value of practical experience exclusively, against the philosophically oriented
medical schools of the day, based variously on Empedocles, perhaps on other
pre-Socratics, on Democritean atomism, and more recently on Peripatetic
doctrines and associated anatomical researches. Empiricists adopted somewhat
of a skeptical stance in taking a plague on all houses approach to divergent
theories, but their main contention was not itself a thoroughly skeptical episte-
mology but rather the knowability of the observable and the unknowability of
the unobservables posited by philosophical-medical theories. As the older
philosophical factions died out, so did their medical branches, and they were
replaced by current fashions in the philosophical field. Epicurean atomism
made its first big impact at Rome with the popular medical lectures of As-
clepiades of Bythynia (ca. 100 b.c.e.); and the Pneumatist school of medicine
appeared about the same time as the result of Posidonius’ innovations in Stoic
philosophy.
As the Athenian philosophical schools collapsed in the next generation, the
medical schools realigned. A new faction, the Methodists, challenged both the
Rationalists (i.e., all the older philosophical and physical doctrines) and the
Empiricists, proposing a middle position claiming that observations of dilation
and constriction provide a basis for medical practice. This transformation of
the medical turf seems to have been connected to the association, from this
time forward, of the Empiricists with skepticism in philosophy. The Empiricist
physician Heraclides of Tarentum (ca. 100 b.c.e.) was perhaps the teacher of
Aenesidemus (Frede, 1987: 251–252). Aenesidemus went beyond the Academic
Philo’s fallibilism to systematize the famous tropes, and rejected as dogmatic
even the claim to know nothing or to know probabilistically. Michael Frede
(1987: 249; cf. 218–222) goes so far as to propose that “Pyrrhonian skepti-
cism” was invented at this time and retrospectively attributed to a famous
founder.^25 Aenesidemus’ position became a minority voice within philosophy
over the next two centuries; the Academy had given up any part of the skeptical
stance, and no other faction picked it up, as syncretism of positive doctrines
became the order of the day. Skepticism was to have one last flourish of
attention with Sextus Empiricus, in the intense fractionation of positions that
peaked around 150–200 c.e., just as the basis of intellectual life began to shift
again.
One mystery remains. Every philosophical school had undergone repeated
revolutions through these series of realignments, with one exception: the
Epicureans. How did the Epicureans remain unchanging in doctrine despite all
this competition and organizational shift? One might also wonder how intel-
lectuals can keep up any eminence at all by merely repeating an inherited
position. But Epicureans had a series of fairly well known spokesmen for two
hundred years, who wrote numerous books (Reale, 1985: 183–184). Their
112 •^ The Skeleton of Theory