Workshops

Workshop B07 – Categorizing Knowledge and Knowledge Reference in Galen: Perspectives from different fields

The aim of this workshop is to initiate an exchange between experts from the fields of classical philology, history of ancient medicine, ancient philosophy, and historical linguistics about the different types of knowledge which Galen and Ancient Greek medical authors reference in their texts, considering also their functions and interrelations with external parameters.

One of the first steps of project B07 consists in the collection and categorization of linguistic expressions encoding evidentiality, i.e. the source or type of information on the basis of which a proposition is uttered. In most Indo-European languages, this functional domain is represented by different means along the lexicon-grammar cline; in Ancient Greek we find e.g. adverbials (such as φανερῶς ‘clearly’), modal particles (such as ἄρα, encoding reportative or inferential notions), constructions with experiential verbs (such as ὁράω ‘see’) or verbal moods (such as the optative).

We would like to discuss the different types of evidence emerging from Ancient Greek medical and especially Galen’s texts (e.g. direct vs indirect, reported vs inferred evidence) and the linguistic and rhetorical strategies associated to them across registers and text types.

Schedule:

– Thursday, 9 Oct 2025, 09:15 – 17:30
– Friday, 10 Oct 2025, 09:30 – 13:00

Download the workshop program

Contact:

• Prof. Dr. Theresa Maria Roth
  theresa.maria.roth@hu-berlin.de
• Dr. Matteo Macciò
  matteo.maccio@hu-berlin.de

(see website of project B07)