Carneades

From Philosopedia

Carneades (c. 213 —129 B.C.E.)

A teacher in Plato’s Academy, Carneades worked out a theoretical formulation with Arcesilaus that showed nothing can be known by our senses or our reason. He therefore was one of the first of the academic skeptics.

H. J. Blackham, in New Humanist (January 1990), explains that Carneades “redeemed epistemology by shifting the question from the objectivity of sense perception to using the subjectivity of perception, brought under control in different levels of permanent suspension of judgment, but in well-founded judgments of probability.”

Bertrand Russell in his History of Philosophy' (1945) relates how Carneades taught young Romans anxious to ape Greek manners and acquire Greek culture by expounding the views of Aristotle and Plato on justice. The next lecture, however, refuted all that he had said in his first, “not with a view to establishing opposite conclusions, but merely to show that every conclusion is unwarranted.”

Charles Hartshorne described Carneades’s skepticism by saying he thought logic must take account of free will and the probable indeterminateness of the future. Thus “x will occur” may be neither true nor false, since there may at present exist no cause to make it so. Really, “x will occur” and “x will not occur” are both false if the truth is that x may-or-may-not occur. Hartshorne, noting that none of the writings of Carneades survive, cites Levi ben Gerson as insisting that where there is no determinate reality, all determinate assertions are false.

{BDF; CE; ER; EU, Richard H. Popkin; JMRH}