Epistemic virtues are many, including truth, objectivity, justification, and precision, each with its historical evolution and scientific practice.

The “expe­rience” family of epistemic virtues, beginning with experience itself, includes experiment, empiricism, induction, empirical evidence, probability, and fal- libilism. Empiricism was born in reaction to rationalism, and its virtues tend to be antithetical, such as the virtue of not being rationalistic, not being de­ductive or speculative, not derived from tradition, books, or reasoning un­controlled by experience.

“Concepts,” wrote Soren Kierkegaard, “just like individuals, have their his­tory and are no more able than they to resist the dominion of time, but in and through it all they nevertheless harbor a kind of homesickness for the place of their birth.” The birthplace of empiricism is ancient Greek medicine, and history's empiricisms are not uncommonly homesick for the wisdom European civilization acquired from ancient medicine.¹

Working on their own and not attracting the attention of elite philosophers, ancient physicians discovered how experience duly controlled can be evi­dence of unseen causes. They searched for methods that would make this experience an instrument of medical knowledge. Advances came slowly. The philosophers mostly did not want to be empirical, and down to the eight­eenth century the word “empiric” meant a quack. Experience (emperia), like perception (aisthesis), was comprehensively disqualified by Greek ra­tionalism, chiefly Plato and Aristotle. For these philosophers, experience is unfree, corporeal, passive, and passionate, in contrast to the contemplative tranquility of rational mind (nous). Experience commingles contemptibly with the contemptible body, serving its servile needs. Limited to superficial appearances, it is incapable of scientific cognition (episteme).

Physicians cannot take that view of their knowledge. Galen, prince of an­cient doctors, also represents the acme of ancient thought on methods of inquiry, and no one except Aristotle is as influential for later natural philos­ophy. Medical themes and the contribution of medical thought on the use of experience arise again and again in history's empiricisms. I invite you to

Empiricisms. Barry Allen, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197508930.001.0001.

watch for them, and I will introduce them whenever I can. Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Robert Boyle, and John Locke all draw from medical thought. There is probably nothing more decisive for Locke’s evaluation of knowledge than his experience as a physician. William James, philosopher of radical empiricism, is another physician. I make this point to justify the somewhat intricate reflection on ancient medicine that follows. It is a needed step to make later connections cogent.