Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LM.MU in Munich, online at historyof philosophy.net. Today's episode, Honorable Ignorance, French

skepticism. We learned two things from the fact that Descartes compared the skeptical arguments

that begin his meditations to stale cabbage that he had reheated for his audience. First,

even in the 17th century, people didn't like cabbage enough to finish it at the first attempt.

Second, skeptical strategies were at this time familiar, or even over-familiar, to an educated

readership. That was an outcome of a long process of forgetting and remembering.

In antiquity, the skeptics had been a formidable presence on the philosophical scene.

Critical thinkers who took over at Plato's Academy, like Carnadis and Arches Elias,

offered the most penetrating criticism of Stoic philosophy.

The arguments of this so-called

New Academy were taken up by other skeptics like Philo of Larissa and Cicero,

with the significant caveat that they allowed for the embrace of beliefs that seemed to have

the balance of probability on their side. But while it wouldn't be appropriate to be dogmatic

about it, I'd venture to say that

ancient skepticism reached its peak in the second century C.E. with Sextus Empiricus.

Because he looked back to the classical skeptic Pyro as a predecessor, he called his style

of skepticism, pyrrhonism. It involved juxtaposing arguments on both sides of an issue, with the effect that the

issue seemed unresolved or in balance, leading to what he called epoch, or suspension of judgment.

In the medieval period, skepticism itself was then largely suspended, one effect of the rise of

dogmatic Platonism in late antiquity. As long time,

listeners will know, it's not as if skepticism was completely absent, and some medieval authors

even knew about the ancient skeptics, for instance, John of Salisbury in the 12th century.

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