‘Carneades’ Theological Arguments

Abstract

Carneades was reputedly the New Academy's greatest dialectician, but little has been established about his dialectical methods. His theological arguments provide an ideal test case, because many of them have survived in Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos 9. Unfortunately our understanding has long been distorted by Cicero's apologetic presentation of them in De natura deorum 3 as ad hominem arguments, aimed merely at exposing the weak intellectual foundations of Stoic theology. Against this near-consensus, I maintain that they are arguments for atheism which, balanced against a corresponding battery of arguments for theism, are meant to result in an agnostic suspension of judgement. Defending this interpretation will involve examining the nature and credentials of the endoxic premises invoked by Carneades. They turn out to be a mixture of philosophical, poetic and popular premises, the philosophical ones being drawn from multiple schools, sometimes even within the confines of a single argument.(David Sedley, University of Cambridge)