A popular saying attributed to Aristotle states that ‘medicine begins where philosophy ends’—but this principle does not seem entirely valid for the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when medicine and philosophy were considered to be integral parts of the same branch of knowledge. For this reason, although today medicine and philosophy are clearly distinct disciplines, historians of ideas cannot study them entirely separately. Indeed, since the early modern era was a period of profound revision of knowledge, probably only a (...) truly interdisciplinary investigation can identify the conceptual shifts and transfers capable of reinstating medicine in its fundamental role in the development of civilisation and modern thought, in particular as a model of a rational knowledge aimed at improving the social good through a fitting interpretation of experience. This article intends to offer arguments in support of such a historiographical approach, and to illustrate certain interesting methodological ideas that emerge from a study in which the history of philosophy and history of medicine cross-pollinate. (shrink)

This paper analyses the available eyewitness accounts and documents relating to the young Francisco Sanchez’s sojourn in Italy with the aim of highlighting the influence of this experience on his education and on his particular form of scepticism. The issue of the certainty of geometry, addressed in his letter to Clavio, is an example of a theme that the Portuguese philosopher must have picked up from a typical debate in Italian academic circles at that time. Even more enlightening for an (...) exact understanding of his Quod nihil scitur, however, are the contemporary discussions on the epistemological status of medicine and on the reliability of traditional Galenic pathology. They show that, instead of being the expression of a radical lack of confidence in every form of knowledge, nihil sciri denotes simply a rejection of the perfect cognition of things and a receptiveness towards a model of ‘weaker’ knowledge, inspired precisely by the exercise of medical practice. (shrink)