Pensare i suoni, descrivere la musica: λόγος e αἴσθησις nella scienza armonica di età ellenistica

The paper provides a brief overview concerning what survives of Hellenistic theoretical reflections on music, in which a crucial role is held by the debate on reason and perception as epistemological tools for the study of melodic sounds and their interaction. The extant writings display not only the importance of this aspect in order to identify and distinguish many 'schools' of harmonics, depending on the role each of them attributed to reason and/or perception, but also that this issue is intrinsically related to the debate on the nature of sound, usually conceived as 'quantitative', i.e. mathematical, according to a mostly rational approach, and 'qualitative' by those who reject reason in favour of a perception-guided approach.