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WorkCicero

The Academic Questions

Cicero's defence of the sceptic's refusal to call anything certain, argued against his own old teacher, and the book Montaigne quoted most on doubt.

by Cicero153 passages held

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Original title
Academica
First published
45 BCE(aged 61)
Original language
Latin

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Overview

Cicero finished a dialogue on whether anything can be known for certain in May 45 BCE, in two books, and within weeks he decided he had given it the wrong speakers. The arguments belonged to Catulus, Lucullus and Hortensius, Roman grandees all older than he was, and no reader would believe that any of them had mastered Greek theories of knowledge. Then Atticus, his closest friend, wrote that the scholar Marcus Varro would welcome a book dedicated to him, although Varro had promised Cicero a dedication of his own two years earlier and had not delivered it. Cicero moved the whole argument to Varro, divided it into four books, and told Atticus that the new version was shorter and better than the old. What survives is the whole of the Lucullus, the second book of the first version, and part of the first book of the second. The question in both versions is the one on which his own school, the sceptical Academy, had fought the Stoics for generations. The Stoics held that some impressions carry a mark that no false impression could carry, so a wise person may treat them as certain. The Academics answered with eggs no one can tell apart, and with dreams, madness and drink: a false impression can always match a true one, so the wise person withholds assent and acts on what is probable. The case against doubt comes from Antiochus of Ascalon, who had taught Cicero at Athens and had broken with his own teacher, Philo of Larissa, in a book written against him. Lucullus puts Antiochus's case and Cicero answers it. The two versions went separate ways: Plutarch knew only the first and Augustine only the second, which he answered in Against the Academics in 386. Until the printer Henri Estienne published the Greek sceptic Sextus Empiricus in Latin in 1562, Renaissance readers learned ancient scepticism chiefly from this book, and Montaigne quoted it more than any other sceptical source.

Key concepts

What does it mean to withhold assent?

It means refusing to say yes to an impression, however convincing, while it could still be false. Assent is the mind's agreement that things are as they appear. The Academics hold that no impression is safe from a false twin, so the wise person holds back that final yes. Carneades is praised for dragging this hasty yes out of the mind as Hercules dragged out a monster.

What kind of impression do the Stoics say cannot be false?

One stamped so exactly by its real object that nothing unreal could produce the same picture. The Stoics call grasping such an impression comprehension, and build knowledge on it. Zeno showed it with his hand: an open palm for the impression, fingers curled for agreeing, a fist for grasping. The whole book turns on whether any impression of that kind exists.

What does Cicero mean by the probable?

The probable is what appears true and meets nothing that speaks against it, enough to act on though not enough to call certain. The wise person, Cicero says, is not cut from stone or oak: they see snow as white and go about their business. They simply keep in mind that the appearance could, in principle, mislead them.

What is the heap argument, and why do sceptics like it?

It asks, grain by grain, when a pile of wheat becomes a heap, and no single grain can be named. Cicero widens it: when does someone become rich or poor, or things many or few? Nature gives no sharp line, so step-by-step questions push a dogmatist into agreeing to something false. The Stoic Chrysippus tried to escape by falling silent before the end.

Who is the wise person both sides argue about?

An ideal, not a living individual: someone who never agrees to anything false. Both schools accept the ideal and quarrel over what it demands. For the Stoics the wise person knows many things for certain; for the Academics the wise person withholds agreement wherever error is possible. Cicero adds that he himself is not wise, and so is often guided by opinion.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

When True and False Look Alike

Does any impression carry a mark that no false one could copy? If none does, a careful person may never say they know, and the whole claim of the Stoics to certain knowledge falls.

Lucullus, speaking for Antiochus of Ascalon, holds that some impressions are stamped by what they show and cannot be counterfeited, so the wise may rely on them. Cicero answers with the Academy's stock of look-alikes: eggs no one can tell apart, twins, the dreams of the poet Ennius, the madness of Euripides' Hercules, a sun that looks a foot across. None of these proves the senses useless. They show only that a false impression can match a true one, and that is enough to withhold certainty.

  • perception
  • truth
  • evidence
  • skepticism
  • logic

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Acting Without Certainty

If nothing can be known, how does anyone choose, act or build a life? Cicero's answer is that the probable is enough, and that certainty was never what action needed.

Lucullus presses the old objection: without firm knowledge there is no memory, no skill, no virtue, and a person who agrees to nothing can do nothing. Cicero replies that the wise follow what appears probable and meets no obstacle, as a sailor sets out in a sound ship and fair weather without knowing the voyage will end well. Doubt, in his account, is a freedom as much as a discipline: those who have not bound themselves to a school judge each question afresh, while he admits that he himself is no sage and often holds opinions.

  • skepticism
  • judgment
  • wisdom
  • reason
  • practical wisdom

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Who Inherited Plato

Is Plato's school the home of doubt or of doctrine? Both sides claim Socrates and Plato, and whoever wins the history wins the right to speak for the Academy.

Varro, following Antiochus, tells the story as one Old Academy that Aristotle's school shared and the Stoic Zeno merely corrected, a system that left the Socratic habit of doubting behind. Cicero counters that Arcesilaus returned to Socrates' confession of ignorance and pushed it further, and that Antiochus, who wrote against his own teacher Philo, was nearly a Stoic under an Academic name. The quarrel is not antiquarian: if the dogmatic schools disagree over the whole territory, Cicero asks whom anyone should follow, and his answer is to follow none blindly.

  • philosophy
  • authority
  • wisdom
  • truth
  • epistemology

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
153
distinct concepts
185
by passages held, corpus-wide
#407

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “perception” and “skepticism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
perceptionskepticism33
epistemologyperception25
epistemologyskepticism24
knowledgeskepticism22
assentskepticism21
assentperception12
knowledgeperception10
epistemologyknowledge9
logicskepticism9
assentknowledge8
assentepistemology7
academic skepticismepistemology5
academic skepticismperception5
skepticismvirtue4
academic skepticismknowledge3
assentvirtue3
knowledgelogic3
academic skepticismassent2
assentlogic2
epistemologyvirtue2
knowledgevirtue2
academic skepticismvirtue1
epistemologylogic1
logicperception1
perceptionvirtue1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. -70 Orations

    Four volumes of the speeches themselves — some delivered, some, like the case against Verres, only published. The philosophical books that fill the rest of the shelf came later, most of them once he had been shut out of that life.

     EN
  2. -54 The Republic (De re publica)

    Plato wrote a Republic and then a Laws; Cicero set out to do both, and the treatise on law is this book's companion — begun a couple of years later and left unfinished.

     EN
  3. -52 Treatise on the Laws (De legibus)

    Unfinished, unpublished, and on the available evidence never released at all. For centuries it travelled as the lesser half of a pair whose better half had gone missing.

     EN
  4. -46 Brutus or History of Famous Orators (Brutus; Orator)

    Not the speeches but the account of them, made when the courts had stopped sitting. The edition carries Orator with it, the portrait of the ideal speaker written for the same dedicatee in the same year.

     EN
  5. -45 A Treatise on the Chief Good and Evil (De finibus bonorum et malorum)

    Cicero's fullest treatment of ethics: three conversations, set years apart and in different places, bound into one survey of what the leading schools said a life is for.

     EN
  6. -45 On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum)

    Finished after the Tusculan Disputations, it opened a run of three books on religion: On Divination and On Fate followed in 44 BCE.

     EN
  7. -45 The Academic Questions (Academica) you are here EN
  8. -45 The Tusculan Disputations (Tusculanae Disputationes)

    The practical sequel to the treatise on the chief good, written next: that book compares what the schools say the good is, and this one puts the answer to work against fear and grief.

     EN
  9. -44 On Friendship (De Amicitia)

    Copyists kept this and On Old Age bound together for so long that printers followed them. The edition prints the Dream of Scipio after it, which belongs to De re publica.

     EN
  10. -44 On Moral Duties (De officiis)

    The last of his philosophical books, and the one that travelled furthest: for centuries afterwards it was simply the standard book of conduct.

     EN
  11. -44 On Old Age (Cato Maior de Senectute)

    Written alongside On Friendship and sent to the same friend, Atticus; the later book refers back to this one by name.

     EN
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