Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism

Abstract

Scholarly interest in ancient skepticism has been resurgent in recent years. What had previously been dismissed as an obscure and eccentric offshoot of Stoic teachings has now come to be accepted as a subtle and challenging set of doctrines that has exerted a considerable, if somewhat hidden, influence on the course of modern philosophy1 This general revival of interest in the three main schools of Hellenistic philosophy, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism reveals, perhaps, as much of the character of our own age as it does of the Hellenistic age itself.2 Nevertheless, and in spite of the revived attention, ancient skepticism still remains resistant to our historical and philosophical understanding,3 due to several factors, not the least being that contemporary skepticism as a philosophical topic is generally considered to be the theoretical province of the analytic tradition, and this tradition is not renowned for its historicist or hermeneutic sensitivities. The key doctrines of ancient skepticism have often been presented with an inadequate respect for the historical context within which they arose and evolved; sins of interpretation already identified by Hegel in 1801 in his own investigation and interpretation of ancient skepticism.