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by Edward Jayne
July 20, 1994

I. The Skeptical Choice

Belief seems to be a universal aspect of human behavior--typical of children, fanatics, psychotics, and primitive tribesmen as well as most of today's normal well adjusted adults in advanced societies. According to the Bhagavad-Gita, we are all the product of our beliefs--as we believe, so we are--and in fact, according to Chekhov, no cause and effect need be involved: simply enough, we are what we believe. W.V. Quine more specifically treats belief as a disposition or bundle of dispositions that exists, as opposed to thinking, which does or performs, and Charles Saunders Peirce argues that such a disposition is necessarily rooted in habit as determined by our entire experience since childhood, including our need for self-esteem, our affirmative quest for something better in life, and, as explained by Montaigne, our wish to cope with what we don't know. In fact, according to Montaigne, nothing is so firmly believed as what we don't know. As opposed to knowledge, which features facts and theories that may be accepted or rejected with relative indifference, belief features what we want to know-facts we want to be true or feel ought to be true.

As an exercise in willed knowledge, belief stretches from raw superstition to the most sophisticated theories of theology and metaphysics. Even pet dogs seem capable of rudimentary belief when they anticipate a reward for doing what they are asked, just as Einstein believed in his theory of relativity, as did most of the intellectual community within just a few years of its formulation. Why is belief so pervasive? At the simplest and most abstract level, I would suggest, because we need to feel confident of the truth value of our ideas, but also, and perhaps more basically, because we need to buttress our sense of personal worth and social acceptance, and here belief takes on entirely new ramifications. As opposed to empirical knowledge, which features facts and theories that may be judged with relative indifference, belief features what we want to know--facts we want to be true or feel ought to be true. Idea thus settles into belief, and this in turn congeals through habit into dogmatic certitude typical of faith. Described by Santayana as "alleged knowledge," faith confirms our desires by conferring upon them the status of an objective truth we can believe in, presumably because they are time-tested and universally accepted by everybody who matters. If belief is habitual idea, faith is unexamined belief. Everywhere belief tantamount to faith--what Paul Kurtz has described as the "transcendental temptation"--is honored for its redemptive and socially integrative powers.[i] It buttresses self-confidence and seals social relationships. It provides the adhesive that binds us together--as individuals, as a society. Because personal experience is focussed by belief into a relatively simplistic conceptualization easy to share with others, there is social cohesion. The same values prevail as well as the same dedication to shared goals and the same aversion to shared enemies. Society becomes a team of like-minded believers, and everybody has a useful role to play. Outsiders are never truly outside if they can identify themselves as good believers.

However, the capacity for doubt, or disbelief, has played a complementary role no less important in the history of civilization. Belief binds social relationships, and this is of vital importance, but disbelief sets the stage for improvement, for the necessary advances so important to social and intellectual progress. Without disbelief science would not have been possible, nor philosophy, nor the political evolution that has produced all the benefits of democracy we take for granted today. All the most backward societies thrive on belief, but to such an extent that disbelief cannot take root, and with the effect that improvements become difficult, if not impossible. These societies can only stagnate, and the doxological certitude they emphasize is precisely the source of their misery. Why? Because the levels of disbelief crucial to advances in physics, chemistry, and biochemistry as well as the obviously practical benefits of such innovations as electricity and the gasoline engine derive from an intellectual freedom that lets any idea be proposed whether or not it challenges or poses any threat to another. This freedom extends from the ability to disagree with family, teachers, and sundry authority figures on issues one considers important to the more disciplined skills to be cultivated in deferring judgment until more information has been gathered, no matter how compelling the evidence at hand might seem at its face value and no matter how convincing various authorities might seem in drawing their conclusions from this evidence.

Historically, the capacity for disbelief has played a unique role in having spurred the advancement of western civilization since the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, when disbelief could first be articulated at the expense of religion, patriotism, and orthodox belief in general. All societies in the world have fostered various belief systems, and many of them to a rather extraordinary degree. Only a couple of non-western societies--most notably China and India preceding the time of Christ and Arab civilization from the eighth through the eleventh centuries, A.D.--have tolerated disbelief for any length of time. The unique advantage of western tradition has not been Christianity, one of many similar ancient belief systems, but in fact its extraordinary skeptical tradition that began in ancient Greece many centuries before Christ was born. Skepticism has been tolerated, if not encouraged, from the Age of Pericles in the fifth century, B.C., to, say, the first half of the third century, A.D., and, after a millenium of medieval Christian hegemony, from the late fourteenth century, A.D., to the present. Even earlier, in fact, the materialist achievement of the earliest Greek philosophers beginning with Thales probably resulted from their inability to accept the Homeric gods. Sophists rejected both Homer and the pre-Socratic materialists, Plato rejected the sophists, Aristotle did the same with Plato, the so-called "Academic" skeptics both Aristotle and Plato, Augustine the academic skeptics as justified by Cicero, and on down the line to Russell and Wittgenstein. The key to this entire linear dialectic has been disagreement, and, whether its principal figures chose to identify themselves as skeptics, they in fact catapulted themselves into prominence by finding good reasons to challenge the authority of their predecessors. Their disagreement was rooted in skepticism.

Indeed, priority must be granted to belief as a preliminary disposition in both individual and collective behavior. But when belief falls short of its claims to certitude, disbelief, with any encouragement, initiates search behavior in pursuit of alternative answers. One believes, then doubts, and, spurred by dissatisfaction, very quickly finds more suitable grounds for recovering one's belief, even if this obliges the abandonment of portions of what one had previously held to be true. Western tradition's unique achievement is that it has formalized and institutionalized this process, specifically in the testing of hypotheses typical of scientific methodology, more generally in the skeptical tradition of philosophy that extends from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the most recent philosophical assumptions in currency today.

Yet disbelief is generally understood. Kant argued, for example that skepticism is a resting place of reason, but this is exactly opposite the truth.[ii] If anything, skepticism destabilizes received assumptions, thereby putting reason to work in the pursuit of a new and more defensible intellectual resting place in which belief may be at least temporarily invested. Only by rigorous effort--precisely the goal of skepticism--can the intermediate activity of doubt be sustained to any appreciable extent pertaining to issues for which a general consensus has already been established, for example the existence of god(s), the need for conventional morality, the justification of patriotism right or wrong, etc.

What I want to propose here is that the sequential advancement from belief to doubt followed by adjustments permitting a recovery of belief on a more inclusive scale may be observed not only in individual behavior on an ontogenetic basis, but also on a phylogenetic scale as the single most important ingredient of the intellectual history of western civilization. Like the dialectic pursuit of intellectual freedom explained by Hegel, this advancement from belief to disbelief and back again to belief has entailed the historically progressive choice dominant since ancient Greece between dogma and its skeptical rejection, but with the significant advantage over Hegel's dialectic that the process has not been limited to a simple and necessarily terminal three-stage movement from dogma to its denial followed by a transcendent reassertion of dogma (a kind of intellectual judgment day) through the final attainment of absolute Idea rooted in Christian theology. Instead, the dialectic persists without apparent end. Today, we may reject for its naiveté Hegel's paradigm that extended from oriental despotism to the Hellenic discovery of freedom and then its fully realized Christian achievement in German civilization. This sequence might have been convenient for Hegel--also for Bismarck, Wagner, and Hitler--but it totally distends western civilization's more pervasive skeptical tradition as guaranteed by intermittent periods of relative intellectual freedom. Germany's admittedly remarkable nineteenth century enlightenment becomes the culminating apex of western civilization rather than one particular phase in a far bigger, more inclusive, and more extraordinary continuing dialectic.

In effect I am suggesting that a basic intellectual standoff may be demonstrated to have taken place between belief and disbelief beginning with a seven-century period of classical enlightenment during which a large segment of the educated classes abandoned polytheistic worship for an unprecedented skeptical perspective begun by pre-Socratic materialists and Sophists, later codified by Pyrrho, and still later refined as a systematic methodology by the so-called New Academy of Plato's successors led by Arcesilaus and Carneades among many others. This intellectual vision played a substantial role in ancient philosophy between 300 B.C. and the retrospective assessments of Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius toward the end of the second century, A.D. During the first century, B.C., Cicero wrote Academica to summarize the so-called Academic approach (it is the only text in this tradition that survives today), but at almost the same time Aenisidemus revitalized Pyrrho's approach to dominate the terminal phase of ancient skepticism at the beginning of Rome's decline. Skepticism's final death knell for ancient civilization, at least, came with Saint Augustine's apostasy from the New Academy in the late fourth century as explained in probably his earliest book, Contra Academicos, written as a critique of Cicero's text.

Meanwhile, the Roman populace's countervailing pursuit of sheer belief antithetical to uncompromising skepticism steadily mounted in intensity. Since the reign of the emperor Augustus at the time of Christ, there was a rapid erosion in popular belief from polytheism to a large assortment of oriental mysteries that came to a focus on the choice between Mithraism and Christianity and finally ushered in Christianity's twelve-century period of intellectual hegemony during the "dark" and Middle Ages. In effect skepticism had terminated polytheism, only to be terminated by Christianity, and well enough to initiate a millenium of orthodox sacerdocracy enforced by a bloodthirsty Inquisition starting in the thirteenth century. Only with the rediscovery of ancient skepticism during the Renaissance (literally, skepticism's rebirth) did the countervailing principles of belief and disbelief once again lock into direct historic competition with each other, now as an ongoing struggle between philosophers of constructive doubt usually identified as empiricists or materialists (e.g., Pomponazzi, Bacon, Hobbes, Gassendi, Hume, d'Holbach, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Mill, Huxley, and Russell) and philosophers of Christian reaffirmation (e.g. Descartes, Pascal, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Whitehead). Constructive doubters shifted from a tentative pursuit of "double truths" during the Renaissance to deism, then atheism and agnosticism; in contrast, reaffirmationists shifted from a fideistic justification of Christian faith during the Renaissance to a variety of metaphysical suppositions, almost all of which were brought to bear in defense of Christianity, however subtle their lines of attack.

What complicates this dialectic interplay has been the choice of Christian reaffirmationists to use skepticism as a methodological stance preliminary to renewed faith. Just as Pyrrho and his followers argued that doubt's inevitability justifies the pursuit of ataraxia (or peace of mind) through the acceptance of whatever dogma seems paramount at the time, a principle of obvious benefit during the final stages of Roman civilization, Renaissance fideists led by Pico della Mirandola argued that this inevitability justifies the acceptance of Christianity since it cannot be disproven and its guaranteed dispensation of rewards and punishment justifies its acceptance on the assumption that its eschatology just might turn out to be true. Descartes accordingly reverted to skepticism as a preliminary assumption in order to justify his single presumably undeniable axiom, "I think, therefore I am." As did Pascal to justify his famous wager, "If we can't be sure, we should opt for Christian belief simply to avoid eternal hellfire whether or not Christianity is true." As did Berkeley to reject the material universe in favor of God and Lockean perception. As did Kant to discount the noumena as that portion of the material universe inaccessible to human insight as opposed to transcendent idea shared with God. As did Hegel to concede antithesis preliminary to the transcendent principle of synthesis. As did Kierkegaard to challenge one's faith in order to purify and intensify it even further. As did Wittgenstein to challenge the certainty of empirical knowledge as opposed to his own private and unpublished certitude in religion's final apodictic superiority.

In effect, the grand dialectic between belief and disbelief has advanced since the middle ages into two versions of disbelief, first Pyrrhonian skepticism (later identified as fideism) preliminary to renewed Christian faith, and the other Academic, preliminary to empirical investigation identified as science. As explained by Pringle-Pattison, this dialectic assigns belief an initial role and doubt (or skepticism) a more advanced status. And just as this priority occurs in individual consciousness, it determines the sequence between belief and disbelief on a collective historic scale:

In the history of philosophy affirmation precedes negation; dogmatism goes before scepticism. And this must be so, because the dogmatic systems are, as it were, the food of scepticism. Accordingly, we find that sceptical thought did not make its appearance till a succession of mutually inconsistent theories as to the nature of the real had suggested the possibility that they might all alike be false.[iii]

II. Pyrrhonian vs. Academic skepticism.

As I have already indicated, the dialectic history between belief and disbelief may be traced back to ancient Athens, which stood alone as the birthplace of skepticism. Nowhere else among ancient societies; not in India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, or Israel--was skepticism both practiced and tolerated as a secular philosophy that challenged received opinion, especially pertaining to religion. Nowhere else, therefore, could this dialectic have dominated philosophical discourse. Granted, Hindu and Buddhist doctrine conceded disbelief, but with sufficient obfuscation to liberate worshippers from the task of exercising it. Indian philosophers, for example, designated all temporal experience as a lie, but only to justify their pursuit of spiritual alternatives not to be doubted. It may also be granted that the Jewish heretic Hiwi as well as such pre-Islamic figures as Ibn al-Rawandi and al-Warraq challenged the existence of God, but their influence was utterly nullified by the orthodoxies that followed in their respective societies. It may even be granted, as argued by Paul Radin in Primitive Man as Philosopher, that other societies might have included individuals who asked whether the gods were tricky or hostile, or whether they really cared, but there is no published evidence to document whether such individuals might have doubted the existence of these gods. If such individuals existed, they did not write about it, and what they thought was not written about by others.

Let me repeat for emphasis: Greek skeptics during the Age of Pericles--Democritus, Protagoras, Socrates, etc.--were the first documented individuals to have systematically pursued the question whether the god(s) exist, whether mankind knows enough or can ever know enough to be able to tell if they do, whether one should even bother trying, and whether religious answers have any value whatsoever as the source of truth. Later Greek philosophers such as Pyrrho, Arcesilaus, and Carneades refined and consolidated skeptical doctrine as summarized by Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, and Dionysius Laertius, whose works survived to be studied and used during the Renaissance to resurrect both secular philosophy and the scientific method. Greek philosophy thus paved the way for the subsequent advancement of both skepticism and its foundationalist rejection in western civilization, and this extraordinary contribution deserves to be more fully appreciated.

I further want to argue here that for all practical purposes our Eurocentric tradition's skeptical heritage is likewise unique, that the capacity for skepticism acquired from ancient Greece is the sine qua non that differentiates our intellectual background from all others, and that it may be traced step by step, with a brief interlude promoted by such Arab philosophers as Averroes, from early Greek philosophers to their modern European descendents inclusive of Montaigne, Gassendi, Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Richard Rorty. I also want to demonstrate that almost all major intellectual achievements in this tradition have either directly or indirectly resulted from a sustained dialectic between skeptics and the most effective defenders of belief, the latter having been described as dogmatists by the ancient skeptics, but more recently as realists and foundationalists. These dogmatists, confident of a self-evident objective reality congruent with orthodox opinion have included theologians, metaphysicians, teachers, politicians, journalists, cracker barrel philosophers, and most of the poets. As skeptics have kept advancing new arguments to challenge their assumptions, these soldiers of faith have kept devising new and more sophisticated defenses of orthodox belief--defenses that might never have been conceived except for the challenge posed by the skeptics. Likewise, of course, their theoretical innovations in defense of belief obliged further modifications in skepticism, necessitating even further innovations on both sides. Like the offensive and defensive technologies of warfare (as well as chess and the game of football), the dialectic between belief and disbelief has accordingly advanced from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, each side having gained in intellectual sufficiency from its conflict with the other.

It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have--until recently been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thoughts has significance. . . . Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche.[vi]

Quite the contrary, the dominant force of Eurocentric tradition has been the dialectic standoff between belief and disbelief, with everything of interest to Eliot derivative of the effort to defend belief--Christianity included--from the demands of skepticism. This is something entirely different, since it demotes Christianity to its proper status as the most important foundationalist response to skepticism. That Christianity has played a very major role cannot be denied, but it has been essentially reactive in the overall dialectic whose primary intellectual achievement on balance must in the final analysis be assigned to the proponents of skepticism. The skeptic may reply to Eliot's assertion that Voltaire and Nietzsche were only possible in a Christian culture by maintaining the obverse, and truer, insights, (a) that skepticism preceded Christianity in the history of western civilization by at least four hundred years, as did the entirety of Greek philosophy inclusive of the Age of Pericles; (b) that only a skeptical tradition as tenacious as ours, stretching from Protagoras to Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Russell could have produced Christianity; and (c) that it took a religious belief system as forceful as Christianity to give orthodox belief any kind of a chance against the thrust of skepticism over this period of time. Nevertheless, as I have already indicated, Christianity has played a major role in the dialectic I am proposing, so it seems appropriate to use the attitude toward Christianity and religious belief in general as the acid test to differentiate hard-core skeptics from their adversaries.

What complicates the issue is that skepticism itself has become the major battlefield between belief and disbelief, with some skeptics having used their doubts to confirm their earlier beliefs and with others having used their doubts to initiate the pursuit of new and presumably superior beliefs. These two essentially antithetical categories thus replicate the dialectic between belief and skepticism in a contest seemingly limited to skepticism alone, with one faction (Pyrrhonian) having emphasized the inevitability of uncertainty to justify the acceptance of orthodox belief, as opposed to the other faction (Academic), which has acknowledged this inevitability, but only to insist upon probing empirical data as accurately as possible in order to determine the probable truth on a tentative hypothetical basis. The division between these two versions of skepticism first occurred at the time of Plato, and it has diffused and complicated the impact of skepticism ever since. The so-called Pyrrhonian version advanced by Pyrrho, Aenisidemus, Sextus Empiricus, Erasmus, Charron, Pascal,Berkeley, Kierkegaard, William James, Wittgenstein, and Richard Rorty has at least tacitly granted belief--and, more specifically, religious faith--its "truth" value based on the expedient premise that the absolute truth is ultimately inaccessible, so we might just as well achieve quietude (ataraxia) by accommodating social custom and orthodox belief. Often enough the tacit support of belief has been the primary purpose of this approach, as was certainly the case with the fideism promoted during the Renaissance by such figures as Pico della Mirandola and Pascal. The primary assumption of fideists was that nothing was certain in the universe, so peace of mind (again, ataraxia) was only possible through orthodox faith.

In contrast, the Academic version of skepticism advanced by Arcesilaus and Carneades (described as such because Arcesilaus had inherited the leadership of Plato's Academy) emphasized epoche as a suspension of judgment (inclusive of belief) in order to establish the most accurate truth strictly on the basis of probability and common sense. Arcesilaus seems to have borrowed the notion of epoche from Pyrrho to provide the keystone of Academic skepticism. He also emphasized the reasonable (eulogon) as the final criterion in ascertaining the truth, whereas Carneades added the consideration of probability with levels extending from simple to tested and irreversible, the latter two apparently necessitating empirical investigation. Also important, Strato, the second head of the Lyceum following Aristotle--and a friend of Arcesilaus--had proposed the so-called Stratonician Presumption that limited the truth to empirical data independent of metaphysical speculation. During the most recent four centuries these simple principles were also important to such figures as Bacon, Gassendi, Bayle, Voltaire, d'Holbach, Hume, Nietzsche, Mill, Huxley, Russell, Dewey, Carnap, Ayer, and Quine, all of whom rejected unexamined belief in favor of making the best possible effort to ascertain the relative probability of truths as established by empirical methodology. The only surviving texts explaining the principles of Academic skepticism are Cicero's two dialogues, De Natura Deorum and Academica, and certain portions of Sextus Empiricus's works. Henceforth I shall be capitalizing the word Academic to refer to any sceptical theory that emphasizes scientific empiricism and can accordingly be linked with the empirical tradition that extends back to the New Academy.[vii]  

Which came first, the Pyrrhonian or Academic version of skepticism? Pyrrho preceded Arcesilaus, but Protagoras, obviously a forbear of the Academic approach, preceded Pyrrho. What seems certain is that the Pyrrhonian approach declined very rapidly in the third century, B.C., but was revived by Aenesidemus at about the time of Christ and survived the Academic approach into the fourth century, A.D. The Pyrrhonian approach was revived before the Academic approach during the renaissance, but empiricism and materlialist philosophy traceable to the Academic approach have gained momentum over the most recent four centuries, and it is only in the twentieth century that Pyrrhonism seems to be on the brink of a major comeback. It may be argued based on a distinction proposed by Hume that the Academic version of skepticism has been mostly "antecedent" in the sense that it uses doubt to initiate the necessary search behavior to establish probable truths through empirical investigation. In contrast, the Pyrrhonian version is "consequent" in the sense that seemingly inexplicable paradoxes such as those recounted by Sextus Empiricus (that a stick thrust in the water seems bent, etc.) can be used to justify the rejection of all truths on a final basis.[viii] The Academic version presumably induces anxiety by adducing contradictions that cannot be resolved, whereas the Pyrrhonian version encourages a final peace of mind (ataraxia) through the paradoxical certainty that all is uncertainty, thus guaranteeing that one's expedient acceptance of conventional wisdom--whatever its presumed certainty--is perfectly acceptable under the circumstances.

Academic skeptics seem to have been fully as concerned as the Pyrrhonians with vulnerability of experience to error, and the Pyrrhonians were no less prone than the Academics to draw their own conclusions based on their skepticism, in their case the advisability of accepting received orthodoxy as a comfortable "fit" no less vulnerable to doubt than any other belief system. If all belief may be challenged on skeptical grounds, the Pyrrhonians suggest, why not go with the crowd, or with one's irrational inclinations, letting need and social acceptance take precedence over impossible standards of certainty? But this latitudinarian choice is no more "final" than the sustained pursuit of empirical probability, whether or not it falls short of the absolute truth. Both the Pyrrhonian and Academic versions of skepticism thus possess antecedent and consequent features, each beginning with doubt and concluding with a particular strategy for coping with this doubt.

Of course significant differences may be found among the figures I have clustered together in either of these two complementary rosters--for example between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein as Pyrrhonists and between Nietzsche and Russell as empirical (or Academic) skeptics. However, their similarities outweigh their differences relative to the basic choice at stake between belief and skepticism. This may be seen in their respective attitudes toward religion, Kierkegaard having taken skeptical doubt to its extreme as an exercise in Christian genuflection, as opposed to Wittgenstein, whose mature speculation about language excluded the topic of religion except in having left enough space for the pursuit of Christianity. What Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein nevertheless shared was their effort to justify their Christian belief. Likewise, Nietzsche extended evolutionary doctrine to philosophical theory in order to challenge the western tradition's entire history of orthodox belief epitomized by religion, as opposed to Russell, who paid little more than lip service to uncertainty in the essentially dogmatic empirical philosophy he advocated, but who was no less hostile toward religion. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche may be compared as having been more or less contemporary existentialists, and Russell and Wittgenstein as having been personal friends for at least a few years with similar approaches to the study of language. However, their respective theoretical differences pertaining to religion put them in essentially different camps, Kierkegaard aligned with Wittgenstein, not Nietzsche, and Nietzsche aligned with Russell, not Kierkegaard or Wittgenstein. This basic watershed extends to include all the rest of the figures listed above, Descartes aligned with Pico della Mirandola rather than Bacon, Hume aligned with d'Holbach rather than Berkeley, and Schopenhauer aligned with Mill rather than Kant and Hegel. In each instance, no matter how sophisticated the argument, the primary choice between the skeptical defense of Christian belief on one hand, and its skeptical rejection on the other almost inevitably establishes the category to which the philosopher belongs.

One must emphasize that both Pyrrhonists and empirical skeptics have agreed that the absolute truth is very probably beyond the capacity of human intelligence to determine. The principium divisionis that separates the two camps is, as I have already indicated, that the Pyrrhonists have either tolerated or encouraged the blind acceptance of belief because of our unavoidable ignorance of the final truth, while the Academics have chosen to cultivate empirical methods to estimate as well as possible the relative probability of competitive truths. Pyrrhonists have argued that skeptical doubt justifies the pursuit of quietude through an acceptance of unexamined belief, while the Academics have favored a laborious if only partially successful pursuit of systematic observation wherever it leads us. Pyrrhonian skepticism has advanced the cause of Christianity as an increasingly sophisticated belief system, while Academic skepticism has been the midwife of both secular philosophy and the scientific method, neither of which has been cultivated to any appreciable extent outside the western tradition. This simple difference has borne monumental consequences in the history of western philosophy. 

There should be no doubt that the combined influence of Pyrrhonian and Academic skepticism has totally imbued itself in the intellectual history of western civilization. Everything we know and think we know is directly or indirectly linked to the effort either to use or to cope with skepticism. Kant's metaphysics, Dostoevsky's fiction of Christian redemption, Jung's theory of archetypes, and even Eliot's poetry of kaleidoscopic Christian despair were only possible in a climate of skepticism. Ultimately, it was skepticism that abolished slavery, imposed universal sufferage, and sparked the feminist movement despite Biblical pronouncements to the contrary. This extraordinary success of scepticism at the expense of received tradition may be suggested by comparisons with non-western societies still almost entirely devoid of skepticism. Even our fads in art, music, architecture, and popular culture may be traced to skepticism through their pursuit of the new to supplant the old. For it has been the struggle to cope with skepticism --to absorb or deny it, or to find some kind of an intermediate compromise--that has given us the ideas, innovations and architectonic accomplishments of our so-called great tradition. Some of western civilization's geniuses have built to deny skepticism, others to deny that denial is necessary. All have tried to deal with its implications one way or another.

Additional factors might have been important in the advancement of Eurocentric civilization, but I would conjecture that most, if not all, of these have either directly or indirectly derived from skepticism. An orthodox Marxist theory of our cultural heritage, for example, emphasizes the emergence of a democratic tradition in mercantile societies that began in Athens and then spread to Rome, the Italian Renaissance, and modern European nations--the same societies as those in which skepticism occurred. This coincidence is striking: wherever capitalism and democracy have flourished, so too has skepticism. What might have been the connection? One may speculate as a Marxist that the rejection of aristocratic hegemony encouraged the systematic cultivation of disbelief in its culture and institutions. Then again, the capacity for disbelief--necessarily entailing both courage and intelligence--could only have facilitated the rejection of the ideological orthodoxy supportive of aristocratic hegemony. So which came first? What can be suggested at least on a tentative basis is that in the struggle between two classes, oppressors and the oppressed, the tools of skepticism have always played a major role--as much a cause as an effect--in sorting out progressive and retrogressive belief systems as alternative versions of the truth. Also important in the history of western civilization, logic served the goals of skepticism by dispensing with false propositions starting with Aristotle's principles of deduction, followed by Bacon and Descartes's rules for the direction of the mind during the seventeenth century, Mill, Russell, and Dewey's versions of inductive logic coming into the twentieth century, and finally the procedures of statistical verification emphasized since early in the twentieth century to determine probability at levels of accuracy never anticipated by Carneades and Cicero. Other variables might also be isolated that helped to define the Eurocentric tradition, but I am confident that these too can be either directly or indirectly linked to skepticism as an intellectual predisposition. The point I am trying to make here is that skepticism's role in Eurocentric history has been pervasive, however obscure its impact might first seem--whether pertaining to economics, logic, or anything else. In contrast, its role for most non-western societies remains fragmentary and essentially foreign--the product of incomplete and piecemeal cultural diffusion.

I would go so far as to argue that the core of western history--its history that matters--is rooted in the evolution of skepticism as a more or less linear progressive movement that may be traced to the simple choice between belief and doubt, between orthodox acceptance and its skeptical rejection. The continuing struggle between these alternatives has generated a cumulative forward progression with a cutting edge to be discerned in the most compelling arguments of its best authors on both sides of the issue at any particular stage in its history. Just as the marvelous harmonic risks of Chopin's music would have been inconceivable preceding Haydn and Beethoven, Aquinas's metaphysics would have been inconceivable preceding Averroes's interpretation of Aristotle, and Kant's metaphysics would have been inconceivable preceding Decartes and Hume; and in literature (no less a battlefield between belief and skepticism) the rural nostalgia of Wordsworth's poetry would have been inconceivable preceding Shakespeare and Milton, Locke and Hume, or Shaftesbury and Hartley. Goethe acknowledged the historic importance of skepticism when he declared, "The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance is the conflict of skepticism with faith."[ix] Goethe made it plain that he himself preferred faith, or belief, but this was necessarily his choice as a poet, as, in fact, it has been the choice of the overwhelming majority of the public, a choice so compelling that the role of skepticism has been almost entirely banished from polite discourse among the partially educated public. The tiniest minority of intellectuals actively pursue skepticism in its purest distillation, but these individuals have catalyzed its benefits for society as a whole and have thereby made their contribution to the cumulative advancement of civilization.

Today, many scholars and intellectuals with multicultural pretensions neglect or actively challenge our skeptical tradition by encouraging the uncritical appreciation of other societies still almost entirely devoid of the stimulus provided by skepticism. "We hold a peculiar assortment of beliefs," the argument goes, "these other societies likewise hold their own peculiar assortment of beliefs. Aren't we therefore--all things considered--basically the same?" But we're not, and the difference should be obvious, since our own beliefs--Eurocentric to the core--necessarily fly in the teeth of skepticism that reduces belief to absurdity unless it is buttressed by philosophical distinctions that rationalize our choice well enough to give it adequate credibility. And this we do, taking pains to reinforce our arguments as well as possible with the authoritative expertise of such figures as St. Augustine, Descartes, Kant, and myriad others for the purpose of finding new grounds to confirm old beliefs. Just as important as skepticism has been the manner of coping with it, and here western belief systems substantially differ from those of societies still lacking sufficient critical mass in skepticism for anybody to be able to question the status quo, much less to defend it on a truly sophisticated basis.

It is to be conceded that skepticism is now making inroads throughout the entire world, and to such an extent that the middle-class American citizen who habitually divides his Sundays between church and televised spectator sports might indeed benefit as much as anybody from the technological byproducts of our skeptical tradition, but without truly participating in this tradition as much as a Japanese or Nigerian engineer who plays chess, keeps track of the world press, and reads Plato, Kierkegaard, or Kurt Vonnegut. Nevertheless, skepticism is only beginning to gather critical mass in these essentially pre-skeptical societies which still comprise the overwhelming majority of our world's population. Custom, superstition and elaborate rituals of politeness continue to thwart intellectual honesty with a sufficient dose to catalyze skepticism. Devoid of the challenge of skepticism, non-western religion continues to lack a theology, much less a metaphysics. Raw faith still metastasizes, and a fundamental sameness predominates. Knowledge consists of rote memory without really asking or answering, and as a result there is be much less to be said. One may conjecture that without skepticism our modern Eurocentric civilization would be pretty much the same, for it would never have emerged from the Dark and Middle Ages and would be no more advanced than the many societies where economic deprivation is, if anything, exceeded by intellectual poverty, and with a determinate relationship that functions in both directions, intellectual stultification both the cause and effect of economic stagnation. These are the societies in which Trotsky's concept of combined and uneven development finds its nightmarish enactment in the contradictory mixture of technology derivative of skepticism (immunology, weaponry, cargo planes to supply emergency food, etc.) and a pre-skeptical absence of social and cultural benefits (genuine democracy, for example) that precludes outstanding intellectual achievement except as a cry of victimization.

How, then, does belief persist today as an antidote to skepticism among the educated classes of Eurocentric societies? One answer is the reliance on sanctioned fictions, for example through the experience of literature. As already indicated, our "high" literature in western civilization has played an important role as an instrument of public gratification by absorbing and denying the impact of skepticism at the most sophisticated levels. Whereas the skeptical methodology explained by both Cicero and Sextus Empiricus emphasized epoche as a suspension of assent, literary experience as explained by Coleridge emphasizes a "suspension of disbelief," exactly the opposite mental disposition. And, indeed, most of our literature resembles and somewhat extends the benefits of religion by its resourceful manipulation of fantasy to exaggerate the experience of belief, though more often than not as a quick fix that need not survive the duration of the reading experience.[x] The fiction we enjoy also produces satisfaction by combatting skepticism, for example when it links villainy with skepticism to justify its rejection and when it evokes both comic relief through the depiction of skeptical absurdity (Falstaff, Touchstone, etc.), and tragic catharsis through the depiction of flawed skeptics prone to introspective self-flagellation. Beginning with Sophocles, this essentially defensive response to skepticism has suffused our literary tradition, and the most remarkable achievements in this tradition--for example Shakespeare's Hamlet, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness--bring skepticism into play at almost every level of experience preliminary to its rejection on the most tentative basis. Granted, today's postmodernist fiction might seem an exception, since it voices skepticism without penalizing it, but this particular literary risk serves only to prove the rule, since it deprives itself of a popular audience, which continues to depend on literature--like spectator sports--as a quickly accessible and dispensable pseudo-belief system. Thus the current success of TV and Hollywood movies, whose receipts totally dwarf the income of our serious authors beholden to skepticism. 

But of course the most effective defense of belief remains the Pyrrhonian tactic of turning skepticism against itself. This may be done, for example, by answering the question, "How can we be certain our beliefs are true?" with its orthodox negative version, "But how can we be any more certain our beliefs are false?" And then by asking the still broader, more invidious question, "So why, then, should we ask any questions whatsoever?" This stoic epistemology is both remarkably profound and readily accessible to the average mind--thus a wonderful instrument for dispensing with issues by the average mind. It is possible to avoid all questions whatsoever on the assumption that this particular sequence of questions can inevitably be asked, so it need not be brought into debate. Many today have fallen into this particular strategy. The justification of the unexamined life defensible on these grounds was first used by Pyrrho to reject all philosophical inquiry whatsoever, and it cropped up again when sixteenth and seventeenth century "fideists," most notably Piero della Francesca, challenged excessive inquiry that might undermine the authority of established institutions. The fideists's ultimate purpose was to demonstrate the need for sheer belief--unadulterated faith in God as guided by church doctrine.

In similar fashion, if with different complications, the so-called neopragmatists and poststructuralists who emerged during the Reagan decade have stretched skepticism even further to make room for belief, this time by having promoted the assumption that no "foundationalist" belief system--science included--takes precedence over any other. There is no such thing as a capital-T truth, Derrida, Rorty, Fish and their many epigones argue, so all knowledge, all belief, must be provisional. This absolute commitment to skeptical relativism might seem to challenge any faith or belief system whatsoever, but its primary target, whether acknowledged or not, has been the presumably totalitarian certitude of scientific empiricism emphasized by the empirical skepticism of such philosophers as Russell and Carnap, and its predictable attendant effect, tolerated if not acknowledged, has been to encourage renewed dedication to orthodox religious belief as well as the current proliferation of bizarre and potentially dangerous fads, creeds, and good causes. For if all discourse is expressive of belief and no belief is more credible than any other, one may take faith in whatever belief one chooses, confident of its justification by the most advanced tenets of philosophy. If the truth can no longer be ascertained, neither can error, falsehood, or the lie. Anything goes--let diversity prevail. As in fact it does. One can only hope that the current trend is nothing more than a brief interlude in the last four centuries primarily dominated by Academic skepticism and that it does not auger a new "dark" ages comparable to the twelve centuries of Christian orthodoxy anticipated, if not initiated, by the Pyrrhonian speculation of Aenesidemus and Sextus Empiricus.

III. Classical Skepticism

The absence of skepticism outside the Eurocentric tradition may be documented by the dearth of texts antagonistic to orthodox belief, particularly the worship of god(s). We have no evidence of skepticism systematically practiced for this purpose in any society preceding ancient Greece, and its pursuit subsequent to ancient Greece can usually be traced to the Greek influence. Indian mysticism might seem to pose an exception to this rule, for example with the pronouncement quoted by Schopenhauer.

It is Maya, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller takes from afar for water, or the stray piece of rope he mistakes for a snake.[xi]

The "veil of deception" was used here to suggest the existence of spiritual truths that transcend perception, so something akin to Pyrrhonism was intended, to believe in these truths despite the physical evidence that might suggest otherwise. However, the validity of these truths was not called into question, merely the usefulness of empirical perception in confirming their validity, as opposed to Pyrrhonism's extension of the principle of uncertainty to these truths as well. Dogma thus receded a level from the realm of perception, and individuals were expected to negotiate this process of abstraction without jeopardizing their belief. Likewise, the skeptical aspect of the antirationalist doctrine of Muslim and Jewish authors such as Al Ghazali and Jehudah Ha-Levi during the Middle Ages might seem to have been achieved independent of western tradition, but they may be almost certainly attributed to cultural diffusion, suggesting the breadth of Hellenic influence as well as the extent to which skeptical theory could be revised, indeed perverted, by others outside the Eurocentric tradition. This seems to have been the case, for example, when Al Ghazali proposed in The Collapse of Philosophy that there is no need for philosophical speculation independent of revelation, since all truth is in the Koran. Such an approach might seem duly skeptical of ideas external to one's faith, but the use of skepticism to reject these ideas because of one's absolute dedication to one's faith smacks of fanaticism rather than skepticism. It was supposedly this use of logic, as told by Abulfaragius, that led to Omar's earlier destruction of the library of Alexandria in 640 A.D.--what was left of it subsequent to its destruction by the Christian bishop, Theophilus, in 389 A.D.

Elsewhere in the world--for example in Persia, China, Africa, and the Americas--there seems to be no evidence whatsoever of systematic skeptical philosophy. Paul Radin claims to have observed skepticism in primitive societies, but his research reveals not the rejection of their existence, but a fear of the gods and an uncertainty whether they are friendly and can be trusted. This more radical version of disbelief--tantamount to atheism or agnosticism--is entirely different from fearing and despising the motives of the gods, and Radin cites no evidence of its practice in native societies.[xii] Have individuals in non-western countries held skeptical views but kept them to themselves, or confided them in private conversations with others with whom they felt safe to do so, as some anthropologists have argued?[xiii] Very probably they have, but that such individuals--perhaps millions of them--might have harbored skeptical views without having ventured to put them on record would indicate the extent to which skepticism has been discouraged, if not punished, in those societies in which belief tantamount to raw credulousness predominated. As a general rule, it may be stated that the great majority of the world's population has taken faith in exactly what has been obliged by custom and cultural tradition, and that this universal homage to shared dogma has been enforced by a righteous priesthood literally bestowed with the power of life and death. More often than not, to verbalize or otherwise manifest doubt was literally to jeopardize one's existence. The Spanish Inquisition illustrated this tyranny of orthodox belief in Europe, but comparable oppression has occurred throughout the rest of the world, as would be indicated by the total lack of documented skepticism. It was the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece who found the concepts and vocabulary to challenge the truth value of belief, and to sustain and perfect this challenge both in public dialogue and in written texts, and this accomplishment turns out to have played a major role--I would argue the primary role--in the birth and advancement of modern civilization.

In his spirited defense of western civilization, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, Ernest Gellner ascribes to our Eurocentric cultural history a unique "cognitive style" and argues that nobody knows just how and why it works.[xiv] The answer, simply enough, I would argue, is that it entails a persistent and organized commitment to critical inquiry which entirely derives from Greek skepticism. As opposed to the emphasis upon custom and tradition that has suffused non-western cultures, western civilization was propelled by skeptical inquiry for seven centuries from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the stoics, Epicureans, and skeptics who held forth up until the fourth century, A.D.; and then, after a twelve-century interlude--the Middle (or "dark") Ages--skeptical inquiry revived during the Renaissance, which was as much as anything a rebirth of skepticism. Pyrrhonian skepticism set the stage for this major achievement, but it was empiricism--the scientific method as fostered by Academic skepticism--that flourished from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and that has brought major changes in every aspect of our lives, especially our willingness both as individuals and as members of society to judge the relative merits of facts, stories, and general information based on a healthy balance between doubt and belief. That's the difference Gellner was looking for!

The first significant contribution to the skeptical tradition seems to have been Heraclitus's theory that the world is in total flux--such continuous motion that the truth can never be fully accepted at its face value. Democritus found comparable difficulties with an atomistic composition of the world too small to be discerned by our naked senses. Cratylus extended this principle of unavoidable ignorance to all acts of communication; Xenophanes generalized that there is no sure way to differentiate true knowledge from the false; and Gorgias argued that nothing exists, that if it did it would be unknowable, and if it were knowable, it could not be communicated. Even more nihilistic in his skepticism, Metrodorus of Chios argued, "I deny that we know whether we know something or know nothing, and even that we know the mere fact that we do not know (or do know), or know at all whether something exists or nothing exists."[xv] The thriving school of Sophists in Athens--led by Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Hippias, Isocrates, Critias, and others--likewise emphasized human ignorance as the most fundamental truth of all.[xvi] Rhetorical persuasiveness therefore took precedence over knowledge, theory, or logic, and apparently epistemological skepticism soon degenerated into moral skepticism as well.

Protagoras, the first and most important of the Sophists, insisted that mankind is the measure of all things in the sense that everything we perceive and judge in the world about us is necessarily the projection of our own minds. Protagoras made this point in the first sentence of his book On Truth--one of the only two passages of his entire body of works that survive today. The sentence deserves to be quoted in its entirety, since it adds a caveat that imposes an additional and potentially awsome responsibility upon the skeptical philosopher: "Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not" [italics added].[xvii] There is nothing we know that exists in and of itself, so we are burdened with the task of isolating the are's from the are not's among what we think we know. But how can we measure are not's unless they exist at least as the product of wrong thinking? The primary role of skeptics is therefore to explore with thoroughness and effectively challenge "things that are not"--false theories and beliefs without foundation--in order to demonstrate their lack of existence--i.e., their falsehood. This obligation may obviously be applied to scientific methodology in the testing of hypotheses to determine their accuracy, but it also applies to any belief or assumption relevant both religious and political issues and to human experience on a more casual basis.

Protagoras also distinguished between physis (freedom) and nomos (traditional usage), and he anticipated Locke by arguing that the soul is nothing apart from its perceptions.[xviii] He likewise proposed a primitive phenomenology based on the assumption that all objective appearances are true at least as appearances and that absolutely nothing exists beyond them. His Antilogic first established dialectics as a methodology for weighing the relative merits and liabilities of any idea, and his final contribution, his infamous treatise On the Gods, challenged the existence of the ancient Greek gods as being very probably among the things that are not. As he explained in his only other passage to have survived, "As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life."[xix] Here what seems to have been agnostic evasiveness with a touch of irony anticipated twentieth-century logical positivists who rejected religion as a "pseudo-question" that can neither be proven nor refuted, and can therefore be ignored. Because of his treatise, all of Protagoras's writings were gathered and burned, and Protagoras fled from Athens to avoid being forced to drink hemlock. He was martyred--some would argue punished by the gods--when the ship taking him to Sicily sank during a storm, apparently killing all aboard. Everything Protagoras wrote has thus been lost except the two sentences quoted above, but his influence has been indelible.

The first documented reaction to skepticism was strictly literary, the product of the stage. Aristophanes's comedy repeatedly scapegoated Socrates for his role as a sophist, while Greek tragedy offered a subtler critique that must nevertheless have been obvious to contemporary Athenian audiences. Sophocles, for example, very likely used Oedipus Rex to depict Pericles as the victim of skepticism. Like Oedipus, Pericles was prophesied to be a "pollution" who would bring the downfall of his lands, endured the plague (indeed, died of it), and was aligned with a woman capable of impiety--the courtesan Aspasia, who, like Protagoras, was indicted for doubting the existence of the gods. Indeed, Oedipus himself resembled Protagoras as well as Pericles in the crucial third scene of the play in which he ignored the desperate admonition of Jocasta to remain in ignorance of his destiny and instead declared, "No-one could stop me from finding out the truth." Suddenly the truth was even more important than his acceptance by the gods. Earlier, he and Jocasta shared the same goal of proving oracles wrong, but Oedipus alone took the final step of seeking out alternative truths in secular answers from the testimony of knowledgeable witnesses. Trapped by his circumstances, Oedipus rejected the authority of the Greek gods for an alternative deification, Tyche (or luck), later personified as the goddess Fortuna, who may be understood at a more abstract level as having represented raw chance, the what-really-happened that was best understood through the quest for probability independent of religious belief. But of course all the prophecies came true, the power of the gods was confirmed, and Oedipus was brought to ruin by his skepticism. Similarly, in Antigone Creon was destroyed because he rejected the importance of social custom (the burial of the dead) imposed by the edict of the gods; and in The Bacchae Pentheus was destroyed because he refused to accept the existence of a particular god, Dionysus, whose uncanny resemblance to Christ as a sacrificial deity linked with the spring fertility ritual has been noted by mythologists since Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough was first published in 1890. As a general principle, it seems the tragic flaw (hamartia, or, more specifically, hubris) of the protagonists of Greek tragedy came of their effort to usurp both the power and knowledge of the gods, and this put them in the same category as the pre-Socratic skeptical philosophers. This was no accident. Like Protagoras and his friends, these protagonists went the limit in their rejection of the gods, and Greek tragedy punished them for their audacity, much to the delight of contemporary audiences offended by the skepticism of the pre-Socratic philosophers.

Previous to Greek tragedy, literature only spradically described figures who might be considered to have been precursors of the skeptics, and these were very severely punished for their transgressions. The Sumerian king Gilgamesh and his sidekick Enkidu actually killed the nature god, Humbaba, then insulted the powerful goddess Ishtar and killed the Bull of Heaven sent to punish them. For these transgressions against the authority of the gods, Enkidu died and Gilgamesh, like Adam and Eve, was later denied eternal life. As for Humbaba's status as a prehistoric Christ figure, perhaps the earliest nature god sacrificed by man, he first needed to exist, contrary to skeptical doctrine, and of course the other gods and goddesses--Anu, Enlil, Ishtar, etc.--continued to exist after his killing.[xx] In Biblical tradition, Adam and Eve were punished for eating of the tree of knowledge, as opposed to Job, who was rewarded for his enduring unexamined faith. Of all the books in the Bible, only Ecclesiastes offered a consistent skeptical vision of human destiny, but Biblical scholarship indicates it was apparently written late enough to have been influenced by Hellenistic philosophy, and it seems to have been only grudgingly admitted to the Bible's final canon by its editors. Similarly, in the Greek tradition, the Homeric figures of Thersites and Antinous were severely punished for their willingness to reject both aristocratic priority and the authority of the gods, whereas Penelope and Eumaius, Odysseus's swineherd, were generously rewarded for their unexamined faith. As a general principle, to doubt or ignore the power and prophecy of the gods prefigured catastrophe throughout Homer's two epics.

Nowhere, in fact, in pre-tragic ancient literature, with the possible exception of the story of Gilgamesh, was skepticism either explicitly or implicitly identified with figures who might otherwise have been considered virtuous. Greek tragedy was the very first literary genre to grant skepticism at least its status as a flaw--albeit an important life-threatening flaw--of characters who otherwise possessed heroic stature rooted in traditional belief. This significant achievement must be recognized to have resulted from the prevalence of skepticism at the time tragedy flourished in ancient Greece, and the primary value of this achievement seems to have been that it denied skepticism its validity within a literary context acceptable to the public at that time. Skepticism was acknowledged only if it could be confessed and renounced by the very individuals who had succumbed to its temptation.

Perhaps fifteen years younger than Protagoras, Socrates was no less prominent as a sophist who played the role of a skeptic by challenging our knowledge of the external world. He was primarily known for his frequent assertions that he knew nothing except his own ignorance, and that nothing could be known except that he knew nothing.[xxi] However, Socrates was followed by his disciple, Plato, who, like the playwright Sophocles, reacted against skepticism, in his case by using Socrates's dialogues to propose a higher world of ideal forms in which we can once again invest our belief. When Socrates spoke as a skeptic in his Dialogues by challenging orthodox assumptions, we may assume it was Socrates himself who was speaking as faithfully recorded by Plato; however, when Socrates went on to propose an alternative realm of ideal forms, we must question the extent to which Plato put in Socrates's mouth his own theory of the universe. Plato may therefore be treated as having been a "dogmatist," as opposed to a skeptic, for he was the first major philosopher to have reacted against skepticism, in his instance by using Socrates to answer his own skeptical questions with a theory of transcendent reality presumably impervious to skeptical doubts--a "higher" truth of ideal forms.[xxii] Thus the perversity of Alfred North Whitehead's remark that the entirety of western civilization has been a series of footnotes to Plato.[xxiii] Quite the contrary, Plato was--after Greek tragedy--the first major footnote to the history of skepticism as the primary catalyst of western civilization. And of course the second (or third) major footnote was Aristotle's no less dogmatic empirical philosophy, which lay the foundation for science by seeking out ideal forms imbedded as categories in the material universe inclusive of society, literature, and the dynamics of human behavior. The fourth such footnote would have been Plotinus's theory of Neoplatonism, and the fifth the philosophy of Augustine, Aquinas, and their scholastic brethren.

What modern historians tend to overlook is that the skepticism of the sophists survived Greek tragedy, Plato and Aristotle. Rudiments of skeptical theory may be found in the philosophy of the Stoics, Cynics, and Megarians. Pyrrho of Elis (365-275 B.C.), the first of the Greek philosophers specifically identified as a skeptic, seems to have accompanied Alexander the Great into India, where he learned to pursue quietude (ataraxia), mental imperturbability (ataraxia), and detachment from worldly matters (apragmosyne)--principles he later merged with Athenian philosophy to be able to propose skepticism as a defense of stoic morality totally free of knowledge.[xxiv] Paradoxocally, he argued that skepticism guarantees freedom from anxiety, since it permits one to disregard contradictory theoretical assumptions. All things are false, Pyrrho claimed, since there is no truth that cannot be refuted by other truths, so their equal probability lets us abandon the fruitless pursuit of answers. As explained by Aristocles in summarizing the philosophy of Timon, Pyrrho's single major disciple:

He [Timon] says that he (Pyrrho) declared that things are by nature equally indeterminable, admitting of neither measurement nor discrimination. For this reason, our sense experiences and beliefs are neither true nor false. Therefore, we ought not to put our trust in them, but be without beliefs, disinclined to take a stand one way or another; and we should be steadfast in this attitude, saying about each thing individually that it is no more than is not. For those who are indeed disposed in this manner, according to Timon, there will result first, a disinclination to make assertions and then, ataraxia.[xxv]

For some individuals this rejection of potentially unpleasant ideas might provoke anxiety and a compensatory pursuit of alternative "truths" that justify their rejection of the malignant ideas they cannot altogether forget, but for the true Pyrrhonian philosopher the mystic confidence that the truth is totally unobtainable guarantees quietude. According to Diogenes Laertius, this extreme epistemological skepticism also necessarily implies an ethical skepticism as well: "He [Pyrrho] denied that anything was honourable or dishonourable, just or unjust. . . . Universally, there is nothing really existent, but custom and convention govern human action."[xxvi] Here custom and convention may be understood to refer to received orthodox belief, whatever belief system is in vogue at the time where one lives (for example, conservatism among today's mainstreet businessmen, and liberalism among today's English and anthropology professors). Though Pyrrho must be understood to have doubted the truth value of custom and convention, his emphasis upon quietude obviously encouraged finding an acceptable compromise with their universal pursuit. Pyrrho's arguments were later codified by Aenisidemus (c. 90-80 B.C.) and provided the basis for Sextus Empiricus's summary of skeptical theory (c. 200 A.D.) which survives today.

Far more influential in ancient times, the so-called New Academy succeeded Plato's Academy under the sway of major skeptical philosophers such as Arcesilaus (316-241 B.C.), Carneades (214-129 B.C.), and Clitomachus (ca. 129 B.C.). Carneades was particularly famous as a consummate polemicist willing and eager to debate the merits of any issue, particularly religious disbelief. On a visit to Rome, Carneades gave a public lecture in which he argued that the perpetrators of injustice suffer more than their victims, but the following day he gave another lecture that just as persuasively argued the opposite case. His purpose, it turned out, was to demonstrate the uncertainty of truth through a dialectic examination of alternative perspectives. Shocked by his cynicism, Cato the elder imposed his expulsion from Rome in order to prevent his further contaminating the morals of its youth. Carneades' contribution to philosophy, like that of Socrates, was primarily oral, and nothing survives that was written by him. However, his disciple, Clitomachus, was a prolific author, and though all of his publications were lost during the Middle Ages, they could be used by Cicero in De Natura Deorum and Academica, both of which have survived, and by Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius in texts which have also survived.[xxvii]

The New Academy's version of skepticism did not emphasize the value of quietude, as had Pyrrho's version of skepticism, but instead, beginning with Arcesilaus, featured an epistemology based on the suspension of assent (epoche) when weighing the merits of alternative theories to help explain any single or clustered "presentation of experience" (fantasia in Greek, visum in Latin--better translated, depending on its context, as perception, phenomenon or perceived data). Carneades maintained that there is no totally reliable criterion (or objective standard of confirmation) to determine the truth, since each and every presentation (i.e., perception) manifests both what it perceives and its own intrinsic limitations as an act of perception:

The criterion must be sought in the affection of the soul caused by the sensible evidence. And this affection must be indicative both of itself and of the appearance which caused it, which affection is nothing else than the presentation. Hence we must say that the presentation is an affection of the living creature capable of presenting both itself and the other object.

More specifically, as pertains to sight:

When we have looked at an object we have our sense of sight in a certain condition, and not in the same condition as that in which we had it before we looked; and owing to such an alteration we perceive, in fact, two things, one the alteration itself, which is the presentation, and, secondly, that which produced the alteration, which is the visible object.

Presentation, which is the primary factor in the cognition of the living creature, must, like light, both reveal itself and be indicative of the evident object which is produced by it.[xxviii]

Truths might exist, Carneades seems to have implied, but the subjective limitations of our perceptual capacity unavoidably prevent their recognition except as a matter of probability. The truth of any particular question is nothing more than its probable truth, for we lack the means to establish the finality of any of our ideas. Carneades therefore agreed with Protagoras that each and every presumed truth needs to be debated on both sides (in utramque partem) in order to determine its relative probability (Pithanon). All knowledge, Carneades proposed, can be divided into two categories, the apparently false and the apparently true, and the latter category--limited to credible impressions--may be further subdivided on an incremental basis into (a) the probable in and of itself (b) the probable and uncontradicted, and finally (c) the probable, uncontradicted, and tested--the latter by means of potentially unlimited inquiry typical of scientific methodology.[xxix] Carneades apparently used the terms "uncontradicted" and "irreversible" interchangeably, and by "irreversible" he meant that the data observed by the skeptic is supported by other data that is either directly or indirectly relevant:

The Academic forms his judgment of truth by the concurrence of presentations [i.e., data], and when none of the presentations in the concurrence provokes in him a suspicion of its falsity he asserts that the impression is true.[xxx]

A particular observation (for example the sighting of a ghost) cannot be accepted if it contradicts all other observations that might be either directly or indirectly related to it. Once all three of these criteria--of probability, contradiction, and methodological confirmation--are met, "truths" can be accepted on a provisional basis until they are superceded by other, yet more probable truths.

Though Carneades and the rest of the Academic skeptics shared with Pyrrho the conviction that the absolute truth is finally inaccessible, they sought relative truths that could nevertheless be determined on a tentative basis by carefully weighing the merits of alternative arguments. Here they parted company with Pyrrho. Whereas Pyrrho used doubt to advocate the acceptance of established custom, Carneades used doubt to advocate the pursuit of systematic investigation in order to sort out those appearances that were the most likely to be true. This single difference between the approaches of Pyrrho and Carneades established the watershed that has differentiated the Pyrrhonian and Academic versions of skepticism that have persisted ever since, one of them providing the matrix of later trends in Christian belief, the other providing the matrix of later trends in scientific inquiry. Pyrrho's influence on modern thought was important, but Carneades's seminal contribution to Eurocentric intellectual history was even more important because of his treatment of empiricism as a necessary byproduct of epistemology. Just as Plato had categorized ideal forms and Aristotle the structures he found in nature, Carneades both categorized and refined the investigation of data crucial to the success of empirical inquiry. The bulk of his contribution was relatively small, but as shall be documented in the next chapter his impact upon the later evolution of modern science has been of major significance. For Carneades, every issue was debatable, and all data was seen to be of potential value in establishing the relative probability of the issues under debate. Knowledge predominated rather than social acceptance. The school of skeptics that followed Carneades, often simply described as the Academy, degenerated into sectarian rivalry, but the pivotal role of Carneades remained uncontested.    

The confusion about the purpose of ancient skepticism--whether to achieve quietude or to promote scientific methodology--was primarily the responsibility of Aenisidemus, a skeptical philosopher perhaps of the first century, B.C., who started out aligned with the New Academy but then rejected the orthodox skeptical doctrine popular at that time by resurrecting the non-probabilistic (at least pre-probabilistic) version of skepticism first offered by Pyrrho of Elis. Pyrrho's contribution three centuries earlier seems to have been almost entirely obscure at the time, but for Aenisidemus it provided a useful precedent, the leverage he needed both for isolating skepticism from stoic and Epicurean dogma and for isolating the approach to skepticism that interested him from what had become Academic orthodoxy. As with most everybody else in the skeptical tradition, the works of Aenisidemus have been lost, but according to Sextus his main contribution to skepticism was his systematic list of tropes (or modes) to challenge the truth value of all perceptions. This uncompromising format for skeptical inquiry was expanded by later skeptics and finally given textbook status by Sextus Empiricus. However, Aenesidemus also argued the radical majoritarian position that universal experience is necessarily true, inviting the corollary that universal opinion (e.g., a flat earth, God's existence as a bearded patriarch, etc.) is also true.[xxxi] Pyrrho's disciple, Timon, had already denied that his (and Pyrrho's) philosophy had "gone beyond ordinary custom," and Aenisidemus went even further in treating social custom as one particular version of universal experience to be accommodated in order to achieve quietude.[xxxii]

Sextus Empiricus, the last and most influential of the Pyrrhonian skeptics, wrote his monumental treatise on skepticism between the second and early third century, A.D. Sextus brought into his discussion as many perspectives as he could, but his own views were in the tradition of Pyrrho and Aenesidemus rather than the Academic skeptics. This may be seen in his initial definition of skepticism, in which he declared that its aim was the achievement of quietude:

Scepticism is an ability, or mental attitude, which opposes appearances to judgments in any way whatsoever, with the result that, owing to the equipollence of the objects and reasons thus opposed, we are brought firstly to a state of mental suspense and next to a state of "unperturbedness" or quietude.[xxxiii]

Sextus's theories of perception, verifiability, and phenomena in general extended Carneades's arguments, but he used a fairly tenuous logic to reject systematic empirical inquiry as a useful source of information:

It is also easy, I consider, to set aside the method of induction. For, when they propose to establish the universal from the particulars by means of induction, they will effect this by a review either of all or of some of the particular instances. But if they review some, the induction will be insecure, since some of the particulars omitted in the induction may contravene the universal; while if they are to review all, they will be toiling at the impossible, since the particulars are infinite and indefinite. Thus on both grounds, as I think, the consequence is that induction is invalidated.[xxxiv]

What Sextus overlooked was the use of adequate sampling to establish the relatively probability of universals, much as is done today through the use of statistics. Sextus also advocated the acceptance of conventional belief without challenging its assumptions. This seems plain in Chapter 8 of his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, "Has the Sceptic a Doctrinal Rule," in which he summarized his skeptical approach:

For we follow a line of reasoning which, in accordance with appearances, points us to a life conformable to the customs of our country and its laws and institutions, and to our own instinctive feelings.[xxxv]

He extended this principle to include religion among the customs with which he was willing to conform: ". . . Following the ordinary view, we affirm undogmatically that Gods exist and reverence Gods and ascribe to them forknowledge."[xxxvi] He did not want to disprove the existence of god(s), but to demonstrate that there was no way to prove it:

In order to form a conception of God one must necessarily--so far as depends on the Dogmatists--suspend judgment as to his existence or non-existence. For the existence of God is not preevident.[xxxvii]

Without being confronted with the task of proving the existence of god(s), Pyrrhonian skeptics could worship them/Him as a prudent choice in their conduct of their personal lives:

For it is, I think, sufficient to conduct one's life empirically and undogmatically in accordance with the rules and beliefs that are commonly accepted, suspending judgment regarding the statements derived from dogmatic subtlety and furthest removed from the usage of life.[xxxviii]

The allusion here to statements with "dogmatic subtlety" and "at the farthest remove from the usage of life" seems obviously intended to refer to the cryptic pronouncements that must have been commonplace even then in the defense of orthodox religion. Let the cabalistic mysteries thrive, Sextus seems to be recommending, for they may be granted their "truth" no less attractive than any other beliefs one might choose to accept. Contextual arguments have been offered to minimize the importance of these passages which respectively attack science and defend religion, but Sextus's intended meaning seems unequivocal, clearly aligning him with Pyrrho, Timon, and Aenesidemus rather than with Carneades and the Academics.[xxxix]

Sextus devoted Chapter 33 of Outlines of Pyrrhonism, "Wherein Scepticism Differs from the Academic Philosophy," to list the basic differences he thought were important between the Pyrrhonian and Academic approaches to skepticism. Significantly, he identified the Academic approach as Academic philosophy, thereby excluding it from his preferred category of skeptical philosophy. Academic skeptics were to be treated as Academics aone, but not as skeptics. Speaking of Plato at the very beginning of the chapter, but with an argument of obvious relevance to the Academic skeptics too, Sextus rejected the importance of probability as an issue important to skepticism:

Since thereby he [Plato] gives a preference to one thing over another in point of probability or improbability, he throws off the character of a Sceptic; for that such an attitude is foreign to us is quite plain from what has been said above.[xl]

Sextus also rejected the Academics' willingness to extend the principle of probability to apply to the interpretation of both sense impressions and ethics. In the latter instance he criticized the Academics for supposing, "that it is more probable that what they call good is really good."[xli] Total uncertainty was his aim, even in moral behavior, rather than the tentative acceptance of qualified truths. Sextus likewise criticized the Academic skeptics for arguing on a presumably categorical basis that nothing is certain, as opposed to Pyrrhonians, who could not even accept the certainty of this particular conclusion:

The adherents of the New Academy . . . affirm that all things are non-apprehensible, yet differ from the [Pyrrhonian] Sceptics . . . for they [the Academics] affirm this positively, whereas the [Pyrrhonian] Sceptic regards it as possible that some things may be apprehended.[xlii]

Sextus likewise differentiated between two kinds of belief, the Pyrrhonian version, which means, "not to resist but simply to follow without any strong impulse or inclination," and the alternative version, which means "to assent to a thing of deliberative choice and with a kind of sympathy due to strong desire." Academic skeptics, he argued, commit themselves to the alternative version:

Carneades and Cleitomachus declare that a strong inclination accompanies their credence and the credibility of the object, while we say that our belief is a matter of simple yielding without any consent.[xliii]

Furthermore, as regards the End (or aim of life) we differ from the New Academy; for whereas the men who profess to conform to its doctrine use probability as the guide of life, we live in an undogmatic way by following the laws, customs, and natural affections.[xliv]

Social adjustment thus took precedence over the often dangerous pursuit of empirical truths typified by the fate of Protagoras, Socrates, Bruno, Spinoza, and many thousands of others who have been martyred for their unpopular views. Apparently the paradox did not occur to Sextus that one's willing acceptance of laws, customs, and natural affections virtually guarantees one's submission to dogma, and that only the determined commitment to probability affords any chance of minimizing its importance.

Perhaps because of Sextus's willingness to ignore this paradox, his works survived the censorship of the Middle Ages, and as a result almost the entire ancient Greek skeptical tradition later came to be linked with his advocacy of the Pyrrhonian approach based on Pyrrho's somewhat modest initial contribution rather than the far more substantial output of the New Academy, which had totally dominated ancient skeptical philosophy for approximately six centuries with little or no reference to Pyrrho's ideas. Nevertheless, the objectives of the Academic approach articulated by Carneades reemerged as the basis for scientific methodology during the renaissance through the continuing influence of Cicero's two books as well as those portions in Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes's works that summarized the Academic contribution.

In retrospect, the Pyrrhonian and Academic skeptical traditions must be understood to have shared certain basic assumptions, but to have differed relative to the final choice that must be made between the acceptance and rejection of unexamined belief. It should therefore be no surprise that they persisted for centuries on almost completely separate tracks, as would be demonstrated by Cicero's two books having contained only one reference by name to Pyrrho and none whatsoever to Aenesidemus, and by the total absence of any reference whatsoever to Cicero in Sextus Empiricus's works.[xlv] Moreover, the difference between the Pyrrhonian and Aacademic versions of skepticism turned out to be of major importance in the philosophical methodologies they respectively encouraged. Both approaches emphatically denied the accessibility of the human mind to absolute truths, but the Pyrrhonian approach promoted the acceptance of this inevitability as justification for orthodox belief, whereas the Academic approach promoted a rigorous empirical investigation to determine as well as possible the truths that seem probable. As it turned out, sixteenth and seventeenth century Catholic theologians adopted the Pyrrhonian version of skepticism when they resorted to "fideism" to justify Christian faith by challenging the validity of pure reason both in secular knowledge and in the Protestant interpretation of the Bible independent of church doctrine. In contrast, the advancement of science during the same period may primarily be traced to the Academic approach. Empirical methodology was necessarily influenced by both Sextus Empiricus and Cicero's reconstructions of ancient skeptical philosophy, but the essential assumptions of the scientific method emerged as being Academic, not Pyrrhonian.

Last but not least was Cicero's accomplishment as an Academic skeptic, for it is still not fully appreciated for having perpetuated the context and texture of ideas typical of Carneades's Academic approach. Sextus merely summarized a relatively small portion of Carneades's works; Cicero breathed life into Carneades and his disciple Clitomachus as debaters in the thick of argument as they made their case in defense of Academic skepticism. In his youth, Cicero studied skepticism in Athens under the direction of Antiochus, a founder of the so-called Old Academy, actually a modernization of the New Academy that combined skepticism with stoicism and Platonism. In line of descent, Antiochus followed Philo, who followed Clitomachus, the disciple of Carneades. Cicero's sympathies remained with the original New Academy dominated by Carneades, and his two major books in skeptical theory, De Natura Deorum (The Nature of the Gods) and Academica (the Academy), were both written in 45 B.C., the year before his murder, as philosophical dialogues that promoted an Academic skepticism based on the writings of Clitomachus.[xlvi] In De Natura Deorum, Cicero surveyed various religious beliefs before launching in Book III into an extended critique of every religious belief that came to his attention. Cicero spoke in the voice of the persona, Cotta, to express the arguments of Clitomachus, and he was sufficiently prudent to insert a pro forma disavowal that "less could befit a philosopher" than atheism (III.44). But with this caveat having been granted, he proceeded to mount a relentless attack on religious belief with ample reference to Carneades in support of his arguments. Cicero left out of his dialogue any effective rejoinder by the other participants, so one comes away from his text with the sense that very few adjustments were needed for Cicero to have also targeted Christianity once it had established itself as a religion just a few decades later. That Judaism was not included in his attack, we may assume, is that he did not know of it or take it seriously enough to mention it.

In Academica, Cicero turned to more philosophical issues, in particular the question of probability (II.32-35, 98-115, etc.), and it was here that he explored in depth the necessity of witholding assent to weigh the merits of alternative theories for explaining any "presentation" of experience. Like both Protagoras and Carneades, he emphasized the importance of "arguing on both sides to draw out and give shape to some result that may be either true or the nearest possible approximation to the truth" (II.7-8--italics added for emphasis). And since the absolute truth was all but impossible to discern, the purpose of philosophers was to refine their approximations as much as possible. "The wise man," Cicero argued, "will make use of whatever apparently probable presentation he encounters, if nothing presents itself that is contrary to that probability" (II.99). Cicero also argued that this wise man "is guided by probability, and wherever this confronts him or is wanting he can answer 'yes' or 'no' accordingly" (II.104). Like Protagoras, Cicero treated the senses as the highest truth (II.19), but he also praised science as a second set of senses, i.e., an extension of the senses (II.31). He therefore treated skeptical discourse as the pursuit of the most probable truths resulting from the systematic investigation of nature.

Cicero's genius seems to have provided the high water mark of Roman civilization, more advanced as a perpetuation of the achievement of Greek civilization than anything that either preceded or followed. As an orator and rhetorician, Cicero made an extraordinary contribution, but his role was even more important as a democratic leader and skeptical theoretician, in both respects having brought Rome's greatest successes just before it began to fall into decline. Just as skeptical theory and democratic practices that emphasize the freedom of speech have been interdependent since the Age of Pericles, Cicero's singular identity as an educated Roman statesman embodied this convergence between politics and epistemology, though, in fact, it was his rejection in both categories that was of crucial importance to Roman history, both in his having been murdered to set the stage for supplanting Roman democracy with the creation of the Roman empire and in his later having been attacked and presumably refuted by St. Augustine to help justify his own conversion to Christianity. Cicero did not directly participate when Caesar was assassinated, but he was generally recognized as Brutus's mentor (he actually dedicated De Natura Deorum to Brutus seven months earlier), and his Philippics speeches attacking Antony in the days that followed also linked him with the conspirators and clearly established his role as the foremost enemy of imperial Rome. When Antony joined in a triumvirate with Augustus and Lepidus, he therefore insisted that Cicero be murdered. Antony's demands were reluctantly accepted by Augustus, and Cicero's killing contributed to the political turmoil that led to Augustus's installation as emperor, followed by a disastrous succession of emperors who finally brought Roman civilization to its ruin. Of course this elongated concatenation of events cannot be traced on a strictly cause-and-effect basis to Cicero's murder, but Cicero can be admired as Rome's last great democratic leader, and his elimination seems to have deprived the democratic forces in Rome of their most effective advocate.

At a second and perhaps more important level, Cicero's Academica was sufficiently influential to have been attacked by St. Augustine in Contra Academicos, the first of his published Christian treatises, which was written immediately following his conversion to Christianity (c. 385 A.D.). Augustine had temporarily accepted the skepticism of the New Academy when he first read Cicero's now lost manuscript, Hortensius, but after his conversion he sought to defend his choice on a logical basis by attacking Academica through a rigorous use of deductive reasoning. The most impressive of his deductions was the foundationalist proposition, "If I am deceived, I am" (Si fallor, sum). In other words, to be wrong is to exist, and to think incorrectly at least confirms that one exists well enough to do this. Other variants may be suggested: I err, therefore I know I think; I err when I think, therefore I exist; (and obversely) I think I exist, therefore I know I err. Augustine's purpose was to establish a basic and unassailable truth which escaped the suspension of assent (epoche) that the Academic skeptics automatically applied in making any judgment of potential truths. Uncannily, Augustine's axiom anticipated Descartes's famous principle, "I think, therefore I am," which derived from essentially the same purpose, to establish the basis for Christian dogma free of skeptical doubt. It also anticipated the existential speculation of such future authors as Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, who tortuously documented their spiritual fallibility as the source of their faith in Christian revelation. Contra Academicos may be treated as having been a somewhat flawed exercise in Aristotelian logic for Christian ends, but it was also the first major step in Augustine's career as a Christian apologist who helped to initiate the transition from both the skepticism and pagan religion in currency at the height of Roman democracy to the Christian dogma that swept Europe and then held sway over it over the following twelve centuries.

The important point to recognize here is that Christian belief did not refute pagan belief. Quite the contrary, pagan belief had become too obviously vulnerable to the critique of Academic skepticism, and too many of the wealthy classes, including the membership of the Roman Senate, had converted to the doctrine of skepticism. Educated Rome was not pagan: as educated Athens had been (and as we are today), it was for all purposes a skeptical society led by agnostics, and the pagan deities were only taken seriously by the lower classes (or proletariat) otherwise satisfied by bread and circuses. Typically, this secular trend spearheaded by skepticism was a major threat to those elements of society in desperate need of something to believe in. Christian belief therefore came to the rescue and supplanted pagan belief as a more effective dogma to counteract skeptical doubt. And, indeed, Christianity was far better packaged for this purpose than pagan belief, since it emphasized one incorporeal deity (Jahweh--the great God "I am"), one relatively credible sacrificial rite (the crucifixion), an impossible ethical code that gave the priesthood a guaranteed role in society (as unavoidable sinners we incessantly need to be absolved), and, last but not least, an eschatology that bestowed extravagant rewards and punishment in an afterlife that stretched to eternity.[xlvii] Christ had made himself plain: "Verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life," and "Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die" (John, 6.47, and 11.26). Eternal bliss in heaven could be anticipated for simply believing in Christ's role as the Son of God and savior of mankind. But to doubt Christ's role guaranteed eternal perdition: "And he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John, 3.36). The choice was simple: either to believe and go to heaven or to doubt and go to hell. Extravagant delusions of grandeur would be suspected if anybody else (the present author, for example) had the audacity to declare, "I, Edward Jayne, am the Son of God, and I have descended from heaven to save mankind. Everybody in the whole world who believes this shall be sent to heaven, but anybody who doubts it shall be banished to an eternity of hellfire." How could such a doctrine gain universal support? In Christ's instance, I would conjecture because belief languished in ancient Rome, and Christianity filled the void by promoting irrational faith--faith at the very brink of absurdity--to exaggerate its differentiation from the principle of suspended belief (epoche) emphasized by the Greek skeptics. Other pagan religions had a chance to do this, but Christianity was utterly totalitarian, hence victorious, in imposing its particular version of absurdity. Though suggestive of bizarre and extravagant megalomania in the opinion of non-believers, Christ's self-declared holy status focussed both ethics and epistemology on the simplest act of faith, and with the promise of rewards (or punishment) vastly in excess of the effort expended to gain them.

Thanks to Christianity, belief could once again thrive, this time as a gentile byproduct of semitic religion produced by ten centuries of ethnic conflict less than eight hundred miles from Athens. Thus began what might seem to have been an intense twenty-century dialectic between an aggressive skepticism uniquely derivative of Greek civilization and Christianity's no less aggressive faith in Christ's holy mission based on prophecies in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. More accurately, the diametrically opposite alternatives of this dialectic have consisted of Christianity's insistence upon sheer faith as opposed to Greek civilization's ability to accommodate skepticism's sheer lack of faith by seeking out foundationalist alternatives relatively immune to its thesis, as illustrated, for example, by the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and also by both the Pyrrhonian quest for spiritual quietude and the probabilistic methodology first suggested by Arcesilaus and Carneades that anticipated modern science. It has been the cosmic struggle between these two antithetical compulsions--Judaeo-Christian belief and Hellenic skeptical accommodation--that has both defined and propelled our cultural heritage as we know it today. Matthew Arnold's distinction between the Hellenic emphasis upon seeing things as they really are and the Hebraic emphasis upon conduct and obedience may be granted its validity, as may Erich Auerbach's distinction between the Hellenic emphasis on the foregrounding of externalized forms and the Hebraic emphasis on making claims to inexpressible truths deserving of belief.[xlviii] However, these distinctions are relatively superficial compared to the belief/disbelief dialectic I am proposing, and whenever Arnold and Auerbach's insights come in conflict with this dialect--for example, when Arnold argues that the love of God is common to both traditions, and when Auerbach uses Homer's example to suggest that the Bible puts more emphasis on the truth--they are simply wrong. Belief is different from the truth, no matter how hard believers try to ignore this difference, and the systematic pursuit of the truth typical of Hellenic philosophy is necessarily antithetical to the comforting shortcuts afforded by one's belief in revealed religion.

Predictably, the Jews had exaggerated religious belief to reinforce tribal loyalty in their conflict against their neighbors, and their acquisition of monotheism from Ikhnaton helped to emphasize their beleagered role as the chosen people--one tribe led by one god. Christians adjusted the formula to meet the needs of gentiles living under the tyranny of the Roman empire, and, no surprise, Christianity eventually prevailed. In just a couple of centuries, Christianity chewed, digested, and eliminated Roman civilization. Skepticism was temporarily bested, and belief prevailed to such an extent that a relative poverty of intellectual curiosity dominated the next twelve hundred years. The European mind adjusted to a new and more formidable set of dogmatic constraints and limitations--somewhat comparable to those experienced today among fundamentalist religious sects in the non-western world. The essentially dogmatic foundationalist theories of Plato, Aristotle (one-fifth of them, at least), and a few others were permitted to survive, but almost the entire literature of skepticism, including more than four hundred treatises by Clitomachus, was obliterated, as if dogma had won the argument--indeed, as if skepticism had never really existed except for its retrospective assessment by Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, and Diogenes Laertius. Even today the majority of the population in western civilization still adheres to a relatively simple Christianity unadulterated by skepticism, though its support tends to predominate in rural communities rather than cities, among the poor rather than the wealthy, among the uneducated rather than the educated, among the old rather than the young, among women rather than men, and among those of a Catholic rather than a Protestant background (the ultimate Protestant achievement apparently entailing the rejection of religion altogether).[xlix] Of course there are many exceptions to these categories, but on the whole one would assume that poor and uneducated Catholic great-grandmothers from rural communities are more likely to put their faith in orthodox religion than educated young men from Protestant backgrounds who live in relatively comfortable circumstances in major cities. If a forty-five year old psychiatrist from Amsterdam, Frankfurt, or Chicago finds himself as a tourist in Madrid sitting at a table and talking with an older Spanish woman obviously from a local village, their conversation might be entirely cordial, but chances are strong they would concur in avoiding the topic of religion. And with good cause.

IV. Modern Skepticism:

From Erasmus to Hume From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, skepticism played a major role in bringing what has been described as "the Great Secularization" of European life and thought.[l] Scholasticism had dissolved, and in its place there gradually emerged a dependence on scientific methodology no less dominant in its ideological demands. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Pyrrhonian skepticism was resurrected by Catholic theologians to combat Protestantism, then by Protestants against the Catholics. Meanwhile, the Academic version of skepticism came into vogue as a justification of science, and metaphysicians found it necessary to come to the defense of Christianity by proposing foundationalist theories of the universe intermediate to God's authority, Decartes by resorting to geometry, Hobbes by drawing upon Galilean mechanics, Spinoza by depicting an elaborate pantheistic universe, and Leibnitz by proposing a universe full of monads, i.e., atomic particles expressive of the soul each of which is aware of all the rest. God's authority was assured, but his role as a personal God capable of intervening in human affairs was diminished, if not obliterated. Toward this end, Descartes employed a "method of doubt" to establish what may be described as having been a "preemptive skepticism," since it let him use skeptical methods to be able to dispense with skepticism by proposing a more internally sufficient Christian cosmology.[li] Skepticism was conceded, but only to set the stage for a better and more inclusive dogmatic system in which God and orthodox religion continued to reign. During the eighteenth century Enlightenment, many tried to salvage religion based on a deistic theory of the universe which an impersonal God created the universe to run on its own. But by the nineteenth century skeptics in the empirical tradition attacked the credibility of all versions of religion, deism included, and the process of secularization culminated in the mid-twentieth century when logical positivists treated religion as a belief system dependent on pseudo-statements unworthy of serious theoretical consideration.

Much of this post-medieva