Dynamis, the Object of a Philosophical Medicine: An Epistemological Analysis of the Treatise On Ancient Medicine

Abstract

In this study, we propose to analyze the concept of dynamis in the treatise On Ancient Medicine that is part of the Corpus Hippocraticum. We will study it inasmuch as it constitutes a core concept on which a particular epistemological relationship between philosophy and medicine is resolved. There is an extensive hermeneutical tradition that presents this writing as the birth of a scientific medicine detached from all kinds of philosophical reflection. For the author of the letter would seem to behave like an empiricist who seeks as a doctor to get radically rid of philosophy or, at least, that ancient medicine that founds his medical practice in the philosophical theory of the elements. However, despite the partial success of this interpretive tradition, we believe that it runs the risk of offering a fragmentary and incomplete reading of the new epistemological statute that the author seeks to assign to medicine. In our opinion, the author, far from trying to expel the philosophy of practice and medical research, integrates it into a new model of scientific explanation.