The school of doubt : : skepticism, history and politics in Cicero's Academica / / by Orazio Cappello.

• Superior document: Brill studies in skepticism
• VerfasserIn: Cappello, Orazio,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill,, 2019.
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Brill Studies in Skepticism 1.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (396 pages).

The School of Doubt conducts a close philological and philosophical reading of Cicero’s Academica , a fragmentary work on sense-perception and Academic history written in the wake of Caesar’s victory in the civil wars (45 BCE). Focusing in turn on the author’s letters discussing the process of composition, the historiographical treatment of the Platonic tradition and the critical exploration of philosophical doubt, this volume presents Cicero as an original and sophisticated historian of philosophy and a radical figure in Western skeptical thought. Widely misconstrued as a technical treatise and a mere chronicle of the Greek debates on which it draws, the Academica here emerges as a key work in the evolution of Ciceronian philosophy and of ancient skepticism – and one that responds directly to the disintegration of Republican Rome.

Table of Contents

Front Matter -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Skepticism and Its Contexts. The Academica in Cicero’s Correspondence -- The Shadows of Apography -- Counter-Figuring Indifference: Varro and the Politics of Composition -- Effecting Cicero: Fiction, Criticism and Subjectivity -- The Pedigree of Doubt: Ciceronian Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy -- Historical Philosophy: Cicero and the Academica in Their Historiographical Contexts -- Philosophy’s Parallel Itineraries -- Progress and Other Stories: Historical Models in Cicero’s Philosophy -- The Practice and Tradition of Philosophia: Debate, Critique and Community in the Academica -- Skeptical Strategies: Dialectic, Assimilation, Rhetoric -- Re-Configuring Conflict: Looking for Philo and Antiochus -- Dialectic and Self-Definition: The Sense of Arguing in Cicero’s Academica -- Dialectical Trajectories of Ciceronian Skepticism -- Conclusion -- Back Matter -- Bibliography.