Hellenistic Philosophy Introductory

Introduction xix
Hellenistic sceptics rejected attempts to explain what is evident by what
is non-evident, which is a generalization of the rejection of the attempt
to explain the material by the immaterial. The two forms of scepticism
in our period, Academic and Pyrrhonist, focussed their attacks on the
leading dogmatic schools of their day, and this meant first and foremost
the Stoics; the Epicureans were also attacked, and Sextus certainly found
room in his capacious works for attacks on Plato, Aristotle and other
earlier thinkers as well. But the very success of the Hellenistic dogmatists
in displacing the giants of fourth-century thought from centre-stage led
sceptics of both persuasions to focus their efforts on the theories of their
contemporaries.
Despite the strong similarity between the two sceptical schools repre-
sented in this book, they should be carefully distinguished. The Academ-
ics, who turned to scepticism under the leadership of Arcesilaus in the
early third century B.c., looked to Socrates for their main inspiration.
The spirit ofSocraticism, for Arcesilaus and his most important successor
Carneades, lay in his refutative activity. The endeavour to subject every
positive belief held by his interlocutors to cross-examination and refuta-
tion inspired them to pursue a rigorous intellectual purity by arguing
against the principal dogmas of the philosophers of their own day. The
dialectical power of Arcesilaus and Carneades manifested itself exclusively
in oral debate; like Socrates, neither committed his work to writing-as
though the very act of fixing live debate in written form would betray
its dialectical character. This activity was practiced for its own sake; those
who report on them by and large give the impression that they believed
that the Academics were unconcerned with any goal beyond the activity
of dialectic. Whether the Academics in fact concealed some arcane ethical
or metaphysical goal behind their acute refutative activity is not clear;
certainly they presented to the outside world only the enigmatic face of
dialecticians ready to argue for or against any given thesis. In so doing,
they helped to uncover latent weaknesses in the dogmatism of the other
Hellenistic schools and stimulated them to buttress their theories with
more acute arguments and more careful formulations. The subtle inter-
play between dogmatic theorizing and dialectical examination which first
emerged at the very beginning of Greek philosophical activity is alive
and well in the Hellenistic period.
With Pyrrhonian scepticism the situation is significantly different.
Pyrrhonism as we know it seems to have originated in the first century
B.C. with Aenesidemus, an Academic who reacted against the growing
dogmatism of his own school, which was embodied first and foremost
by Antioch us of Ascalon. To underline the renewed scepticism of their

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