Il sapere congetturale tra medicina e retorica. Un’indagine su semeion e tekmerion

Abstract

In this essay we focus on the epistemology of Hippocratic medicine starting from the analysis of two terms on which scholars have paid attention, semeion and tekmerion (and related verbs semainein and tekmairesthai ), connecting them to the notion of eikos. Our goal is to examine the conjectural and fallible nature of human knowledge starting from the peculiar case of ancient Greek medicine. In order to do this, we will make a comparison with another techne that played a crucial role in Greek culture: rhetoric. After all, if this comparison medicine-rhetoric may sound surprising for modern scholars, in the Greek world it was instead widespread and it is not by chance that the terms of our investigation were widely used in both technai.