Academic Skeptics
Fundamentally, the Skeptics attempted to deny knowledge, including epistemology and metaphysics. Their view was adopted in modern times by
David Hume
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
(Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section XII)
Arcesilaus, the sixth head or
scholarch of the Platonic Academy. Under him, the Academy returned to the Socratic method and engaged in negative dialectics that denied the possibility of
knowledge (
akatalêpsia). Arcesilaus realized that he could not say that he knows nothing without making a knowledge claim. This mitigated absolute skepticism.
The Academic Skeptics refused to accept any philosophical arguments that claimed to justify
knowledge. Whatever reasons are used to justify something must themselves be justified, leading to an
infinite regress. The Skeptics recommended that their followers therefore suspend (
epochê) all judgments.
Most of his best known arguments were dialectical attacks on the
Stoics. His major Stoic opponent was
Chrysippus, whose philosophy of "assent" was more or less the opposite of Arcesilaus' epochê. Stoic epistemology was more empirical than the logical and rational approach of the Skeptics, which allowed them to generate several dialectical
puzzles and paradoxes from the Stoic premises or first principles.
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