Carneades of Cyrene Simulacrum

The Life

Carneades was born in Cyrene, in North Africa, around 214/213 BCE. He came to Athens as a young man, studied in the Academy under Hegesinus (Arcesilaus's second successor), and became scholarch sometime in the middle of the second century BCE. He held the office until old age forced his resignation in favour of his pupil Clitomachus, and he died in 129/128 BCE, nearly ninety. He wrote nothing. What we know of his arguments comes from Clitomachus, from Cicero (who had studied with Clitomachus's successors), and from the reports of Sextus Empiricus and others.

The single most famous episode of his life is the embassy of 155 BCE, when he went to Rome together with the Stoic Diogenes and the Peripatetic Critolaus on diplomatic business for Athens. In Rome he gave two public lectures, one arguing for justice and one against it, demonstrating with equal skill the case on either side. Cato the Elder, alarmed by the spectacle of a philosopher who could win either position he chose, had the embassy dispatched home as quickly as possible.

The Thought

Carneades extended and refined the sceptical method of Arcesilaus, and he gave it a new constructive edge. He accepted Arcesilaus's central thesis — that no impression is so compelling that its truth is guaranteed — but he recognised that human beings cannot live without acting on impressions of some kind. The question was which impressions should guide action. His answer was the doctrine of the *pithanon*, the probable or plausible: an impression that is persuasive in itself, coherent with other impressions, and tested against further investigation is a reasonable guide to action, even though it falls short of certain knowledge. This was not a retreat from scepticism but a formalisation of how the sceptic could live well within it.

His attacks on contemporary systems were devastating in detail. Against the Stoics he showed that fate and moral responsibility could not both be held consistently; against the theology of the philosophical schools he argued that no conception of the gods withstood serious examination. The cumulative effect of his dialectic was to raise the standard of argument in every school he attacked.

The Legacy

Through Clitomachus and Philo of Larissa, Carneades's thought passed into the Roman world and shaped the philosophical culture of the late Republic. Cicero's surviving philosophical works — *Academica*, *De Finibus*, *De Natura Deorum* — preserve the Carneadean method: the systematic display of rival positions, tested one against another, with suspended assent at the end. Through Cicero, Carneades influenced the rhetorical and philosophical education of the entire Latin world, down through Augustine and the Middle Ages. The modern notion of the probable as a guide to practical judgement, though it has other ancestors, has one of its sources here.