Arcesilaus
3rd-century BC Greek Hellenistic philosopher · Turkey · Academics · Lived 315 BC to 240 BC · aged 75
Arcesilaus is read about 51 times a day, in 43 languages.
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Something wrong?He took Plato's academy and turned it inside out. Arcesilaus made doubt the method, insisting the senses couldn't deliver truth - a position that put him in direct collision with the Stoics, who claimed certainty was possible.
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About this person
Arcesilaus became the sixth scholarch of the Platonic Academy around 264 BC, succeeding Crates of Athens. In Athens he encountered Timon of Phlius, a Pyrrhonist whose skepticism appears to have pushed Arcesilaus toward a radical shift: he became the first Academic to adopt philosophical skepticism, doubting the senses' power to discover truth about the world, though possibly still believing truth existed. This inaugurated what's called the Second or Middle or New Academy - the skeptical phase. His chief opponent was Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism, whose doctrine of katalepsis held that reality could be grasped with certainty; Arcesilaus denied it. He left no writings, so his thought survives only in fragments preserved by later hands.
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