Scepticism - Lecture 5a
5a. Aenesidemus and Pyrrhonism
The final years of the Academy
Clitomachus, one of Carneades’ former pupils, becomes scholarch around 128 BC, and attempts to defend the view that Carneades did not regard assent as something that could be rationally justified.
However other pupils of Carneades openly dissented from this line of interpretation and presented him as legitimising assent (‘the wise man sometimes assents’). Metrodorus of Stratonicea is included in this group of people by Cicero, and Sextus also singles out Carneades’ pupil Charmadas.
Around 110 BC Philo of Larissa is elected scholarch, and this event is seen by Sextus as inaugurating the so-called Fourth Academy. Although Philo had been one of Clitomachus’ pupils, he is linked with Metrodorus by Cicero; and it seems that upon his election, the epistemological stance officially associated with the Academy became one of epistemological fallibilism. In accordance with this change, Carneades’ appeals to what is plausible (pithanon) were increasingly interpreted as appeals to a notion of defeasible justification that sufficed to make assent rationally acceptable. Moreover Philo eventually moved in an even more dogmatic direction by attempting to defend the view that the Academy as a whole had never gone beyond criticizing the Stoic’s specific criterion of truth. By this point, Philo was apparently prepared to accept that if people employed methods of inquiry other than those advocated by the Stoics, they might even be able to arrive at opinions that were certainly true.
Philo died in exile around 83 BC, and the Academy as an organized philosophical school has by then ceased to exist. It is clear, therefore, that the final years of the Academy would have been dispiriting ones for anyone who found that the investigation of claims left them with no inclination to believe that any specific claim was ever better justified than some contrary claim. Even under Clitomachus, the Academy seems to have degenerated into a set of factions peddling different interpretations of Carneades’ philosophical position. And after Clitomachus’ death, the most vociferous exponents of a dogmatic interpretation of Carneades’ views gained a decisive ascendancy.
In the light of these developments, it seems clear that people interested in the harder-edged negative epistemological position we have ascribed to Arcesilaus and Carneades would have had a strong motive for defecting from the Academy. Moreover there is a compelling case for supposing that Aenesidemus of Cnossus was one of those defectors.
Aenesidemus
A long summary of Aenesidemus’ Pyrrhonist Discourses is preserved in the Bibliotheca of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople (9th C AD). Photius reports that this work was dedicated to one of Aenesidemus’ colleagues from the Academy – Lucius Tubero.
The Discourses are written from the perspective of someone who wants to emphasize the superiority of those thinkers who call themselves Pyrrhonists over contemporary Academics. According to Aenesidemus, the Academics are doctrinaire and incur a scrutiny similar to that faced by other philosophers whereas ‘the Pyrrhonists, by entertaining doubts about every thesis, maintain consistency and do not conflict with themselves’
Aenesidemus’ criticism of the Academy are very precisely targeted – he alleges that the Academics of his time are little more than ‘Stoics fighting Stoics’, dissenting only from the cognitive impression. However Aenesidemus also criticises the slightly older position of dogmatically affirming that all is incognitive, and he maintains that doctrinaire claims of any kind are inappropriate for people who maintain that there is no criterion of truth or refuse to pick out a particular criterion.
The Lucius Tubero specified as the dedicatee of Aenesidemus’ Pyrrhonist Discourses is described as a Roman citizen and politician. A name search for this particular individual throws up only Lucius Aelius Tubero – a friend of Cicero’s and legate to Cicero’s younger brother Quintus while he was governor of the province of Asia 62-59 BC. Now Cicero was born in 106 BC, and there is no evidence to suggest that Lucius Aelius was significantly older than Cicero himself. Thus we are potentially confronted by a serious chronological problem. Aenesidemus seems to be clearly writing about the Academic under the leadership of Philo, yet Cicero’s Academica, which was written in 45 BC and discusses in some detail the Academic approach to epistemological issues, doesn’t mention Aenesidemus at all. Moreover when Cicero mentions Pyrrho, he depicts him exclusively as a discredited moralist.
John Glucker notes in his Antiochus and the Late Academy that Cicero also fails to mention in the Academica any of the attacks launched directly against Philo by Antiochus of Ascalon even though the Academica extensively takes material from Antiochus’ own works. Glucker suggests that as Cicero had been one of Philo’s pupils, he suppressed these attacks out of respect for his former teacher. And Glucker goes on to argue that as it is plain that Aenesidemus was also very hostile towards Philo’s Academy, the same motive might similarly have persuaded Cicero to avoid mentioning Aenesidemus. Indeed one might go even further than Glucker himself and suggest that Cicero’s unflattering portrait of Pyrrho is an oblique riposte to the pretensions of Aenesidemus’ upstart Pyrrhonean school.
It appears, therefore, that we have in Aenesidemus a former Academic who leaves the Academy around the time of Philo and begins writing in defence of a much more negative assessment of our cognitive capacities than was being defended at that period by the Academy. In the light of Aenesidemus’ intellectual background and this timing, it is clear that Aenesidemus’ decision to call himself a Pyrrhonist cannot be taken at face value. The principal influence on his Pyrrhonism is more likely to have been Arcesilaus rather than Pyrrho himself.
Sextus has no problem about using the term ‘sceptic’ when he is referring to Aenesidemus. Moreover much of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism derives from Aenesidemus’ writings, namely the ten tropes ‘handed down by the older sceptics’ and the eight causal tropes. Sextus ascribes the ten tropes to Aenesidemus at M VII 345, and the eight causal tropes are introduced in the Outlines (I 180) in the following terms: ‘Thus Aenesidemus furnishes us with Eight Modes by which, as he thinks, he tests and exposes the unsoundness of every dogmatic theory of causation.’ No detailed Pyrrhonean material can be confidently traced back beyond Aenesidemus’ time (though we shouldn’t entirely overlook the possible contribution of Ptolemy of Cyrene – the person picked out by Menodotus as re-establishing Pyrrhonism). In contrast Sextus conspicuously refrains from calling Pyrrho a sceptic. He also says some things that imply close similarities between his position and that of Arcesilaus: ‘Arcesilaus ... definitely seems to me to share in the Pyrrhonean way of thinking, so that his mode of life and ours are all but one’ (Outlines I 232)
Given the absence of an authentic succession of Pyrrhonean philosophers linking Pyrrho to Aenesidemus and the dogmatic aspects of Pyrrho’s views as reported by Timon, these comments by Sextus further reinforce the case for treating Aenesidemus’ Pyrrhonism as a repackaged version of Arcesilaus’ views rather than Pyrrho’s.
But if this is the true origin of Aenesidemus’ views, why would he conceal the fact and why would he choose Pyrrho as a figurehead for his sceptical school? One plausible explanation of a decision to conceal his connection with the views of Arcesilaus is that Aenesidemus desired to avoid becoming embroiled in further disputes about the interpretation of past scholarchs. But once Aenesidemus had decided to conceal the link with Arcesilaus, Pyrrho would have been an obvious alternative source of intellectual respectability.
Pyrrho pre-dates Arcesilaus, and issues of historical priority were of considerable importance to Greek philosophers. Moreover Arcesilaus had been satirized by at least two of his contemporaries, Ariston of Chios and Pyrrho’s pupil Timon, as someone who had furtively stolen ideas from Pyrrho.
Aenesidemus’ one genuine borrowing from Pyrrho seems to have been the idea that epoche can bring something worthwhile, namely ataraxia or peace of mind. Pyrrho was held in high regard because of his austere life and his indifference to frivolous concerns. Moreover this was linked in the minds of his contemporaries to his commitment to suspension of judgement. According to Laertius, Pyrrho was so respected by his native city that they made him high priest, and on his account they voted that all philosophers should be exempted from taxation.
It is also instructive to note here the problems Sextus finds himself in when he attempts to specify the difference between his scepticism and Arcesilaus approach to philosophy. Sextus is vigorous in his attacks on Carneades’ ‘New Academy’, but he is much less confident when it comes to differentiating his own stance from Arcesilaus’ position. Sextus does report that Arcesilaus declares that suspension of judgement really is good whereas the Pyrrhonist merely reports that it seems good to him. However this supposed difference might easily be based on nothing more than a misreading of Arcesilaus’ ad hominem polemics against the Stoics who did profess to regard epochç as good when knowledge is impossible. And the only other point of difference Sextus manages to locate is that Arcesilaus supposedly says the end is epoche, whereas the sceptics regard epoche as a means of arriving at mental tranquillity. But we have already admitted that Aenesidemus’ inspiration for supposing that epoche could be beneficial and positive does indeed come from Pyrrho.
 Scepticism - Lecture 5b |
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