Book contents
- Galen’s Epistemology
- Galen’s Epistemology
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Do I Wake or Sleep?’
- Chapter 2 Galen’s Empiricist Background
- Chapter 3 Discovery, Method, and Justification
- Chapter 4 From Problems to Demonstrations
- Chapter 5 Galen’s Notion of Dialectic
- Chapter 6 The Relationship between Perceptual Experience and Logos
- Chapter 7 Galen against Archigenes on the Pulse and What It Teaches Us about Galen’s Method of Diairesis
- Chapter 8 On Sense-Perception
- Chapter 9 Reason and Experience in Galen’s Moral Epistemology
- Chapter 10 The Arabic Alexandrians’ Summary of Galen’s On the Therapeutic Method
- Chapter 11 What Level of Certainty Can Medical Sign-Inference Reach?
- Bibliography
- Index of Passages
- General Subject Index
Chapter 1 - ‘Do I Wake or Sleep?’
Galen, Scepticism, and Dreams
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2022
- Galen’s Epistemology
- Galen’s Epistemology
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Do I Wake or Sleep?’
- Chapter 2 Galen’s Empiricist Background
- Chapter 3 Discovery, Method, and Justification
- Chapter 4 From Problems to Demonstrations
- Chapter 5 Galen’s Notion of Dialectic
- Chapter 6 The Relationship between Perceptual Experience and Logos
- Chapter 7 Galen against Archigenes on the Pulse and What It Teaches Us about Galen’s Method of Diairesis
- Chapter 8 On Sense-Perception
- Chapter 9 Reason and Experience in Galen’s Moral Epistemology
- Chapter 10 The Arabic Alexandrians’ Summary of Galen’s On the Therapeutic Method
- Chapter 11 What Level of Certainty Can Medical Sign-Inference Reach?
- Bibliography
- Index of Passages
- General Subject Index
Summary
Some disagreements are serious, others are footling. There are two disagreements about dreaming. They concern the questions ‘Do we wake or dream?’ and ‘Should we have confidence in dreams or in waking experience?’. The answer, said the Sceptics, is in each case: ‘Who knows?’. According to Galen, the sceptics aren’t serious, and no-one is genuinely puzzled by the questions — the disagreements are of the footling sort. That is true, and philosophically uninteresting. But the sceptical arguments which have exercised philosophers are, as Galen suggests, trifles; and in this case at least it is not difficult to let the fly out of the fly-bottle.
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- Galen's EpistemologyExperience, Reason, and Method in Ancient Medicine, pp. 13 - 31Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022