Plato's Academy

The new academy took their cue from a rather different plato than the one who inspired spucippus and xenocrates. New academics were sceptics, particularly impressed by plato's early socratic dialogues. This brand of platonism would go out of fashion for a few centuries, only to return with a vengeance in the roman empire. It would seem that spusippus and Xenocrates were trying to develop ideas which had been discussed in plato's Academy. These ideas are sometimes called by the somewhat histrionic phrase, unwritten doctrines.