Carneades and the Skeptics

Carneades was a great sceptic who argued for global suspension of belief. His follower clitomachus set forth a dialectical reading like the one we considered for archesilaus clytomicus. But other followers of carneides, who had also studied at the feet of the master, disagreed. They rejected the sceptical academy as a fall from grace and initited the last phase of ancient scepticism calling it pyranism. This form of scepticism was embraced by sextus empiricus in the second century a d. He will supply us with a leading sceptic who wrote extensively and whose writings are preserved to this day.