the epistemological history of the West.
