Carneades

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Carneades, Roman copy after the sit statue exhibited on the agora of Athens, ca. 150 BC, Glyptothek

Carneades (c. 214 – 129 BC) was a radical skeptic born in Cyrene and the first of the philosophers to pronounce the failure of metaphysicians who endeavored to discover rational meanings in religious beliefs. By the time of 159 BC he had started to refute all previous dogmatic doctrines, especially Stoicism, and even the Epicureans whom previous skeptics had spared.

Carneades is known as an Academic Skeptic. Chemist Robert Boyle, for example, referred to him in his 1661 Sceptical Chymist. Academic Skeptics (so called because this was the type of Skepticism taught in Plato's Academy in Athens) hold that all knowledge is impossible, except for the knowledge that all other knowledge is impossible. He maintained the school's sceptical lines. So great was his stature and authority that after his death it was his philosophy more directly than that of Socrates and Plato that Academics felt required to interpret and defend. He did not publish any written version of his arguments, leaving it to his successors (e.g., Clitomachus) to quarrel over their actual philosophical intentions. Carneades' criterion, even in its most refined form, deals only with the subjective appearance of truth. Traditionally it has been regarded as a doctrine of probabilism. Carneades concludes that an impression which meets all these conditions is the one we use in forming judgements about everything that is supremely important to us (ref. The Hellenistic Philosophers vol. I, A. A. Long & D. N. Sedley, Cambridge University Press, 1999).