Descartes and Ancient Skepticism: Reheated Cabbage?

Abstract

This paper began life as part of a longer paper, versions of which were read at MIT (May, 1997), Stanford (October, 1997), the University of Michigan (December, 1997), and the Classical Seminar in Corpus Christi College, Oxford (June, 1998). A version of the present paper was presented at Cornell's Society for the Humanities (March, 1999), and at the Keeling Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, held at University College, London (November, 1999). I thank the audiences on these occasions for helpful comments, especially Jean-Marie Beyssade, Chris Bobonich, Justin Broackes, Lesley Brown, David Charles, Ed Curley, Stephen Everson, Dan Garber, Louis Loeb, Gisela Striker, and Ralph Wedgwood. Thanks are also due to Carl Ginet, who saved me from a mistake and suggested a way to repair it; to Michael Ayers, Al-Quassim Cassam, and Zoltdn Szab6 for stimulating discussion; to Julia Annas, both for stimulating discussion and for showing me her as yet unpublished paper Hume and Ancient Scepticism, which has influenced my paper a lot; to Charles Brittain for stimulating discussion and helpful written comments; to an anonymous referee for, and the then editors of, the Philosophical Revieur, and to Christopher Taylor, my commentator at the Keeling Colloquium. Marjorie Grene's paper, Descartes and Ancient Skepticism, Review of Metaphysics 52 (1999): 553-71, reached me only after my paper had been completed; I regret that I was not able to take account of it. 1See (to take only a few of many examples) M. F. Burnyeat, Can the Skeptic Live His Skepticism? in Skeptical Tradition, ed. M. F. Burnyeat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 117-48, at 118-19 (originally published in Doubt and Dogmatism, ed. M. Schofield, M. Burnyeat, and J. Barnes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1980), 2053);J. Annas andJ. Barnes, Modes of Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 7-8; B. Mates, Pyrrhonism and Modern Scepticism: Similarities and Differences, in Philosophie, Psycholoanalyse, Emigration, ed. P. Muhr, P. Feyeraband, C. Wegeler (Vienna: WUV-Universitatsverlag, 1992), 210-28, at 219-21; R. Hankinson, Sceptics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1995), 21-23; S. Gaukroger, The Ten Modes of Aenesidemus and the Myth of Ancient Scepticism, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 3 (1995): 371-87, and his Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1995), 310ff. However, the claim is often qualified. Annas and Barnes, for example, say