Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Diocles of Carystus on the method of dietetics 77 (7) .(8) (9) (10) (11) .’(12) (13) (14) .(1) Since there are two different kinds of starting-points of scientific demonstrations(for every demonstration and argument starts from either perceptionor clear insight), it is necessary for us, too, to use either one of these orboth for the purpose of judging the present problem. (2) Now, judgementsthrough reason are not equally easy for all people, since one has to be intelligentby nature and to be trained during youth in the disciplines thatsharpen reasoning. Therefore, it is better to start from experience, especiallyso because many doctors have declared that it is through experienceonly that the powers of food have been discovered. (3) Now, one mightperhaps despise the Empiricists, who have taken great pains over arguingcontentiously against the things which are discovered through reason;(4) however, Diocles, though being a Dogmatist, in the first book of his‘Matters of Health to Pleistarchus’ writes the following, and I quote:(5) ‘Those, then, who suppose that [substances] that have similar flavoursor smells or [degrees of] hotness or some other [quality] of this kind all