Cicero’s political philosophy — II — Skepticism, wisdom, and politics

[image: Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno of Citium, representing the three philosophical schools well regarded by Cicero]

[This series is based on Walter Nicgorski’s Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy. See part I.]

There are two chief priorities in philosophy, according to Cicero in his Academica: judicium veri, the search for a criterion of truth, and finis bonorum, the determination of what is good. In other words: epistemology and ethics. After all, it’s all well and good to talk about what a happy or fulfilling life for a human being ought to be, but such talk is empty unless one can reasonably answer the obvious question: how do you know? (I’ve argued in the past that a very similar coupling with epistemology should apply also to another major branch of philosophy: metaphysics.)

It is because of this attention to the criterion of truth that Cicero clearly allied himself with one of the two major skeptical schools of the Hellenistic period, the so-called New Academy. He rejected the approach typical of the other skeptics, Pyrrhonism, as explained by Walter Nicgorski in his Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy: Cicero couldn’t “take seriously a skepticism which he found disabling because it undermines human responsibility by leaving man unable to know standards and goals of action.” That is why Cicero’s style of skepticism is often referred to as moderate or, better…