Popkin' Skepticism And The Cynical Tradition

Abstract

The philosophical heritage of ancient Greece has come down to us in several streams of traditions. The Platonic and Aristotelian traditions are the two best known. After them, I suppose the sophists, stoics, and Epicureans are next in terms of public and scholarly recognition. Ancient skepticism has only made a comeback in the study of the history of philosophy in the last fifty years or so, and I do not have to tell readers of this volume that this comeback was largely inspired by Richard Popkin. In this chapter I want to set up his achievement in recovering the tradition of skepticism as the background for a further exploration. What about other traditions of ancient philosophy, such as the cynics? Why did Popkin ignore them, and why do most students of ancient philosophy pass over them so quickly, if they are aware of them at all? There are several answers to these questions. One is that Popkin had enough on his hands in dealing with skeptics, millenarians, and Jews.1 No one can do everything. This is possible, of course, but I would rather see a more principled reason. Another is that in our specializing society, you do not need to know anything about the cynics to be a specialist on the skeptics, or Plato, or Aristotle. A third is that philosophy understood as metaphysics and epistemology will not have much respect for schools that reject metaphysics and epistemology: “they are not philosophers”. A fourth is that we do not have much information about the cynics: just a few works and fragments. The last three answers were the same sort of reasons that militated against treating ancient skepticism as philosophy, and Richard Popkin overcame these objections. So I ask again, why didn’t he include cynicism in his Umwertung aller philosophischer Wertungen? Let us start with Popkin’s achievement. When he began, very little modern scholarship had been written about the ancient skeptics, and most of it was