First steps: Skepticism

The Skeptics believed you could never be completely certain of the truth. For example, you can't really know what objects really are, only how they appear. Your senses could be fooling you. Pyrrho is considered to be the first skeptic philosopher, and his ideas were expounded by a philosopher with the unlikely name of Sextus Empiricus.

I first heard of Sextus Empiricus when I was reading “The Black Swan” by Nassim Taleb, and I thought he was making it up. That book does have fictional interludes in it, so it was possibly an invention. But I have found other references to this character, so I am now of the opinion that he did exist. Of course I couldn't be certain of this and still be a good skeptic.

Another Skeptic was Carneadus, and his brand of skepticism is known as Academic Skepticism, since he taught at the Academy in Athens. It appears that Skeptics spent most of their time trying to debunk the ideas of other philosophers, especially the Stoics, although Carneadus also took on the Epicureans.

I like the story of Carneadus's trip to Rome, where on one day he delivered an oration praising Roman justice, and the next day he refuted his own arguments and concluded that justice was impossible. The Romans didn't bother trying to argue with him, they just sent him back to Athens, where he could no longer confuse them with his philosophy.

Here's an overview article about Skepticism. Returning to Sextus Empiricus, he introduced ideas of empiricism to this philosophy. If you couldn't be certain of anything, at least you could have provisional beliefs. Then you could collect evidence for or against your beliefs. Sextus was a physician as well as a philosopher, and belonged to the empirical school of medicine, which believed in basing medical practice on experience. Given the state of medical theory at the time, this was probably a good idea.

To me, Skepticism seems less like a complete philosophy, and more like a useful tool, a way to think about and criticize ideas. In this way it resembles pragmatism. I find it interesting to introduce the idea of uncertainty into discussions about ethics. How can you find the correct way to act in a particular situation when you can't be completely certain of the facts of the matter, or even of the ethical principles that you believe in?

First steps: Cynicism

I wanted to talk about two other Greek schools of philosophy, Cynicism and Skepticism. In reading about Cynicism, I realized I should have covered the Cynics before discussing Stoicism, since it appears that the Stoics derived many of their ideas from the Cynics.

Of course, cynical has a dictionary meaning, which includes things like being suspicious of the motives of other people, being bitter or resentful, and exploiting the moral scruples of others for personal gain. Not a pretty picture! But, as with epicurean and Epicureanism, it doesn't really give a correct picture of what the Cynics believed.

This article on Cynicism gives a good overview of the Cynics and their beliefs. The most famous Cynic was Diogenes, who slept in the streets of Athens in a bathtub. He was trying to illustrate that people should live a life free of possessions, and that true happiness comes from living in accord with nature. Fortunately for Diogenes, Athens has a mild climate.

This idea of living in accord with nature resembles the Stoic idea of living according to reason (see my earlier article on Stoicism). The Cynics believed that being happy depended on being self sufficient and having the right attitude. The way to achieve this positive attitude and self sufficiency was to disregard the conventional goals of wealth, fame, and power, and to live simply. These ideas were also influential with the Stoics.

It appears that the Cynics weren't popular with everyone, maybe because of their tendency to flout convention. Cynicism today has a negative connotation, and the name Cynic itself means dog-like, which I assume was meant to be an insult. On the other hand, there is a theory that Cynic derives from the name of the school where Antisthenes taught. Antisthenes, who was the first Cynic, taught at the Cynosarges gymnasium in Athens (Cynosarges means place of the white dog).

The Cynics were mostly concerned with ethics, unlike some of the other Greek philosophies which included lots of other topics. Antisthenes taught that virtue and not pleasure was the purpose of life, in opposition to the Epicurean philosophy. This seems like a more useful basis for an ethical theory to me, although there is still room for debate over what virtue consists of.

Interestingly, Antisthenes believed in a single natural god (this was around 400 BCE), and not the many gods that other Greeks believed in.