Lévy, Carlos
Senior Fellow: February–April 2019
Research Project: Philo and Scepticism
In papers about ancient philosophy, few concepts are as frequently commented on as that of scepticism. But in many cases, scepticism is reduced to the work of Sextus Empiricus or used to qualify thinkers who, like Cicero, had never heard about Aenesidemus, the founder of neo-Pyrrhonism, i.e. the most formalised structure of sceptic thought. Although Philo is the first to give testimony about Aenesidemus’s tropes, he is in most cases rejected because he is said to have little interest in philosophy, or to subordinate philosophy to theological themes. The book I am preparing has four main purposes:
- To demonstrate that Philo is a reliable witness of the appearance of neo-Pyrrhonism and thus to reconnect with H. von Arnim’s seminal paper;
- To establish the corpus of sceptic themes, concepts, and words in Philo’s work;
- To tackle the presence of many strategies in Philo’s corpus aiming to include scepticism in a reflection about God and faith. In our opinion, Philo is one of the creators of fideism. While he stresses the extreme fallibility of the human mind and the oudeneia of created beings, he asserts that faith is the only possible means for a subject to have a kind of existence;
- To investigate the apparition of what will become a major theme in Jewish philosophy (recently Levinas), i.e. the idea that for a Jew, ethics is the best way towards the absolute.
Carlos Lévy was a professor of Roman philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne until 2015 and is now a professor emeritus and fellow of the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies.