Kingship, Symposia, Gift-Exchange: The Scientific Self at Ptolemaic Courts
By Marquis Berrey
What was the habitus of the experimenter broadly understood in Alexandrian
medicine, such as the court physicians Andreas Carystius (d. 217 BCE) or Apollonius
Citiensis (fl. 75 BCE)? The medical author's ethical self-presentation -- a discursive
construction of truth-telling, discrimination between explanatory alternatives,
observational ability, honorific addresses -- is the scientific self (Daston and Galison
2007). Scholars of early modernity have noted the rhetoric and society of genteel
Hippocratic Experimentation and Poetic Simile in Homer
By Ralph Rosen
On several occasions in the course of an argument the Hippocratic treatises recommend corroborative procedures to their readers that closely resemble what we would call an empirical ‘experiment’. Airs, Waters, Places, for example, offers two in succession in ch. 8, which discusses rain water and water from snow. In the case of rain water, the author asserts that the sun draws up the finest parts and leaves behind the heavier, and that the same process holds for the human body, namely that the sun draws up the lightest part of its humors.
The Sliding Scale of Experiment-Kinds
By Paul Keyser
Scholars contemplating the nature of scientific endeavor since ca 1600 AD have often argued that
“experiment” is a distinctive or even definitive feature of “science,” and correlatively that “experiment”
was absent in prior endeavors, which are thus excluded from “science.” However, the claim that
science emerges like a sudden breakthrough assumes either the emergence of new cognitive capacities,
or the new deployment of existing capacities, and neither hypothesis admits a sensible account of how
that could occur (Lloyd 2009, 159–160).
Cutting Words: Polemical Dimensions of Galen's Anatomical Experiments
By Luis Alejandro Salas
Galen of Pergamum (129- ca. 216 CE) often writes about the need for experimentation, peira, in epistemic medical claims (e.g., Pecc.Dig. V 68; SMT XI 459-61; Comp.Med.Gen. XIII 376; Hipp.Med XVIIb 61-2). In these contexts and others, Galen's discussion of experimentation and of his experiments regularly is part of a polemic against rival theorists, in which knowledge production is a means to an end. To what extent are the heuristic and agonistic functions of Galen's anatomical experiments separable?