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RESEARCH PRODUCT

From Carneades to Cicero

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This chapter is about how Stoic epistemology developed in the two centuries after Chrysippus’ death. I first show that, as a result of Carneades’ critique in the mid-second century, there was a shift of emphasis in the epistemological debate between the Stoa and the Academy. From then on the task was not to explain what causal features a cognitive thought has, but to describe what phenomenological features it has. I show that the later Stoics responded to this challenge in two different ways. Some changed Chrysippus’ theory quite radically. They held that a cognitive thought is characterized by giving rise to a sense of conviction, denied that preconceptions count as cognitive thoughts, and downplayed the importance of arguments. I argue that this anti-theoretical position is what is recorded in Cicero’s Academica and much of Sextus’ testimony. But other Stoics at the time were more conservative. They held, against Chrysippus, that a cognitive thought is characterized by being clear and distinct, a view they ascribed to Zeno, the funding father. But against their anti-theoretical contemporaries, they emphasized the importance of arguments, even more than Chrysippus had done. All the later Stoics therefore seem to have abandoned Chrysippus’ naive realism.