I argue for the view that the scientific model which Plato consistently had in mind when sharpening his main ethical theory was medicine. Moreover, I ascribe to Plato a “medical model of ethics”. A careful examination of this model reveals how Plato appropriates several medical concepts and ideas by employing two central methodological devices in his thought: dialectical transposition and analogical characterisation. In discussing them, I identify different kinds of medical references in the dialogues –not all medical references in Plato (...) have the same methodological status– and draw greater attention to the most recurrent medical analogies in them. More generally, the paper is also meant to provide a case study of the complex relationship between medicine and philosophy in Antiquity by examining in a new light the various ways in which the former served as an epistemological and ethical model for the latter. (shrink)

The question of determining the genuine works of Hippocrates, a topic already much discussed by the ancient commentators, still continues to be actively debated, although the disagreements among scholars remain, it seems, almost as wide as ever. In comparatively recent times, Edelstein's IIEPI AEPQN and two subsequent studies of his written in the 1930s and marked a turning-point in that they presented a particularly clear and comprehensive statement of the sceptical view, according to which Hippocrates is, as Wilamowitz put it (...) long ago, ‘ein beriihmter Name ohne den Hintergrund irgend einer Schrift’. (shrink)