Ancient Philosophy - Lectures 8 & 9 (Part One)
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
Lectures 8 & 9
Academic Scepticism
Arcesilaus
Plato was succeeded as head of the Academy by his nephew Speusippus, who appears to have begun a process of changing the emphasis of the Academy from original research to an attempt to produce a canonical systematisation of Plato’s mature philosophical doctrines. However around 272 BC the Academy was dramatically revitalized by the election of Arcesilaus of Pitane as its head. Now it seems clear that Arcesilaus would not have been elected to this position if his philosophical views had been seen by his contemporaries as a heretical repudiation of the Academy’s Platonic heritage. Nevertheless Arcesilaus appears to have drawn his inspiration primarily from the role allocated to Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues
In these dialogues Socrates is portrayed as questioning other people to see whether they possess real expertise in a particular area of inquiry; and he tests this expertise by attempting to construct arguments that use claims endorsed by his interlocutors to arrive, via principles of inference that are equally acceptable to these people, at conclusions which contradict their professed views on a given topic. If Socrates can achieve this result, he infers that he is not conversing with real experts; but significantly there is no explicit indication in the texts that Socrates already possesses the expert understanding initially claimed by his conversational partners.
Unfortunately our familiarity with the Socrates of the later dialogues tends to distort our understanding of what actually happens in these early dialogues. Instead of reflecting on the way in which the early dialogues see Socrates undermining all the positive views on offer and putting nothing explicitly in their place other than an admission of the need to continue our investigations, we interpret Socrates as criticizing the views of his interlocutors on the basis of what he at least takes to be his knowledge of where the truth really lies.
In the case of Arcesilaus, however, his destructive critique of the pretensions of other philosophers utilizes Socrates’ ad hominem approach, but we find ourselves reacting to Arcesilaus’ philosophic posture in a radically different way precisely because we are not under the same pressure to interpret him as really arguing from the basis of some positive views that are concealed simply for presentational reasons. The example of Arcesilaus forces us to consider what would happen if someone who had a settled policy of testing all claims to expertise by means of the methods of Socratic dialectic found that these techniques invariably succeeded in undermining such claims irrespective of their subject matter or whether they were made by himself or any other person. How would such a person respond to his continued success at negative criticism and his persistent failure to persuade himself that he or anyone else genuinely counts as an expert on even the most straightforward of topics?
Presumably that ongoing experience would eventually give him an inclination to suppose that he will never succeed in uncovering any real experts. However that inclination would, to some extent, be counterbalanced by his recognition that any claim he might be tempted to make about being an expert on the availability of experts would itself not withstand critical scrutiny. Thus he would be inclined to refrain from concluding that it is impossible for there to be such a thing as genuine expert. Ant this, in turn, makes it understandable that he might continue his investigations in a calm and relaxed manner, free from the anxious thought that the truth about the nature of the world and his place in that world might easily be within his grasp if he just made one last heroic intellectual effort.
It also seems to be a psychological fact about human beings that they are incapable of exercising immediate volitional control over the content of their beliefs. In many circumstances these beliefs respond directly to a person’s assessment of the relevant evidence: if he takes himself to have good evidence for the truth of the claim that p, then he will find himself believing that p; and if he takes himself to have no good evidence for the truth of the claim that p, then he will find that it is psychologically impossible for him to hold the belief that p. However someone who has persuaded himself that neither he nor anyone else he has ever met possesses any real expertise at conducting inquiries into even the simplest of matters is unlikely to think of himself as having good evidence for the truth of any claim. It follows that if the psychological mechanism specified above operates over a wide range of possible beliefs, then such a person will frequently find himself suspending belief on occasions when other people do have definite opinions.
Significantly, the ultimate outcome of Arcesilaus’ use of the techniques of Socratic dialectic seems to have been a wide-ranging suspension of belief along the lines just described. Ancient authors attest repeatedly to Arcesilaus’ skill in argument and the way in which he happily argued on both sides of the question without establishing any definite conclusions. Moreover they also agree that the notion of suspension of judgement (epoche) occupied a crucial place in Arcesilaus’ philosophic stance. Indeed they often state that Arcesilaus and those Academics influenced by his arguments either suspended or tried to suspend judgement about everything. A particularly clear expression of this interpretation is provided by the later Pyrrhonean sceptic Sextus Empiricus. According to Sextus, we do not find Arcesilaus ‘making any declarations about the substantial existence or non-existence of anything, nor does he prefer any particular thing to anything else in respect of its trustworthiness or untrustworthiness, but he suspends judgement on all things’ (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book One, Section 232).
Now one might be inclined to treat a belief as a kind of judgement and accordingly interpret these ancient commentators and doxographers as claiming that Arcesilaus and his immediate followers purported to suspend belief on all topics. In reality, however, Academic epoche is presented by Arcesilaus as equivalent to the Stoic notion of refraining from assent, and the Stoics treated assent as a matter of forming beliefs about matters of objective fact. So it seems that Academic epoche is most appropriately interpreted as a matter of suspending belief about matters of objective fact.
In addition to the reports that Arcesilaus and his followers purported to suspend belief about all matters of objective fact or described themselves as attempting to do so, we also find reports that Arcesilaus committed himself to the normative view that we ought to suspend judgement. In these latter instances, it seems likely that the writers attributing such a stance to Arcesilaus are being misled by his use of ad hominem arguments intended to drive his philosophical opponents into confessing that by their own standards it is inappropriate for anyone to give his assent to any judgement. After all, we have been treating Arcesilaus as someone who uses another person’s premisses and favoured inferential principles to arrive at a conclusion that contradicts some claim that this person put forward in his capacity as a putative expert on some topic of inquiry. It appears, therefore, that we are forced to accept that if Arcesilaus did construct arguments that had as their conclusion the claim that we ought to suspend judgement, then those arguments were binding only on Arcesilaus’ opponents. Arcesilaus’ ability to construct an argument for a particular conclusion around someone else’s premisses and inferential principles plainly does not imply that Arcesilaus himself has any reason to think that his conclusion is true. In contrast, Arcesilaus’ principal intellectual opponents, the Stoics, were committed to the view that one ought to suspend judgement where one lacked conclusive grounds for a judgement about a matter of fact. So it would have been perfectly appropriate for Arcesilaus to remind the Stoics of the implications, from their point of view, of unanswered sceptical arguments.
 Back to Home Page |
| Lectures 8 & 9 (Part Two) |
Send E-Mail to: alan.bailey4@yahoo.co.uk
Copyright © 2007 Alan Bailey. All Rights Reserved