the less contentious logic of the Aristoteleans and the Stoics. The epistemologi-
cal concerns of Greek philosophy were kept alive by the continual presence
and challenge of the Skeptics. In Greece, the strongest development of skeptical
traditions goes along with the strongest of the ancient developments of episte-
mological argument.
In India, the omni-skeptical stance is put forward by Sañjaya. The response
of the intellectual network, crystallized by Gautama Buddha, is not so much
epistemology per se as a fusion of epistemology and ontology in the general
conception that the world of ordinary objects is an illusion. Buddhism incor-
porates an extensive, but not unlimited, skepticism into its basic stance, di-
rected against the material world and against any reification of absolute
transcendence, and especially against the permanence of the self; but the karmic
causal chain, and the religious pathway out of it, are not illusory. This doctrine
of world illusion becomes the foil against which future generations of Indian
philosophers, on both the Buddhist and Hindu sides, would develop more
explicit epistemologies.
In China, the skepticism of the Warring States debaters is not very sharply
formulated; we have no records of an omni-skeptical doctrine that truth does
not exist. Nevertheless, in the latter part of this period we find the strongest
development toward Chinese epistemology. This sequence is the high point for
many centuries of the Chinese push toward higher abstraction. In these gen-
erations occur the sole development of Chinese logic, the Mohist Canon, which
may be interpreted as a move to overcome the paradoxes of Hui Shih and the
School of Names by more careful abstract statement. This epistemological
standard is largely lost as the result of the dominant synthesis of Han Confu-
cianism. A more enduring result is an epistemological-metaphysical fusion in
the Tao Te Ching ontology of the Nameless. Unlike in India, where world
illusion holds up an explicitly epistemological criterion, Taoist namelessness
proclaims not the non-truthfulness of ordinary objects, but only the futility of
articulating them. Implicitly it is a statement of the end of epistemological
debate, and of the abstraction sequence in Chinese philosophy generally.
The initial appearance of skepticism in all these world arenas occurs in
situations where the intellectual attention space first undergoes a crisis of
overcrowding. Thereafter, as the networks accumulate concepts on a higher
level of abstraction, skepticism is periodically revived, sometimes in its classic
guise of “a plague on all houses,” but sometimes deliberately invoked as a
surgical tool by those who wish to separate their own brand of truth from the
accretions of the field. In Hellenistic Greece and the “Second Sophistic” of
competing rhetors in the Roman Empire, skepticism is an institutionalized
school, counterpart to the morass of the Middle Platonist syncretisms, while
the seeming imperviousness of Stoicism and Epicureanism to resolving their812 •^ Meta-reflections