Ladies and gentlemen, it's a pleasure for me to be back in Erlangen after a little bit

more than one year, and I would like to thank the Consortium for Research in the Humanities

as well as the Faculty of Philosophy, or the Philosophical Faculty and its Dean for organizing

this book presentation. When I was asked to come to this event and to give a paper not

on the content of the book, but on something new related to the book, first of all, from

a not very modest perspective, I was a bit puzzled because I thought, what else can I

say? This is of course not true because this book was meant and still is a first step into

a field of research which has been neglected very much in philosophical scholarship, namely

the epistemology of the prognostic disciplines as Professor Fried has just explained to you.

So there is something new to say, and I will try to formulate tonight a somewhat provocative

thesis which may provoke protests or, as I hope, consent, but which will try to clarify

one aspect that came up in many of the chapters of the book that Professor Fried has just

very generously commented upon, namely the fact that in the Latin Middle Ages, and the

book only speaks, this is true about Latin, or the European Middle Ages, prognostic disciplines

were considered altogether not as sciences or disciplines based on causal knowledge,

but on science, on siegna, that is to say, astrology, divination, but also medicine and

meteorology, they were all understood as disciplines which do not proceed from causes, which is

the standard account of science in the Middle Ages, from causes which explain the phenomena

and the scrutiny, but they proceed by means of science. This may be surprising at a first

glance because it could make you think that they were judged equally on an epistemological

level, which is the prima facie impression, but as I will try to show, this is not true

because the concept of sign, of signum, which is used to describe the epistemological approach

of the prognostic disciplines in the Middle Ages is equivocal. It is not the same model

applied in medicine and meteorology as the one that is applied in divination and astrology.

So, there are two models. One thing that I learned in Erlangen, even though not with

proficiency because I was just here for three months, is to prepare a PowerPoint. So, I

brought a PowerPoint for you, which is not as good as if I would have had the assistance

of my colleagues here, but I did my best. There are two models of sign, of sign based

knowledge in the Middle Ages, the first of which goes back to Aristotle and to his prior

analytics, which are usually not emphasized very much in medieval, in scholarship or medieval

philosophy and in the theory of science, but which are important in this respect because

in the prior analytics, Aristotle says that there is indeed a kind of knowledge, of scientific

knowledge that proceeds by signs or semeia. Signs, he says in chapter 27 of the prior

analytics, can indeed be propositions which are used to prove something. And here you

have the three examples that Aristotle suggests, namely, the first example is a woman was pregnant

because she has milk, second example, wise men are good because Pitechus was good, and

third example, a woman is pregnant because she is solo. From these, Aristotle says, only

the first, these are called entumema by Aristotle, from these entumema, only the first can really

lead to a irrefutably true conclusion because in the other two, the terms of the propositions

are not in good relations, but this leads a bit astray from what I want to show here.

So only the first is a valid entumemon, as Aristotle would say, which in its full syllogistic

form would read as follows, and you have it on the slide, every woman who has milk was

pregnant, this woman has milk, therefore she was pregnant. In this very case, Aristotle

says, we are not only facing semeia, not only facing signs, I have to, I'll speak of signs,

and in my pronunciation, signs sometimes can mean ciencia and other times it can mean signum,

so you have to listen very carefully. In this case, we do not only have semeia or signs,

but we are faced with a tecmerion, and a tecmerion is translated in German as belek, whereas

in English, the Aristotle translators usually speak of a probative index, which is actually

a distinction that goes back to the medical tradition, already Hippocrates in the prognosticon

spoke of semeia on the one hand, which are signs which are valid but not so strong as