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Dr.
Richard Baldwin, Gulf Coast Community College.
This page last updated
08/17/10
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SKEPTICS
I. Pyrrho of Elis (360-270 B.C.) taught that
the key to happiness is to suspend judgment on every issue in light of our
inability to get to the truth beyond the appearance of things. The "salvation"
offered by Skepticism would have little appeal for the person who had been
captured in battle and sold into slavery. It would promise nothing to the
person whose village had been destroyed and who was now part of the desperate
urban poor. It could be a sort of salvation, though, for some intellectuals,
who were frustrated at their inability to make sense of the world. It relieved
them of that necessity and therefore of their frustration ("perturbedness").
"The benefit of being a Skeptic is described as not being perturbed, which seems
much like the ataraxia of the Epicureans and the apάtheia of the
Stoics” (Marietta 162).
II. Carneades (214-129 B.C.) "One has no
access to objects independently of one's images or impressions--this is what the
Epicureans and Stoics themselves maintained--and consequently it would be
impossible for anyone to have reason to believe that sense-experience ever gives
trustworthy information about objects. There is no criterion, either internal
or external, by which accurate images or impressions can be distinguished from
inaccurate ones. The logical outcome of these theories is complete Skepticism
about sense-experience, and about knowledge generally insofar as
sense-experience is supposed to be its basis....Carneades, however, argues that
the intellect is no more to be trusted than the senses...the equally good
arguments that may be produced on both sides of every question...show that our
power of reasoning cannot be trusted to give us the truth about anything....A
Skeptic suspends judgment on every issue, including the issue of the legitimacy
of Skepticism" (Jordan 227-8).
A. OBJECTION An obvious objection to
such complete Skepticism, argue the Stoics, is that a complete suspending of
judgment would entail a complete suspending of activity,
and without activity (e.g., the activity of taking nourishment) no one could
long exist. Before we act we must experience some impression to which we assent
as accurate and therefore it is the height of absurdity for Skeptics to argue
that accurate impressions can never with any confidence be identified. A
complete Skeptic would exist--briefly--in a state of total paralysis.
Carneades is especially notable among
Skeptics for his novel response to this objection. He countered that certainty
is not necessary for action; probability is enough. According to Cicero,
Carneades interpreted wisdom in terms of probability--the wise doubt all
impressions but act on and advise others on the basis of probable impressions
(which Stoics accept as certainty). But Carneades only said this to answer his
critics, he really was a Skeptic.
B. FREE WILL Cicero says Carneades
would insist Skeptics are free from dogma and masters like Zeno. In fact, he
argued for free will v. Stoics' Destiny! Cause/effect does not have to be an
unbroken chain. There may be independent causes like human will.
C. VIRTUE Carneades also objected to
the Stoic claim that virtue is the chief good and they were indifferent to
health, good opinion of others, freedom from pain, etc.
D. REASON If human reason is a gift
from the gods, as the Stoics argued, Carneades pointed out that the benevolence
of the gods then is questionable. Cicero's dialogue on
The Nature of the Gods,
presents Carnedes as arguing that in real life bad men prosper while things
often turn out badly for good me, so that it appears the gods make no difference
in their judgment between good and bad. That is, the Stoics have the same
problem Christians do with explaining the problem of evil with a benevolent god.
E. THE GODS Evidently Carneades did
believe in the gods, though. Cicero tells us that Carneades did not deny that
the gods exist, but just intended to show that the Stoics have no real
explanation of them. Like many Romans, the mere fact that the gods represented
the traditional belief of their ancestors was for him reason enough to affirm
the gods' existence. The Stoics, who supposedly despise authority and appeal to
reason, fail to see that religion would be in sad shape if it needed proof by
arguments, which always raise more questions than they answer, especially when
it comes to the problem of evil.
III. Pyrrhonian Skeptics: Aenesidemus (1st
c. AD) and Sextus Empiricus (c.200 AD)
A. Aenesidemus argued that true
Skeptics do not assert or "determine" or "lay down" anything whatever, "not even
the laying down of nothing." "Skeptics advance arguments to show that `We
assent to nothing' is a dubious a statement as any other, `so that after
destroying others it turns round and destroys itself, like a purge which drives
the substance out and then in its turn is itself eliminated and destroyed'"
(Jordan 233). He made lists of various modes (tropes)
of skeptical argumentation, e.g. his famous Ten Tropes designed to induce
suspension of judgment chiefly with respect to sense-experience" (Jordan 234).
There arises, though, a new perplexity created by the Ten Tropes.
"Disagreement,
Infinite Regress, Circular Reasoning, and Hypothesis are but four additional
modes of attacking `dogmatism' of every kind. And if we take the gist of the
Ten to be the inescapable relativity
of our sensory
impressions, we may add this to the four new tropes for a set of five `supertropes'
containing the whole arsenal of Skepticism in a compact form. Such a list of
Five Tropes is said to have been drawn up by a successor of Aenesidemus' named
Agrippa" (Jordan 236).
B. Sextus Empiricus “is our best
ancient authority on the history and doctrines of Skepticism, and he contributed
much to our knowledge of other Hellenistic philosophies. Sextus advocated
suspension of judgment as a way to achieve ‘unperturbedness’” (Marietta 165)
"`The originating cause of Skepticism is, we say, the hope of attaining
quietude. Men of talent, who were perturbed by the contradictions in things and
in doubt as to which of the alternatives they ought to accept, were led on to
inquire what is true in things and what false, hoping by the settlement of this
question to attain quietude....[But] we end by ceasing to dogmatize'....the man
who determines nothing as to what is naturally good or bad neither shuns nor
pursues anything eagerly; and in consequence he is unperturbed" (Jordan 239-40).
Tranquility of soul, for the Stoics an
accompaniment of virtue, is for Sextus an accompaniment of "mental suspense."
This explains how Skeptics were able to manage their practical affairs: they
did what compelled their assent, however dubious it seemed from a philosophical
point of view. That is, they lived in accordance with their instinctive
feelings. “This sort of Skepticism does not lead to inability to act and
respond intelligently to events as they appear to be. It is a pragmatic
approach rather than a doctrinal approach” (Marietta 165).
Having a comparatively small following,
even at its peak, Pyrrhonian Skepticism died out entirely in the third century
A.D., and for 1,200 years little was even known of it. In the fifteenth
century, however, Sextus' Outlines
and Against the Dogmatists were rediscovered. Pyrrhonian arguments then
began to influence religious and philosophical controversies that were to have a
large hand in shaping the development of modern thought.
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