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On Systematicity. How to Write (Ancient Greek) Science

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Published/Copyright: July 15, 2016
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Abstract:

This article asks what it takes to make the treatment of a given topic and thus a scientific or scholarly text ‘systematic’. After some remarks upon systems theory, the paper illustrates systematicity, the quality of being systematic, by readings of the Hippocratic On Breaths and De Morbis II, Porphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle’s Categories, and Ps.-Galen’s Medical definitions. Systematicity turns out to be a result of epistemic and rhetorical practices to the same degree. It rests upon the authors’ ambition to transform the epistemic structure of the objects into equivalent rhetorical forms, which, in turn, become convincing because they hint at the objects’ epistemic structures.


Article Note:

This paper originated in a talk given at a Princeton conference in 2013, held in honor of Heinrich von Staden, to whose work and personality this paper is a modest tribute. My heartfelt thanks go to the organizers of that conference, Brooke Holmes and Joshua Katz. Furthermore, I would like to thank Anna-Maria Gasser, Lowell Edmunds, Loren Marsh, Sebastian Luft, and the anonymous readers of Trends for their help with this paper.


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Published Online: 2016-7-15
Published in Print: 2016-7-15

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