Carneades

From Epicurus Wiki

Carneades (c. 214 – 129 BCE) 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 BCE he had started to refute all previous dogmatic doctrines, especially Stoicism, but also the Epicureans whom previous skeptics had spared.

Carneades is known as an Academic Skeptic, so-called because this was the type of Skepticism taught in Plato's Academy in Athens. He held 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.

[edit] References to Epicureanism

Diogenes Laertius records that Carneades denounced Chrysippus for being jealous of Epicurus: "Indeed, if Epicurus had written something, Chrysippus would vie to write just as much. To accomplish this, he wrote down whatever popped into his head and often repeated himself. In his haste, he neglected to do any editing, and he used many lengthy citations to the point of filling his entire books with them, not unlike Zeno and Aristotle."

Plutarch relates that Carneades taunted Epicurus, on the subject of remembering past pleasures, as if Epicurus kept a diary of statistics documenting "how often I had a meeting with Hedeia or Leontium," or "Where I drank Thasian wine" or "what twentieth of the month I had the most sumptuous dinner." (Non Posse 1089C)