Lévy, Carlos
Senior Fellow: January–February 2024
Research Project: Scepticism of Non-Sceptics: A Puzzling Problem
Scepticism would be a much less interesting concept if, alongside the official sceptics—in other words, those of the Neopyrrhonian scepticism elaborated by Aenesidemus—there were no thinkers whose works include passages or allusions that were sceptical or close to scepticism. In some cases, even the struggle against scepticism can be a means to acquire a deeper knowledge of the concept. The most famous is that of Descartes, who thought that the discovery of the cogito could be the end of scepticism. Before him, Augustine had tried to get rid of Academic “scepticism,” a word he never used, though he probably knew something about Neopyrrhonism thanks to his master Ambrose. Moreover, in antiquity itself, there was a huge doxographical effort, at least in the New Academy, to create a genealogy of the Academic suspension of assent (epochè) by considering as sceptics those thinkers in whom there were only some traces of the philosophy of doubt. The most impressive sceptic doxography of this kind is the one we find in Cicero’s Lucullus.
The main purpose of this research project will be the evaluation of the exact role of non-sceptics in the history of scepticism. The modality of their influence is manifold: opposition, the use of sceptics by non-sceptics, the use of non-sceptics by sceptics, conscious or incidental contradictions, and so on.
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.