«El muy axiomático Arcesilao»

Abstract

According to Cicero, Arcesilaus revived the old socratic way of philosophizing. Evanghélos Moutsopoulos states that: "Socrates, by contrast, starts out from a methodical scepticism, and arrives quite deliberately at a rationalism that is, in the best sense of the word, dogmatic" (Philosophical Suggestions, Academy of Athens, Research Center on Greek Philosophy, 2013, p. 133). By a hermeneutical explanation of one passage of Diogenes Laertius "Life of Arcesilaus", the author of the present article has showed reasonably that the platonism of the Middle Academy wasn't indeed a kind of scepticism that doubts for the sake of mere doubting, but instead an original reinventing of Socrates' irony and docta ignorantia as a suitable means to investigate looking honestly for some truths.