The Limits of Demonstrative Reasoning in Pharmacological Knowledge: Averroes’s Colliget and Its Reception by Dino del Garbo

Abstract

This article explores Averroes’s epistemological reflections on pharmacology as presented in Book V of the Colliget, with a particular focus on his arguments on demonstrative reasoning. It examines how Averroes highlights the limits of syllogistic demonstration in drug investigation and the essential role of experience in validating conjectural knowledge obtained through reasoning. The study then traces the reception of this framework within the Western medical scholastic tradition, using Dino del Garbo’s Expositio super canones generales de virtutibus medicamentorum simplicium secundi Canonis Avicennae as a case study to show how he inherits and rearticulates Averroes’s epistemological stance, preserving the distinction between the first three medicinal virtues (accessible through reasoning) and the fourth (accessible only through experience). Overall, Averroes’s treatment of pharmacology integrates rational inference