"They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases"
About this Quote
Medicine, Plato suggests, can hide its uncertainty behind fashion. The jab at "very strange, and newfangled, names" isn’t just a cranky complaint about jargon; it’s an early diagnosis of a timeless cultural maneuver: rename the problem, and you get to look like you understand it. In a world where authority is often performed rather than earned, technical language becomes costume. The word "certainly" sharpens the knife, implying the evidence is obvious to any attentive observer, while "newfangled" frames innovation as suspect - not because new knowledge is impossible, but because novelty is easy to counterfeit.
Plato’s broader project is always about distinguishing real knowledge from its persuasive imitations. In his view, sophists sell verbal sophistication as wisdom; here, practitioners of healing (or at least their less principled cousins) risk doing the same. Diagnostic labels can be clarifying, but they can also be a kind of reputational laundering: if the name sounds learned, the healer sounds learned, even when the underlying grasp of causes remains thin.
Context matters: Greek medicine was moving from temple-based cures and folk explanation toward more systematic observation, and that transition created a market for expertise. Plato is wary of expertise that can’t justify itself in rational terms - explanations that are more linguistic than logical. The line lands because it’s about power: whoever controls the names controls the story of what’s wrong, and therefore who gets to fix it.
Plato’s broader project is always about distinguishing real knowledge from its persuasive imitations. In his view, sophists sell verbal sophistication as wisdom; here, practitioners of healing (or at least their less principled cousins) risk doing the same. Diagnostic labels can be clarifying, but they can also be a kind of reputational laundering: if the name sounds learned, the healer sounds learned, even when the underlying grasp of causes remains thin.
Context matters: Greek medicine was moving from temple-based cures and folk explanation toward more systematic observation, and that transition created a market for expertise. Plato is wary of expertise that can’t justify itself in rational terms - explanations that are more linguistic than logical. The line lands because it’s about power: whoever controls the names controls the story of what’s wrong, and therefore who gets to fix it.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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