Matyas Havrda – författare

Determining what has gone wrong in a malfunctioning body and proposing an effective treatment requires expertise. Since antiquity, philosophers and doctors have wondered what sort of knowledge this expertise involves, and whether and how it can warrant its conclusions. Few people were as qualified to deal with these questions as Galen of Pergamum (129–ca. 216). A practising doctor with a keen interest in logic and natural science, he devoted much of his enormous literary output to the task of putting medicine on firm methodological grounds. At the same time he reflected on philosophical issues entailed by this project, such as the nature of experience, its relation to reason, the criteria of truth, and the methods of justification. This volume explores Galen''s contributions to (mainly scientific) epistemology, as they arise in the specific inquiries and polemics of his works, as well as their legacy in the Islamic world.

Determining what has gone wrong in a malfunctioning body and proposing an effective treatment requires expertise. Since antiquity, philosophers and doctors have wondered what sort of knowledge this expertise involves, and whether and how it can warrant its conclusions. Few people were as qualified to deal with these questions as Galen of Pergamum (129–ca. 216). A practising doctor with a keen interest in logic and natural science, he devoted much of his enormous literary output to the task of putting medicine on firm methodological grounds. At the same time he reflected on philosophical issues entailed by this project, such as the nature of experience, its relation to reason, the criteria of truth, and the methods of justification. This volume explores Galen''s contributions to (mainly scientific) epistemology, as they arise in the specific inquiries and polemics of his works, as well as their legacy in the Islamic world.

Galen’s On Demonstration (written c. 160 C.E.) was a tour de force of scientific methodology, loosely based on Aristotle’s (and Theophrastus’) Posterior Analytics and suited to the needs of a philosophically minded doctor. In its fifteen volumes, Galen outlined the theory of demonstration and the method of discovering premisses in natural-philosophical arguments, and rehearsed exemplary discussions to show how one should proceed when dealing with scientific problems. His polemics on issues in Aristotle’s physics attracted the attention of Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Greek Neoplatonists and made a significant impact on Arabic philosophy. On Demonstration is lost, but parts of it can be reconstructed from Greek and Arabic sources. This book is a collection of all available testimonia, some published for the first time. They are accompanied by notes, translation, and a substantive introduction that deals with the sources, the history of scholarship, the purpose, structure and contents of the treatise, and its Arabic reception. The book will be useful for students and scholars of ancient and medieval medicine and philosophy, as well as those engaged in the study of the classical world, Graeco-Arabic studies or Islamic studies.

The seventh book of the Stromateis is the culmination of Clement of Alexandria's ethic. Introduced as an apology of the piety of the perfect Christian (the 'gnostic'), it broaches such topics as divine pedagogy, angelology, superstition, prayer, assimilation to God, martyrdom, eschatology, and the criteria of orthodoxy. This volume contains sixteen studies dealing with all major themes of the seventh book and the method of their presentation. It includes a Clementine bibliography of the last fifteen years and two appendices concerned with Clement's 'Hymn to Christ the Saviour.' The publication may serve as a companion to the reader of Stromateis VII and as a compendium of contemporary scholarship dealing with major aspects of Clement's thought in general.