| Summary: | The paper analyses how Plato describes the medical thought and practice as a pattern for the dialectical practice of logon didonai. In the Hippocratic corpus, one finds the idea that the doctor must reason and find causal connections that the patient has not noticed ; because he knows his patient’s past, the physician can foresee his future, and thus justify the therapy he proposes. Thus, τέχνη is not frontally opposed to ἐμπειρία, which is a direct knowledge based on the intentional observation of events that repeat themselves. In the Gorgias, by contrast, Plato opposes τέχνη to ἐμπειρία, making medicine a τέχνη and lowering rhetoric to the status of a mere ἐμπειρία, reduced to an activity that cannot account for itself, and which has only pleasure as its goal. This opposition gives medicine considered as a τέχνη a true status, but separates it from all ἐμπειρία. However, Plato’s opposition to ἐμπειρία must be attenuated, for he thinks that the recourse to experience is necessary when a general theory must be applicated to individual cases, even though only after the elaboration of the theory. Plato finds this feature in the medical practice and uses it for the construction of a dialectical, viz. philosophical rhetoric.
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