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Profiles in skepticism: Carneades
The philosopher for whom belief comes in degrees
One of ancient skepticism’s towering figures was without a doubt Carneades of Cyrene (214–129 BCE), who became scholarch of the Academy little over a century after Arcesilaus turned Plato’s school in a skeptical direction. Like other skeptics associated with the Academy, Carneades’ driving idea was to go back to Socrates’ dialectical approach to philosophy and to his famous admission that he didn’t know much. Socrates, according to the Academics, was the original skeptic.
Arguably, Socrates had devoted himself to the pursuit of three aims: (i) making people realize that, despite their assumptions to the contrary, they believe a lot of things that are not true; (ii) subtly hinting at the most likely answers to the various philosophical problems being debated; while (iii) hiding his own convictions so not to unduly influence his interlocutors. Carneades followed this same three-pronged approach to philosophical dialectics, one that is practiced still today under the broad term of “Socratic method.”
Carneades, like Arcesilaus before him, focused his criticism on the dominant school of the time: Stoicism, and particularly on Stoic epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with how we know things. More precisely, he rejected the Stoic idea of…
